The Hybrid Age: A New Paradigm of Geopolitical Power

The 21st century is characterized by a structural transformation of geopolitical power that can no longer be interpreted exclusively through the classic categories of international competition. Territory, population, military force, and economy, the pillars of traditional geopolitics and political realism, have not disappeared, but are progressively subordinated to a higher-order factor: technology understood not as a tool, but as a system.

In this context, the concept of the hybrid age, developed by Ayesha and Parag Khanna, takes on a truly paradigmatic value. It should be noted that the term hybrid, now widely used in many fields, from security to international relations, from war to “threats,” has undergone a clear semantic inflation. In the Khannas’ text, however, hybridization is not a simple descriptive attribute, but a systemic historical condition, among the first formulations in the geopolitical sphere to conceive of the hybrid as a new state of the international order.

(Developed in their 2012 book “Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization,” it argues that humanity is moving beyond mere coexistence with technology into a phase of co-evolution with it.)

For Ayesha and Parag Khanna, hybridization is not simply about the adoption of advanced technological tools, but rather a profound change in the relationship between power, knowledge, and decision-making, in which technology becomes the structuring environment of geopolitical action, and no longer merely its support.

Classical geopolitics has historically conceived of power as a direct function of control over space. From Ratzel to Mackinder (Halford Mackinder’s seminal work “The Geographical Pivot of History,” presented to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904), to the elaborations of Spykman (Nicholas Spykman’s seminal 1944 work “The Geography of the Peace,” published posthumously after his death in 1943. This is a foundational text in geopolitical theory that profoundly influenced American strategic thinking during and after World War II), territory has been understood as the material basis of state power. In this tradition, power is rooted in the physical dimension, in the ability to occupy, defend, and administer a delimited space.

The hybrid age introduces a substantial discontinuity: power no longer resides exclusively in physical space, but in the networked systems that traverse it, connect it, and make it functional. Digital infrastructures, communication networks, technological supply chains, and data flows produce a systemic geopolitics in which control is no longer linear, permanent, or exclusive. As anticipated by Castells, power is organized around network nodes and the ability to govern their flows. This is a key insight from Manuel Castells’ network society theory. He argued that in the information age, power fundamentally shifts from hierarchical structures to network configurations – what matters is not just being in the network, but controlling the strategic nodes and switches that direct flows of information, capital, and influence.

It follows that geopolitical superiority is no longer determined by mere territorial extension, but by the capacity for integration, adaptation, and resilience of complex systems. In this sense, the hybrid age marks a transition from the geopolitics of space to the geopolitics of systemic architecture.

One of the most innovative contributions of the hybrid age concept lies in the idea of human-machine co-evolution, which differs from both technological determinism and purely instrumental views of technology. The structural interaction between human decision-makers and algorithmic systems radically changes decision-making times, risk perception, and, above all, strategic rationality itself.

In the geopolitical domain, this implies that the ability to make quick and informed decisions becomes more relevant than the availability of material resources. The integration of artificial intelligence into decision-making processes accelerates the OODA cycle and reduces the space for political deliberation, as highlighted by RAND (2019) and SIPRI (2020) studies on AI and strategic stability. This dynamic introduces the risk of implicit delegation of decision-making authority to opaque systems, with potentially destabilizing consequences for deterrence and crisis management (Virilio, 1998).

This is a crucial observation about the friction between operational necessity and strategic control. The speed imperative in autonomous systems creates what we might call a “command compression” problem or the gap between the tempo of machine decision-making and human oversight becomes a vulnerability in itself.

Virilio’s work on speed and politics illuminates how velocity itself becomes a strategic dimension. When decision cycles compress below the threshold of meaningful human intervention, we’re not just delegating tactical execution – we’re ceding portions of strategic agency to algorithmic logic that may optimize for parameters that don’t align with political objectives or escalation management.

The deterrence implications are especially troubling. Deterrence has always rested on credible human judgment – the adversary’s belief that rational decision-makers will respond in predictable ways to specific provocations. When autonomous systems enter the loop, this calculus becomes opaque. Does the adversary deter the system, the operator, or the policy framework? And critically, can they distinguish between a deliberate escalatory signal and an autonomous response to pre-programmed triggers?

