Welcome to the grey zone: Future war and peace

Managed democracies and patchwork states

In the European Union’s (EU) neighbourhood, the arc of instability has become an arc of managed democracies and patchwork states by 2030. In the self-proclaimed managed democracies, like Serbia and Moldova, governments strategically balance a democratic facade with heavy oppression of progressive values and minorities. This quasi-authoritarian style and support from their role model, China, under the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party, help them sustain effective if inequitable governance, economic growth and stability.

The patchwork states include Syria and Libya, where conventional fighting on the battlefields of the 2010s has ended. Under tight control of the Eurasian middle powers – Russia, Turkey and Iran – conflicts have transformed from to be resolved to permanently managed. Internally, different factions are supported by different outside powers, but anti-Western and anti-liberal sentiments bind them together in a transactional coexistence in which there is no formal war featuring the kind of mass violence that could attract global attention. Instead, transnational criminal networks are intertwined with political and business elites, facilitated by Moscow, Tehran and Ankara.

Criminal violence is widespread in both managed democracies and patchwork states. While the criminal business elites escape control and prosecution under any jurisdiction, their people on the ground are protected by middle powers, who deny access to international organizations or independent journalists. Ordinary people thus suffer from both oppression by their ruling elites and the consequences of gang violence. Rather than being a symptom of instability, criminal violence is a consequence of a powerful alliance between organized crime and politics.

Middle powers playing the grey zone

The Eurasian middle powers have learned how to play the grey zone under the radar of great power competition between the United States and China. Turkey, Russia and Iran flexibly form coalitions of interest. These middle powers have used their influence on patchwork states like Syria and convinced governments to maintain a unified government that speaks the language of international law and diplomacy with one voice in order to play the international political-diplomatic game and gain support for their policies at the United Nations (UN). This also serves to continue to blackmail European countries into providing development money, security sector assistance, aid and weapons to control migration flows, protect the externalized European border and avoid the spread of epidemics. To the outside and with the help of those middle powers, leaders in patchwork states and managed democracies have managed to fight off any Western attempts to gain regional hegemony and rallied their populations against the liberal West, embodied by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its members – of which Turkey is no longer a part. Rhetorically, the middle powers promote the principle of non-interference, but in reality, they control the unwritten rules of the game.

After Turkey left NATO in 2025, it established a broad regional security alliance that includes Saudi Arabia and Egypt, based on a minimal consensus of shared religious values. The alliance brings together countries with varying motives on a transactional basis. The pragmatic union serves to gain control in Europe’s south-eastern neighbourhood and form a bloc against NATO and the EU, which has never offered any credible prospect of accession to Turkey.

By 2030, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria consider joining the new alliance, since its support is the only option to get growing human displacement from sub-Saharan Africa under control. Pressured by climate change-induced environmental degradation across the African continent, the North African countries struggle with serving their own population and refugees at the same time. The EU has stopped providing support due to internal economic crises and political divisions after attempts at externalizing its Southern border to North Africa have only provoked a spiral of violence there. Turkey, the region’s master of refugee deals since its first refugee agreement with the EU in 2016, comes up with a new plan. Together with its partners in the Gulf and financially backed by China, it offers Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria a resettlement deal in exchange for economic and security sector assistance. Turkey and Saudi Arabia recruit refugees into mercenary armies, the defence industry, agriculture and the care sector.

Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were never accepted by EU member states due to their perceived religious otherness, are accession candidates to the Turkish-led alliance, which does not impose any conditionality except for a minimal formal commitment to religious values. Considerable parts of the population in those countries are ready to take up arms for a new alliance and against the EU, which humiliatingly rejected these states despite their best efforts to meet accession and association criteria. The same goes for Azerbaijan, which has long distanced itself from the EU. Inspired by Russian and Chinese propaganda tactics, the increasingly authoritarian Turkish government launches disinformation campaigns targeted at the Muslim population in Europe. With this, Turkey joins Russia in its efforts to destabilize social cohesion inside the EU between minorities, nationalists and a green-liberal academic elite.

Following Belarus’ long-expected European Revolution in 2028, the political cleavages in its society grew. In 2030, the Eastern part of Belarus on the left bank of the Dnieper River declared independence and pursues pro-Russian foreign policy. After declaring independence, the Eastern breakaway part of Belarus adopts a declaration to become a part of Russian Federation following the Crimean example. However, Russia acts as it did in the case of Transnistria and does not accept Eastern Belarus as part of its own territory. To maintain influence, Russia is interested in keeping instability in its European and EU-friendly neighbourhood and starts blackmailing the Baltics and Poland via energy and trade negotiations outside of multilateral formats, excluding the common EU front.

Although the Eastern part of Belarus wishes to become part of Russia, the Western part under Lukashenko manages to deal with Russia with Russia’s tools. If previously the common expectation presumed Russia to annex Belarus in order to create a new federation, a necessary step for the president of Russia to remain in power, then in 2030 Lukashenko decides to reverse that tactic. In 2030, the president of Belarus offers the possibility to create a common Federation of Russia and Belarus by 2035, under the condition that Minsk would become its capital. Although knowing in advance that this proposal will not be accepted by Russia, the proposal signals solidarity between the two nations and advances their dialogue.

