Welcome to the Gray Zone: A Feminist Analysis of U.S. Strategic Anxiety

• In Event: Gender and Security

Abstract

US grand strategy grapples with the threat of conflict waged in a “gray zone” between war and peace. Gray zone conflict encompasses a range of coercive, aggressive, actions short of war-e.g., Russia in Ukraine, ISIL in Iraq/Syria, Houthis in Yemen- that defy frameworks for thinking about threat and defense. They are “risk confused”: objectives, actors, relevant international norms, and the role of force can be uncertain. Given this ambiguity, any state response is fraught: treating gray zone conflict as war risks over reaction; ignoring it risks escalation. Gray zone conflict thus provokes strategic anxiety. Much scholarly work on gray zone conflict is definitional, locating it among theories of war and peace. In this paper we treat the definitional exercise as a strategy for containing the anxiety of ambiguity, and bring a feminist/gender lens to the gray zone category. The gray zone provokes anxiety because it does not fit the war-peace binary. But aggression has never fit a simple binary; it always has spilled into and sometimes looked like the everyday. The paper diagnoses strategic anxiety, deconstructs the binary and speculates on what threat management might look like from a premise of accepting the gray zone conflict as inescapable and everyday.

Authors

• Kara Hooser, The Ohio State University

• Jennifer Mitzen, Ohio State University