However, co-evolution is only an intermediate stage. The hybrid age heralds an even more radical trajectory, namely a condition of structural coexistence between humans and thinking machines, without historical precedent. For the first time, the international system is set to include non-biological actors with autonomous cognitive, inferential, and operational capabilities. This ontological discontinuity marks the gradual overcoming of any anthropocentric paradigm of power.

In this scenario, state sovereignty is not abolished, but profoundly reconfigured. Alongside territorial sovereignty, informational sovereignty, technological sovereignty, and cognitive sovereignty are emerging. Above all, however, sovereignty is progressively tending to be exercised not only over natural persons, but also over operational artificial entities, raising unprecedented questions about responsibility, accountability, and legal subjectivity.

The Weberian model of the state based on the monopoly of legitimate force, is increasingly inadequate to describe a reality in which power is also exercised by highly technologized non-state actors, including digital platforms, large technology companies, and autonomous systems. The traditional distinction between subject, instrument, and object of political action is thus tending to dissolve.

The hybrid age paradigm introduces a new stratification of the international system. Competition no longer takes place solely in terms of military force or economic power, but on the basis of the ability to integrate technology, strategy, and governance. Thus, at least three types of powers can be distinguished: advanced hybrid powers, capable of governing complex systems (the United States and China); incomplete powers, technologically advanced but structurally dependent (the European Union); and residual powers, anchored to obsolete industrial and strategic models.

In this context, geopolitical competition tends to fall below the threshold of declared armed conflict, deliberately avoiding those forms of coercion that would trigger traditional military responses or collective defense mechanisms. This dynamic does not represent a renunciation of confrontation, but rather its strategic sophistication. The definition of technological standards allows for the governance of the ecosystem rather than individual technologies; control of the narrative directly affects the decision-making context; and pressure on critical infrastructure transforms national security into a problem of systemic resilience, as well as military defense. Finally, geopolitical power is exercised through the architecture of interdependencies, rather than against them.

The hybrid age also has a profound impact on the logic of deterrence. Classical models assumed rationality on the part of actors, clarity of attribution, and relatively stable decision-making times (Waltz, 1979).

The classical deterrence models rooted in Waltz’s neorealist framework were built for a world where:

Attribution was clear: You knew who launched what, from where Rationality was assumed: Actors would calculate costs/benefits in predictable ways Decision cycles were measured: Hours, days – time to think, consult, respond

The hybrid age explodes all three assumptions:

Attribution becomes deliberately murky – Is that cyber attack from Russia, a patriotic hacker, a false flag? Are those “little green men” state actors or not? The gray zone is the point, not an accident.

Rationality becomes culturally contingent – What looks “irrational” from a Western cost-benefit analysis may be perfectly rational within a different cultural or temporal framework. Putin’s Ukraine calculations, for instance, defy simple deterrence logic but make sense within his historical narrative.

Decision compression and expansion occur simultaneously – Cyber attacks happen in milliseconds, requiring pre-delegated responses. But hybrid campaigns can unfold over years with no clear “start.”

In the new technological environment, however, the attribution of attacks is often ambiguous, escalation can be unintentional, and conflict tends to become permanent but undeclared. Cyberattacks, cognitive operations, and algorithmic interference produce a condition of chronic instability that Lucas Kello has effectively defined as unpeace. Technology, far from being merely a factor of stability, thus becomes a multiplier of systemic risk.

Kello’s work, particularly in his 2017 book “The Virtual Weapon and International Order,” captures something essential about the current strategic environment that challenges Cold War-era crisis management frameworks. His “unpeace” concept describes a persistent state of low-intensity hostility conducted through cyber, information, and cognitive domains – neither full peace nor declared war, but continuous contestation.The hybrid age ultimately represents an ontological transformation of geopolitical power. It redefines the ways in which power is exercised, legitimized, and contested, shifting the center of gravity from the territorial to the systemic and cognitive dimensions. In this new paradigm, power is distributed, temporary, and inherently unstable.

Attempting to structurally oppose this trajectory would mean opposing the very course of history, understood, according to Ratzel’s lesson, as a dynamic, organic, and irreversible process in which political forms and power structures transform in response to the material and technological conditions of their time. Regulations and ethical limits, far from being neutral or universal, reflect often asymmetrical cultural and geopolitical visions, as demonstrated by the divergence between Western and non-Western approaches.

This was first published on December 29, 2025 on European Affairs (Italy) and is republished with the author’s permission.