NATO’s failed war on the grey zone

The latest in a long line of increasingly desperate attempts by NATO to prove its worth – dating back to then French President Emmanuel Macron’s notorious ‘brain death’ comment in 2019 – sees the alliance actually declare war on the grey zone in early 2030 (Economist, 2019). In cooperation with the Alliance for Multilateralism, which includes Canada, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand but not the United States, NATO plans to revive the international legal order and to find new compromises with its competitors, while also partnering with the private sector and heavily investing in military capabilities in domains like cyber and outer space to counter digital warfare. This includes a reduction of democratic checks on countries’ militaries and the use of executive powers and of limitations on the development of dual use technology. It thus seeks to reboot the Westphalian state, revive clear borders and re-establish a multilateral regional and even global order.

NATO’s war on the grey zone is doomed to fail, because grey zone warfare cannot be countered with command and control tactics nor with the re-imposition of borders and state-based order by force alone. The few attempts at a hybrid approach to divide and rule do not find fertile ground and cannot manage to win the hearts and minds of the population abroad. From China to Turkey and the Balkans, people are no longer interested in an unattainable European alternative. It has lost its appeal for people who need a viable vision for their future.

At the same time, people in the EU, Great Britain, Australia and the United States feel the countries they live in are at constant war, but these populations do not experience armed violence traditionally associated with warfare. Instead, they experience economic decline, polarization and a constant buzz of trade, information, energy and technological wars over the goods they buy, resources they consume and over the personal data they may or may not want to protect. Along with the rising threat of diffuse global threats like pandemics, people have both become dependent on the Internet of Things and more vulnerable to cyberattacks as the battles of the 2030s. History and religion, the causes or shadows of past wars, become decisive tools in the present war of narratives. As the liberal elite in those countries and regions manage to regain control – for now – populist nationalists, supported by Russia’s and Turkey’s information warfare, incite hate. Racist violent attacks on minorities and on activists defending their rights become widespread. The liberal political elite, which relies on a shrinking support basis from the middle of society, fails to prevent this, as they are busy constructing a narrative of common outside enemies to the East to distract from their own paralysis.

As extreme weather events increase and the number of climate refugees spikes, climate change seems to be the only issue that brings governments to the negotiating table at a global level. Nevertheless, the establishment in Washington and across the transatlantic community is out of its depth, returning to the blind spots and wishful thinking of the Obama years. By 2030, US President Ocasio-Cortez has decided to become the president of peace. European allies are not willing or able to spend more on defence. After considerable defence budget cuts, the United States’ membership in NATO exists on paper only and the alliance is in a serious crisis.

The Ocasio-Cortez administration prioritizes the long-heralded Green New Deal as, seemingly, the only way to keep dominating the world economy – but it is too late, as most people outside the administration realize. The United States continues to lose ground to an ever-rising China, which continues to largely stay out of overt wars and armed conflict, but manages to reap the benefits of its debt trap diplomacy. China is the main trading partner of both the new Turkey-led alliance of middle powers and the patchwork states they cooperate with; moreover, its economic activities benefit from the deregulated trade regimes of the grey zone. China’s ability to supply organized criminal networks, which engage in smuggling activities, allows it to de facto retain its asymmetric tariff position vis-à-vis other major powers, despite claiming to do the opposite. Undermined by the Chinese economic powerhouse of state-led capitalism, the United States and Europe have no other option than to keep trading and cooperating with China – largely on China’s terms.

In this scenario, the wish to return to the times when liberal democracy was thought to have ended history distracts from a changing reality. The Eurasian middle powers Turkey, Russia and Iran become successful managers of a permanent state of grey, in which the line between war and peace is blurred beyond recognition and illiberal practice prevails. Understanding the drivers and consequences of this potential future is the focus of this essay.

Shifting powers, or ‘Westlessness’

In 2020, ² countries of the EU and their allies seemed paralyzed. President Assad won back control over the majority of Syria with the help of Russia and Iran. This development marked the disastrous end of an era of US attempts to contain rivals in the Middle East. It also marked an end of the comfortable coexistence between the United States and the EU. Confronted with new American priorities, EU member states are lost between trying to be good allies – to ensure the continuity of US security guarantees – and developing an alternative strategic vision for their relationship with a crisis-ridden neighbourhood, as well as building the necessary strategic autonomy and the military capability to secure their own territories. Russia accelerated its propaganda to erode trust within liberal democratic societies, while Western liberal elites desperately tried to save low single-digit percentages of economic growth to keep social contracts working and the population satisfied. Meanwhile, China was busy creating facts on the ground in the South China Sea with its salami-slicing tactic of gradually expanding its territorial control over a desired sphere of exclusive influence – and it continued to expand its global technological and economic dominance.

