What do we speak of when we speak of ‘hybrid warfare’, a notion that has become prominent in discussions of European security? The article shows that this question is difficult to answer, as the hybrid warfare discourse is not only vague, but also consists of multiple, and at times contradictory, narratives. While talking and writing about supposedly the same thing, participants in the hybrid warfare debate often suggest markedly different ideas about the precise nature and target of the threat, offer different responses and draw upon different expertise. Grounding our argument in critical scholarship on narratives, security knowledge and hybrid warfare, we build a framework for studying security narratives around the four elements of threat, threatened value, response and underlying knowledge. This framework is utilised in a case study of Czechia, a country that has played a pioneering and outsized role in European hybrid warfare debates. We identify three narratives of hybrid warfare – defence, counterinfluence and education – which present markedly different understandings of ‘hybrid warfare’, and ways to defend against it. Our intervention hopes to contribute to disentangling the contradictions of the hybrid warfare discourse, itself a necessary precondition for both sound state policy and an informed public debate.

当我们谈论“混合战争”时，我们在谈论什么？这个概念在欧洲安全讨论中已经变得很突出了？该文章表明，这个问题很难回答，因为混合战争的话语不仅含糊不清，而且包含多种，有时是相互矛盾的叙述。在谈论和写所谓的同一件事时，混合战争辩论的参与者通常会就威胁的确切性质和目标提出明显不同的想法，提供不同的应对方式并利用不同的专业知识。基于我们关于叙事，安全知识和混合战争的批判性学术研究的论点，我们建立了一个框架来研究威胁，威胁价值，应对和基础知识四个要素的安全叙事。该框架在捷克共和国的案例研究中得到了利用，这个国家在欧洲混合战争辩论中发挥了开拓性和过大的作用。我们确定了混合战争的三种叙述-防御，反影响和教育-对“混合战争”及其防御方法表现出明显不同的理解。我们的干预希望有助于消除混合战争话语的矛盾，这本身就是健全的国家政策和知情的公开辩论的必要前提。