The international security environment is undergoing a profound transformation due to the evolution of hybrid threats, which are disruptive, multidimensional, and asymmetric. These threats operate across multiple domains—cyber, economic, political, and informational—blurring the lines between war and peace, state and non-state actors, and conventional and unconventional warfare. While scientific and technological advances have contributed to making the means and methods of hybrid warfare increasingly sophisticated, effective and difficult to counter, they have simultaneously provided tools and capabilities that enhance early detection and effective response to such threats.
Hybrid threats are persistent and permeate our daily lives, as both state and non-state actors seek to exploit their targets’ vulnerabilities to their own advantage by coordinated use of a mixture of measures (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, technological), while remaining below the threshold of open armed conflict. While hybrid threats and hybrid warfare are not new phenomena, the scale, complexity, and impact of these operations have intensified in recent years as technologies and techniques have been used for malicious purpose. Examples include the hindering of democratic decision-making processes by massive disinformation campaigns, using social media to control the political narrative or to radicalise, recruit and direct proxy actors. By blending digital influence, psychological manipulation, and social engineering, hybrid threats infiltrate everyday experiences, often without being detected.
Furthermore, critical infrastructure has become a prime target for hybrid operations, often with kinetic consequences. Attacks on undersea communication cables, satellite networks, and energy grids can disrupt the functioning of governments, paralyze essential services, and destabilize societies. Cyberattacks against key critical infrastructure sectors—such as finance, energy, and transportation—continue to rise.
Experience over the past decade in many countries has registered an increasing use of hybrid warfare techniques and that trend is likely to continue. This poses new challenges for relations with both allies and adversaries and complicates an already difficult and unstable geopolitical and geostrategic context.
The 2025 World Emerging Security Forum will explore a range of hybrid threats, their evolution, their impact on international security, and ways to counter them. Among these, cognitive warfare has emerged as a key security issue of the present period. It goes beyond the challenge of disinformation, utilising emerging technologies to exert sustained, deep and hard to trace influence on large population groups. The evolution of the cognitive battlefield, however, does not mean kinetic warfare has become unimportant; far from it, emerging technologies are transforming strategy and battlefield tactics with new means and methods of warfare such as drones, robotics, and space-based weapons. This is significantly reshaping the military operational environment.
Meanwhile, traditional kinetic and contemporary cyber forms of warfare and insecurity come together in the domain of securing critical infrastructure. Digitalization has brought profound social benefits but has also introduced serious vulnerabilities. Cyber incidents can lead to major disruptions. Warfare in Ukraine has highlighted how cyber attacks on critical infrastructure can serve as a potent tactic and has revealed the potential for collateral damage. At the same time, physical sabotage of digital services remains a risk, as is all too clear from undersea cable disruptions.
Exploring cognitive, kinetic and infastructure concerns, the 2025 World Emerging Security Forum will explore issues along a continuum of hybridity, combining innovation and traditional concerns and instruments in the security sphere.