Key drivers of global politics, peace and war in the early 2020s were a rising China, a decline of US-American influence in the world and the inability of the EU and its member states to shape international relations. The United States continued its retreat from the international stage. In 2020, President Trump was re-elected – and his second term was essentially a continuation of the first, which led other players to strategically exploit the resultant vacuum in US leadership. Still haunted by the Ukraine scandal and accusations of colluding with Russia, Trump decided to ‘help’ Ukraine – and bolster his signature ‘Walls for the World’ programme by starting to build a wall that separated the sovereign part of Ukraine from its breakaway Eastern territories Donetsk and Lugansk in 2022. This did provide some symbolic reassurance about US security guarantees to NATO’s European allies, although the wall also provoked some outrage and was of little practical benefit. However, the final blow to the Atlantic alliance was eventually delivered by Trump’s successor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Elected to the White House in 2024, Ocasio-Cortez’s administration significantly cut defence spending and instead focused on social welfare and fighting climate change with a Green New Deal.

The parts of the world that traditionally identified as ‘the West’ were surprised by its own rapid decline. Their leaders also failed to recognize this and failed to find answers to the world becoming increasingly ‘Westless’ (Munich Security Conference, 2020). After Europeans had failed to respond in a meaningful way to the wars in Libya and Syria, the Middle East and North Africa region was increasingly left to the mercies of Eurasian middle powers: Russia, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Europe found no effective way to influence those actors and leverage its interests. The EU’s appeal in its south-eastern neighbourhood declined. Serbia and Moldova pragmatically turned towards the Chinese economic powerhouse as their new main trading partner and ally. After Moldova’s unsuccessful attempts to find its European way and Serbia’s determination to find an alternative way, China’s hegemonic expansion strategy proved successful. These smaller states also developed a constructive relationship with some of the Eurasian middle powers, notably Turkey and Russia. Their political systems became pseudo democracies, significantly restricting civil liberties and minority rights, following the Chinese Communist Party’s model of success in terms of growth and stability.

In 2021, the EU decided to officially exclude the possibility of Turkish EU membership and refused to recognize Turkey’s unilateral actions in Syria as being legitimate. In piqued response, Turkey looked for more like-minded partners, entered into an alliance with Saudi Arabia and Egypt – not in total agreement over politics, but with a minimal consensus on shared religious values and the goal of dominating the region around them by offering an alternative to EU and NATO. In 2025, Turkey finally left NATO, as there was no need to pretend it was still interested in an alliance of marginal international importance.

Economically on the rise, thanks to excellent relations with China, Turkey filled the power vacuum in the South-Eastern Mediterranean – a move that began with its 2019 occupation of Northern Syria and its military support to the Libyan government in Tripoli. While the two countries were once rivals in Central Asia, they have settled on a pragmatic economic and political partnership, based on state-led capitalism, strongmen leaders and their joint disdain for the EU and the United States. Syria and Libya became patchwork states, in which different factions supported by outside powers dominated various regions of these countries. Even if the areas of control did not match the internationally recognized state borders, Turkey and its allies were able to convince the factions to support unity governments and make the bloc under Turkey’s control seem more consolidated than it actually was.

For Russia, the year 2025 is a historic milestone as the country celebrated the 80th anniversary of the victory in World War II with historic re-enactments of past battles including the liberation of the Baltic states, Poland and Berlin and Crimea’s return to Russia. The symbolic act was led by Vladimir Putin, the former president of Russia and head of the Russian National Security Council from 2024. With this, Russia skilfully told its own narrative of historical legacy and its new place in the global order. While the victory over fascism meant prosperity to most of Europe, it was the beginning of occupation for the Baltic states. Reminding the world that Russia owns this crucial part of European history was the final step in Russia’s historically underpinned narrative that it is, again, a great nation that has taken a path different from the EU’s.

The failed European project?

Another driver of developments in the 2020s lay in the failure of the EU and its member states to develop a set of inclusive values and an inclusive economic system that ensured peaceful and resilient societies – at home, in its neighbourhood and further abroad. At home, European countries failed to develop inclusive narratives of identity and belonging. When Russia and Turkey started to intensify their disinformation campaigns to undermine social cohesion, they found fertile ground in diverse societies like Germany and Sweden. In these countries, White supremacy, anti-Islamic racism and hate crimes were on the rise after Europe’s consistent failure to combat racism and reform its migration and asylum policy. With propaganda on their phone screens, the streets full of riots and protests, and politicians spreading alarmist messages about an assertive Turkey and China exporting its digital surveillance and the economy crumbling, people in Europe began to feel like they were caught in a constant war. This feeling was only exacerbated by the repeated ‘trade wars’ with both the United States and China – the former stirred up by a disruptive, post-Brexit Britain. European populations were also subject to continued hybrid and political war tactics from Russia, the success of which inspired other actors to mimic them.

In its close neighbourhood, the EU failed to develop an inclusive vision that offered a credible perspective to Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and other neighbours who hoped to join the club. Increasingly disappointed by the EU that was internally divided and failed to maintain its economic success, the countries started looking for alternatives and ended up in the arms of Turkey’s new alliance with its strong ties to China, soon to be the world’s only economic superpower. In the case of Turkey, the EU’s failure to define its core values in line with a viable way to govern migration and prevent conflicts in its near abroad has allowed Turkey to hold the EU hostage. A victim of its own passivity, the union accepted illiberal tendencies in Turkey and allowed the country to rise to the central and powerful position it occupies in the 2030 scenario.

