Hybrid war (in reality more of a hybrid policy, since it implies a whole complex of measures, only occasionally with a forceful component) is a way of defending one's community's competitive position primarily through bluff, illusion, forgery, intimidation, bribery, and the conclusion of agreements with the deliberate intent of breaking them in order to mislead rival parties.
The essence of the phenomenon
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Let the game not be by the rules a line from a song about St. Petersburg policemen
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It implies an almost complete absence of limits on the means used to achieve desired strategic goals, justified by a set of theses along the lines of "since you're against us like this, we'll be like this too" - while the opponent is often credited in advance with the very measures one plans to rally one's own supporters around using. It is a consequence of both foreign- and domestic-policy weakness, where the authorities cannot secure successful cooperation from the population, combined with access to significant resources and the ability to redistribute them without restriction "to points of breakthrough."
The tactics of hybrid politics are best understood with the help of microhistorical methods, which scrupulously record as exhaustive a picture as possible of the events and methods surrounding one specific subject or object.
A story from Nizhny Novgorod hybrid politics
Anna Stepanova, an associate of the late politician and Nizhny Novgorod governor Nemtsov, documents Anna Stepanova's Removal from the Election (Kuznetsov's Investigation) and, several months later, receives a reply to her complaint to the prosecutor's office. The Investigative Committee confirms that violations did occur - and nevertheless refuses to open a criminal case. Yet from a legal standpoint there are clear violations of the principles governing the formation of a legislative body, sufficient grounds for investigative action regardless of whether they would "have" affected the outcome of the election or not. After all, administration employees who allow, and moreover cover up, tricks of this caliber have evidently reached such a degree of readiness for official forgery that they may pose a danger to the very society their administrative services are meant to serve. Yet instead they are placed in key positions in organizing the electoral process - namely, on election commissions, which are "not so easy to get into."
Situation as of 27.08.16
Anna Stepanova drew up and filed an official document - a complaint against the investigative department's refusal to open a criminal case over gross violations in the work of the election commission.
The cultural code of the Stepanova story
In the story of the manipulations surrounding Stepanova's admission as a candidate, and in how the investigative authorities assessed them, the workings of the notorious "cultural code" are plain to see. In acting "against the 'dangerous' opposition," officials of various levels of government, and individuals sympathetic to these practices, believe with varying degrees of sincerity that they are "defending our patriotism." Within this worldview, "heightened public danger" is represented not by official forgery, nor by corruption, nor by abuse of office, but by attempts to influence processes of power by any means other than obsequious appeals or anonymous denunciations (calls for repression), or some intermediate form of these two genres.
As for official violations themselves, they, as "minor sins" such as theft or forgery, are sometimes tolerated, especially when committed collectively, "collegially" (the classic corporate diffusion of responsibility) and for the purpose of "countering enemy forces." And this mechanism is perfectly rationally understood by any more or less thoughtful leader and is used in a hybrid fashion for mobilization purposes - when one needs to cover up one's own economic failures with "the fight against the enemy."
This is interesting
Shortly before Nemtsov's murder, Anna Stepanova was the target of an attack that was strange in its evident, deliberate failure, which was assessed in publications as a warning directed at Nemtsov himself.
Methods of countering hybrid politics tactics
The main method of both research and counteraction is the application of a microhistorical approach. As a body of case histories accumulates, it becomes possible to conduct both quantitative and qualitative analysis of hybrid methods at such a level of substantiation and precision that its results become a widely accessible means of influence in the information field.
Methods of countering hybrid war tactics
Hybrid war ostentatiously flaunts the use of force at points where doing so looks advantageous, but in reality conceals behind its bluff a weak competitive standing, because the very shift to hybrid actions is a consequence of severe difficulties on the field of "ordinary competition." Communities with a high level of self-organization and self-defense are extremely difficult to subject to hybrid influence without suffering the heaviest retaliatory damage. An additional protective measure is provided by highly professional rapid-response units capable of striking, precisely and as quickly as possible, at the command centers organizing hybrid actions on the ground.
Risks of hybrid war
The main risk for the side pursuing a hybrid war strategy is a gradual, but deep and long-term, dramatic loss of reputation - both in the world and within its own society. A characteristic example is Byzantium. A large number of poisonings of opponents of those in power, excessively convoluted political tactics, and inflated taxes, combined with the Constantinopolitan governments' constant claims of acting for the greatness of the empire, led to such a degree of loss of reputation that the townspeople largely relocated to Italy, while the villagers offered no resistance to the natural conquerors of a society of this kind. The level of distrust toward the former authorities was such that the dozens of peoples of Anatolia, who had never formed a unified community across the Hellenistic, Roman, or Constantinopolitan eras, historically speaking quickly formed, together with conquerors from Central Asia, a more or less cohesive Turkish people.
Hybrid politics can arise in the most varied historical eras and conditions, but even in similar times, different, even neighboring, communities have no identical recipe for "what to do about it" so as to avoid "ultimately discrediting themselves and eventually falling apart." This happens because the real lines of force underpinning power more often rest not on "foundational" norms written into law, but on the particularities of how people perceive things in a given natural region and with a given socio-economic experience. One can insist to the hilt on one's own patriotism - if the community in question leans more toward a nationalist worldview - or on devotion to the interests of revolution and progress, if it is a more socialist society - and do whatever one likes, within the bounds of the social standing one has attained.
As a rule, decentralized communities are more resilient to the risks of hybridity spreading than centralized ones. Thus, the contract killings and immorality of the Medici nearly destroyed Catholicism and triggered the birth and growth of Protestantism, whereas such a notorious scoundrel as Nixon could be "unseated" from Washington fairly - if not easily, then at least cheaply - relying on nothing more than the nearest alternative centers of decentralized power.