Outside the European continent, Europeans relied on a half-hearted approach to maintain stability: help failing states improve rule of law, governance and service provision in order to improve economic performance while respecting environmental protection standards. A stable and performing government would eventually enable ‘good’ and inclusive governance and respect for fundamental rights – foundations for liberal peace embedded in a capitalist system of green growth. While this idea sounded appealing within the EU and its neighbourhood, the Union’s model began to fail at home and, with that, its promises and legitimacy began to seem empty in the neighbourhood that it had refused to fully embrace. There was no reason for the neighbours to accept the EU’s conditions and, increasingly, little of its model was left to emulate. The EU had not been confident enough to double down on its own uniqueness and had not been generous enough in sharing its achievements of prosperity, rights and freedoms relative to the rest of the world.

Thus throughout 2021–2024, authoritarian state-led capitalism without liberal democracy or human rights became the preferred model from North Africa to Turkey. Gradually, the Chinese model of effective service provision and economic growth without respect for individual rights and freedoms proved to be not the exception, but rather the rule. With its pragmatic – or rather opportunistic and selective – approach to the international order, China learned to play the game to its advantage. Instead of entirely opposing existing multilateral systems like the UN Security Council, China stood by and watched when the marginalized and excluded voices became increasingly dissatisfied and blamed the failures of multilateralism on the West. In this context, the European project began to crumble internally, failed to deliver peace, democracy and human rights to people in its neighbourhood, and never became a transformative force for peace and human rights globally.

Patchy, ineffective transnational governance

In the 2010s, people in Europe may have imagined great power competition between China and the United States leading to a new cold war or even a third world war that would wipe large parts of the population off the planet. Seeking to revive order and peace, the ‘Alliance for Multilateralism’ (Federal Foreign Office, 2019) set out to save what was left of the post-WWII so-called liberal international order, but had difficulties coming up with any promising strategy beyond trying to hold onto what they knew and loved – a system of seemingly clear distinction between war and peace, right and wrong, legal and illegal, defined by international law. This type of system was symbolized by the UN Charter, to which the alliance’s member states ceremonially pledged allegiance each year at the Munich Security Conference, but which was never fully realized in practice.

What people did not see coming was a powerful alliance between business elites, governments and criminal groups that operated outside any international framework of governance or accountability. The failure to close loopholes and fight transnational criminal networks, end the illicit arms trade and eradicate tax havens turned the world into a paradise for those that never believed in global governance in the first place. While the EU imagined it would both make friends and save the world with its regulatory power, the new wealthy elites of the late 2020s could not have been less interested in international rules and agreements. United by the desire to end the West and its model of liberal democratic governance, Chinese politicians, the Saudi royal family and Turkish businessmen struck deals with transnational criminal networks and actors that counted as ‘clandestine’ in the West. This adds to their dominance of the formal economy, which leaves European countries no choice but to trade on China’s terms. Maintaining facades of legitimate business – largely through Chinese supply chains and the vast range of licit and illicit activities of many conglomerates (along the lines of the Russian, hybrid approach) allowed this cartel to dominate illicit trafficking of arms, drugs and people and enrich themselves, ensured mafias and gangs retained sufficient freedom to operate with impunity.

Adding to their arsenal of private military companies, militias and other irregular armed groups, this allowed states like Iran and China to exploit the grey zone under the radar of what has been governed by international agreements and monitored by UN agencies. While conventional armies and weapons could be detected and traced back to their owners, private military companies and militias – both on the ground and in the cyber realm – became attractive options to exploit the informally governed in-between. Aggression below the threshold of war became more and more lucrative. This led to the acceleration of existing trends that had seen ‘the concomitant worldwide growth in “private” armies, security zones, consultants, and bodyguards’ (Appadurai, 2006), who are not independent but operating in symbiosis with the authoritarian states protecting them.

Those suffering the most were vulnerable and marginalized populations, whose rights were not protected. The rule of law was applied selectively to the advantage of autocratic governments. In the absence of major or clear war (as traditionally understood), attention to and analysis of these violent incidents declined. Victims were harder to count and in the absence of the rule of law, justice was scarce. The project of establishing universal human rights that are protected by states acting in the best interest of their population has failed and the UN human rights system has become useless to this end. After all, and despite the suffering of marginalized or precarious populations, life in autocracies was quite ordinary and comfortable for the majority.

Between the zones: Post-Soviet, non-EU

The possibility of a European future for Ukraine and Belarus was controversial due to the divided views inside the EU, Ukraine and Belarus. Both countries had been members of the EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) Initiative since 2009, which gave its signatories an opportunity to join the EU’s sphere of influence – without necessarily offering a membership perspective (Korosteleva, 2011). At the same time, Russia saw Belarus and Ukraine as part of its sphere of influence – its ‘near abroad’ or, even, part of the ‘Rusky Mir’ (‘Russian world’/Russosphere) (e.g. see Toal, 2017: 9). Thus, both countries have remained in-between East and West.

Before the European revolution in 2028, Belarus pursued a successful multi-vector foreign policy by enhancing relations with the United States, the EU and Russia. The societal cleavage that led to the revolution in Belarus started growing when the government decided to depart from the EU’s EaP Initiative, which provoked the anger of the progressive youth and European-minded educated middle class. Meanwhile, many people in the Eastern part of Belarus wished to remain related to Russia as a brother nation. The division in society was exacerbated by the United States’ growing support to Belarus since 2020, when mutual ambassadors were reappointed after a decade. Special support to Belarus remained a foreign policy priority, even under the Ocasio-Cortez presidency. As a former socialist country that seemed to affirm United States’ soft power, it became the new US administration’s chosen avenue for a new and different US engagement in Europe.

Ukraine’s European path has not been bloodless. After President Viktor Yanukovich’s decision to reject the association agreement with the EU, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass made it difficult for Ukraine to move forward towards the EU membership or to implement structural reforms. In 2029, when Russia was preoccupied with the revolution in Belarus, the government of Ukraine used the window of opportunity and recognized the independence of its separatist breakaway territories, the so-called Lugansk and Donetsk Republics. This step was no surprise, as the Eastern breakaway territories were separated from Ukraine by a wall built in 2022 with the support of then US President Donald Trump after his re-election in 2020. Ukraine took the decision to recognize its independent breakaway territories as the only option for the country to get rid of its grey zone areas and to join the EU and NATO. To finalize the separation, Ukraine cuts social benefits including pensions to citizens of its former Eastern territories by 2030.

In spite of somewhat pragmatic cooperation, the EU failed to credibly declare Ukraine, Belarus and the other EaP countries a clear priority. Instead of offering a membership perspective, the EaP required countries to conduct reforms according to EU membership criteria without hope of becoming an EU member. This had been controversial from the beginning. Already the title of EaP determined its members as the geographic East, clearly othering them as well as confirming them as partners and thus not members. Meanwhile, for Ukraine and Belarus the EU symbolizes the geographic West that these countries want to become part of. By relocating these countries to the status of Eastern partners, the EaP itself effectively placed them in Russia’s sphere of interest. Russia in turn declared its interest in former post-Soviet states, known as the Karaganov doctrine, already in 1992. The leadership of EU countries has failed to understand that there cannot be prosperity in Europe if there is no security and there cannot be security only in certain parts of Europe. While Russia had to grudgingly, painfully accept the colour revolutions, it never accepted the further integration of its near abroad into the EU and NATO. The EU’s EaP Initiative left considerable ambiguity that allowed Russia to view its near abroad as divided into geopolitical zones of influence.

This (un)intentional political and geographic separation left enough political space for Russia to offer an alternative – the Eurasian Economic Union, which Belarus became a member of in 2015. The EU’s leadership should not have been surprised by the events in Ukraine in 2013, as they were a continuation of what had started in Georgia in 2008. In denial about Russia’s commitment, the EU missed the moment to send a clear message and ‘resolve’ the future of Ukraine, Georgia (and indirectly also Belarus). After the EU’s realization that the EaP had failed as a tool to enlarge its influence without offering a membership perspective, the Union showed a late interest in what was left and to enhance the partnership with the advanced members of EaP – Georgia and Ukraine. Ukraine’s step towards the West by signing the Advanced Partnership Agreement with EU in 2022, the United States’ diminished role in NATO and as a security guarantor in Europe after 2025, together with Turkey’s alternative leadership in the Southern Mediterranean, cumulatively resulted in a growing need for the EU to take steps in order to grow in territory and also to enlarge its influence. This need for growth, both in population and in territory, offered a moment for Ukraine to perceive itself as a useful addition to decadent Europe and for Belarus as a moment to follow Ukraine’s path towards the EU.

Even though the EU’s global importance has declined considerably, constant pressure from Russia has finally driven a majority of Ukrainians into Europe’s arms, fearful of losing their independence and having to live under the Russian dictatorship. Both Belarus and Ukraine are illustrative of the fate of many in-between countries in an era of permanent grey. Not clearly belonging to either of two sides, they are caught between a struggle over truth, narratives and history. In the scenario, they were partly able to take steps towards their preferred future, but only via the difficult route of separation. While this may seem a temporary solution, it certainly won’t a search for belonging and peace, as they will – ironically and tragically – be the arena of both grey zone warfare and the war against the grey zone.

Shifting powers, a fragile European project, patchy transnational governance and countries between spheres of influence are already visible trends in 2020. Spelling out potential consequences of these continuing trends across the 2020s and a picture for 2030 shows that un-cancelling a progressive future cannot mean a return to the status quo before those prevalent trends. Finding an alternative path forward requires going one step further and identifying why this future matters today, what are the underlying contradictions and how they could be resolved.

The false dichotomy between war and peace

The scenario outlined above focuses on the grey zone as the space in between what is defined as war and peace in the UN Charter, which was the cornerstone of the post-war international order. But the scenario does not envisage major wars as the opposite to the end of history (Fukuyama, 1989). Instead, it illustrates that some actors learn to manage the ambiguity in between war and peace and exploit it to their advantage, while others fail to even realize what is happening. A misplaced idealism focused on the war and peace dichotomy in the West leads to a failure to see and govern the grey zone. Nadia Schadlow (2014) calls this the failure to understand that the space between war and peace is not an empty one – but a landscape churning with political, economic and security competitions that require constant attention. In the future we outline, this proves to be fatal not only for the dominance of the United States and its allies, but also for a functioning system of international rules.

Of course, Western governments have also engaged in what analysts label hybrid or political warfare, from the Cold War to the war against terror up to competition over narratives between China and the United States in times of 5G, trade wars and the Corona epidemic. One can certainly argue what is labelled political warfare when committed by the West’s opponents counts as legitimate promotion of partnership and interests by the United States or EU – illustrating the limited usefulness of broad concepts such as grey zone or political warfare as objective truths or diagnoses. While political warfare involves the accusation of hostile intent, this intent is often up to the opponents’ perception. It arguably says more about the accuser than the accused, as shown by Foucault’s analysis of war, according to which ‘power operates through the discursive practices of politics and war’ and ‘discourses around peace, war, sovereignty, and rights frame our assumptions and behaviours when it comes to conflict’ (Bowers, 2019: n.p.).

What’s worse, while ‘open societies saw themselves as the uncontested winners and expected that the remaining autocracies, with the help of western pro-democracy actors, would be relegated to the dustbin of history’, they have failed to effectively counter authoritarian influencing and propaganda (Benner and Soares de Oliveira, 2016: n.p.). Their war against the grey zone resulted in authoritarian tendencies that undermine the very principles of its own liberal democratic model instead of defending values of openness and human rights – while remaining ineffective against an expanding grey zone. Large parts of the population turn towards authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbàn, while the rest desperately tries to hold onto the formerly free world. When Ocasio-Cortez is elected president (in 2024) in our scenario, it is too late to turn back. Between authoritarian tendencies and economic decline as well as a failure to innovate and accept the new reality, the West’s decline accelerates in absolute terms. It also accelerates in relative terms as rising powerful rivals establish an alternative order with full backing of their population – either voluntarily or through repression.

This has severe consequences for the fate of individuals, who are subject to authoritarian repression and criminal violence in patchwork states; as well as criminal violence and generalized oppression, albeit in the relative material comfort of those living in managed, non-liberal democracies; and the uneven life chances and widespread precariousness offered by traditional liberal democracies. But it does not lead to large-scale wars and rising counts of war casualties. The suffering happens in the grey zone of creeping authoritarianism and it stays under the radar of newspaper headlines. Thus, the scenario is meant to show that there is no black and white dichotomy between a positive, peaceful post-war era with a dominant role of the United States and its allies, which has helped avoid another world war and interstate wars in Western Europe, and a negative, multipolar world of chaos, violence and trouble.

Instead, the key to understanding what is happening and how to find an alternative is to acknowledge the grey in both eras – because the opposite of peace is not war, but violence and oppression – not as a dichotomy, but on a continuum. Switching from the macro-level of war and peace to the micro-level of human suffering helps understand this. As Dr Martin Luther King Jr famously said in 1956 ‘if peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don’t want peace. So in a passive, non-violent manner, we must revolt against this peace’ (King, 1956). From a macro-perspective, the cold war may have seemed like a period of ‘long peace’ (Gaddis, 1986). But even this period had its shades of grey, be it in the Soviet bloc or the firing line of proxy wars – just as the permanent grey zone may even have its upsides for some, if not for others.

Grey parts of the peaceful order

The theory of the post-war order of sovereign states with the monopoly of violence and de jure equality under international law was never fully realized and did not eliminate violence and coercion. There were losers and outsiders on different levels. At the state level, some states simply were not part of the bargain when the winners of WWII created a Security Council with five veto powers. At the sub-state level, large parts of the population were not part of the equation either. Indigenous populations and minorities not represented by those that formally rule the territory they live on and sit in the UN General Assembly in New York never had a voice in shaping the system. They remained subject to and largely suffered from unjust rules, domination and coercion. The third group that was not part of the post-war bargain has thrived from the blind spots of the system: transnational criminal groups and some of the wealthiest people on earth who have used the peaceful order and loopholes in law enforcement on regular markets – such as the financial markets – and irregular markets – such as trade in illicit goods – to their advantages.

All three groups play a central role in the scenario of 2030, as an underused resource for those that piggyback on the flaws of the post-war order and strategically exploit vulnerabilities, underserved populations and governance gaps. From a confident liberal democratic perspective, it may not seem plausible that countries would submit to the Chinese debt trap and join an autocratic alliance, that minorities would turn against democracy and that an alliance of criminal state-corporatist business elites thrive. However, looking at the aforementioned blind spots and with Dr King’s words in mind, it should become clear that some never enjoyed the benefits of the peaceful order and others were only waiting to turn their power against its core principles.

(Dis)advantages of the grey zone

The grey zone of the scenario ends large-scale conventional war on defined battlefields. For democracies, conventional war with ‘boots on the ground’ has become socio-economically and emotionally too expensive and risky to the fragile societal unity. Societies are not willing to tolerate the casualties of even limited conventional war and risking an escalating all-out confrontation is simply too costly for politicians – the grey zone allows them to keep it that way. But instead of eliminating the horrors of war from collective memory, a new, diffuse feeling of constant war creeps in.

What is called grey zone warfare today is a tactic perfectly suited to a hyper-connected world. Cross-border dependencies have existed for a long time in the areas of energy and trade. But, with the growing penetration of the Internet and increasing reliance on technologies such as 5G, dependencies have increased, including in people’s social lives and private spaces. This means ‘one country can bring another to its knees without deploying a single soldier’ (Braw, 2020), by targeting electrical grids or transport networks, but also by gradually undermining societally cohesive historical and political narratives. Thus, each individual becomes part of the battle in a permanent grey zone. The future will have no battlefields, as everywhere becomes a potential battlefield (Bousquet, 2017). Information warfare turns communication into spaces where no single truth exists, but individuals feel like they have to pick what is true. According to Peter Pomerantsev’s ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’ (Wood, 2015: n.p.; see Pomerantsev, 2017), which the individual will have to build up their own interpretation of the world and what matters as well as what happens in it. This renders the democratic negotiation of a common political project in a society almost impossible. What’s more, individuals can choose between several truths – or their subjective, intertextual combination of historical, legal, social, cultural and political truths (plural). While narratives have always been an important part of warfare, the grey zone allows actors to exploit the shift in the referent object of security from society to the individual that is inherent to liberalism and its organization into societies and economies. It facilitates the exacerbation of the fragmentation and polarization of societies by provoking clashes within families, societies, between states, between regions and alliances.

In such a situation of a permanent grey zone in which there is no peace, but no war either, people may eventually wish for an actual conventional war to happen, as it may seem to be the only potential way out of an unbearable state of grey, for better or worse. For others, however, like conventional war, the grey zone can also be a means to progress from a previous status quo – if you know how to play it. This can be an opportunity and a risk. For example, the development of the grey zone in the scenario enabled Ukraine to further develop a European identity while its relations with Russia deteriorated. The grey war in the East enabled Ukraine to highlight the European future as its only future. In the scenario, these developments also enable parts of Belarus to follow their European aspirations.

The scenario of a ubiquitous grey zone deserves attention, as the grey zone represents an unregulated space in which the new normal is tested and later de facto legitimized. In reality, we are already seeing the greying of the edges of our understandings, discourses and practices. The order of rules gradually falls apart. As one can see in the example of the ‘resolvable’ conflicts that have become permanently managed grey zones, no man’s land becomes everyone’s land and ends up being one man’s land in the case of the countries governed by autocrats. Syria and Eastern Ukraine as grey zones are well suited to test new types of weapons and private armies as well as being a venue in which actors can create international legal precedents for their own. Early signs of this include, for example, Turkey unilaterally creating what it calls a ‘humanitarian corridor’ in Northern Syria, which later, in the 2030 scenario, falls under Turkish sovereignty, or Russia annexing Crimea and claiming it was based on a ‘legal’ referendum (BBC, 2019; Marxsen, 2014).

In 2020, many people in Europe and the United States may hope that a return to the post-WWII rules is the best possible way to solve problems. It is not. The 2030 scenario shows that these hopes are misled. This may be an opportunity to not let illusions of the perfect become the enemy of the good. An alternative, more realistic approach may require forming ad hoc coalitions to solve single global issues like climate change or pandemics. Without a commitment to a joint strategic vision, however, solving immediate issues may create new problems in the long run.

Preventing the grey – Or managing it

In what we call the permanent grey zone, clearly delineated battlefields are gone, but with them also the illusion that there was peace outside of them. The UN Charter’s distinction between war and peace was never fully realized in practice. Rather than an actual, real-world dichotomy, it is a normative illusion of Western idealists that turns a blind eye towards domination, violence and injustices. As a consequence, resolvable grey zones become permanent – and managed by other powers. And the blurred line that always existed turns into ubiquitous grey of a new quality in 2030. What is governed – absolute peace and clearly defined war – become rare. What is ungoverned and happening under the threshold of the West’s understanding and attention – the grey zone – will exceed formal global governance. Governing these spaces of grey in both the physical and relational sense, and collectively solving problems absent universal definitions are difficult challenges. They require international cooperation, which currently seems to be on the decline as well, as the impossibility of resolving conflict in the UN Security Council and other multilateral fora.

With more widespread use, concepts like war have gradually lost their original meaning. With grey zone, hybrid and political warfare, any contestation that involves real or alleged hostile intent is labelled warfare. Doing so means being complicit in the expansion of the grey zone, not preventing it. More refined analytical vocabulary is certainly needed to help people describe what is happening in the world, formulate solutions and regulate hostile behaviour. The widespread use of the term grey zone shows that there is a void – a space between black and white, war and peace – which is not yet sufficiently understood. Better analysis by NATO members and the EU is needed if they want to actively shape this space instead of passively watch and receive the externalities in the form of conflict and suffering – without falling into the trap of creeping authoritarianism.

When complete peace is not attainable, the challenge is to manage the grey zone. This becomes evident in case of countries that have remained in between the spheres of influence for the longest time – including Belarus, Ukraine, the Balkan countries and even Turkey. These countries should have formed an arc of stable friendship around Europe, but have instead turned into an arc of instability in 2030. While we argue that the EU should not have left its neighbours in limbo about accession prospects, we do acknowledge that their future has not only been up to the EU. The people of Belarus and Ukraine, for example, have agency. But they have not been free to simply choose their future, with Russia as a powerful neighbour that exploited the ambiguity left by the EU.

Choosing a muddling through approach to European association – Europe’s own interpretation of grey – served to avoid outright war with Russia over places such as Georgia and to delay polarization within. A failed attempt at managing the grey at best, this meant avoiding honest and open discussions about European values that could have brought new life to the EU as a political project of peace – and it may mean losing the upper hand economically in the long run, too.

Renewing the international order

While the defenders of the post-war liberal order either fail or refuse to manage the grey zone, the combination of a strategic void and semi-plausible deniability encourages contesters to shape the world as they like it. In the UN Charter, war is defined as an act of aggression, an exceptional evil and a deviation from the norm that can be tamed with international treaties. This fallacy may be the consequence of a liberal misunderstanding of Clausewitz’s definition of war as the continuation of politics by other means – an understanding that sees war as an exceptional beast that is to be tamed and can be eradicated in favour of peace.

Before societies became so interconnected and technologically advanced, one was sure to eventually need conventional warfare and defining a threshold of outright aggression between states was enough. Faced with changing realities, the UN has evolved and has sought to prevent other sources of violence than interstate conflict, alleviate suffering and support justice and accountability. With regard to intrastate conflicts, however, the Security Council has proved redundant. This serves actors like the Chinese and Russian governments who exploit their relative positions in great power politics legitimized in the Council – a tendency that is only reinforced by our scenario. Fighting crime and protecting vulnerable populations would not be a priority in the 2030 world of permanent grey. While some multilateral agencies, like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), will be indispensable to ensure functioning of global infrastructure and emergency response, the Chinese, Turkish and Saudi Arabian governments would certainly reshape priorities to fit their world of managed grey.

As the post-war international order with its system of rules and laws that govern war and peace is clearly under threat, and contestation is rising, there is a tendency (certainly at least in the West) to idealize one’s own past – a sort of political ‘retromania’ – and call for a united front against common outside enemies (Reynolds, 2011). Our scenario and the accompanying analysis are instead a call for nuance and honest introspection, written from a European perspective. They show that the defenders of the West’s preferred international order in the idealistic sense failed to construct a positive narrative and renew a system perceived as unjust by so many around the world. Instead of mourning the passing of the post-war order as an era of unprecedented peace, it is essential to reconsider its flaws as the fundamental reasons for why it has failed or may fail. Privileged by the post-war peace, Western heads of states and large parts of the population were blind to other shortcomings of the seemingly peaceful international order and the grey in it. What they failed to acknowledge is that this system, for all its manifest benefits, entrenched enough particular hierarchies and inequities, and tolerated enough violation in exception by its principle supporters that it lost support around the world – despite having been the best hope for constraining the return of great power politics in earnest.

Not losing sight of the individual

The feeling of permanent war – at least in the ideological and political sense – and the criminal and state-based violence and the hate crime that occurs in a dispersed manner brings the individual to the spotlight in the 2030 scenario. Instead of invoking peace and war strategically, as it suits political leaders, honesty about the actors and objects of contestation, especially those that suffer from violence, could help people better understand the nuances of war, peace and trade-offs that come with political decisions. Similarities of individual suffering in both war and peacetime deserve more attention. This calls for acknowledging the nuances of violence and domination – not war – as the true opposite of peace. It shows that an analytical focus on battle-related deaths in clearly delineated conflicts above a certain threshold completely misses the point to understand future conflict and violence (see Galtung, 2011; Krause, 2016).

Building societal resilience and starting to do so at the individual level is important to avoid suffering and the breakdown of political orders. Knowledge about favours for individual psychological resilience can help fill gaps in understanding societal resilience, its role for peaceful political change. Tackling trauma and taking lived experiences and political demands of people affected by violence seriously would be an important first step. Resilience should not be taken as an excuse to depoliticize and shift all responsibility onto the local and individual level without dismantling practices of domination, but rather to enable and learn to listen. Showing that demands are heard through formal channels of local institutions, states, non-governmental organizations or international humanitarian aid actors might decrease the chances that people turn to grey channels in despair.

Confronting those challenges is not easy. But the space between order contestation and aggression will likely remain ambiguous, absent international agreements on new, universal definitions. It is still open whether the contestation will lead to a temporary backlash, turn into a permanent new cleavage of liberal versus authoritarian, or if ‘the West’ is indeed in terminal decline (Börzel and Zürn, 2020: 19). Solving the internal contradictions, including coercion, (post-) colonial domination, environmental damage, inequality and the exploitation of power structures is an important condition to disarming its enemies. Because while there is certainly (structural) violence, domination and injustice in liberal societies, turning against the idea of liberal democracy may backfire on the individual level, when rights and freedoms are restricted and consequently, physical violence rises. The really important question is: For whom does the current order or system of governance really deliver peace, prosperity and justice? Eventually, only a liberalism that alleviates injustices can prevail and be a desirable alternative to permanently managed, authoritarian shades of grey.