Abstract
It is common wisdom that wars offer opportunities for innovation in how states and other actors organize their assets and institutionalized modi operandi. This is even more true of ‘non-wars’ – a concept denoting various types of coercive statecraft actions short of formal declarations of war (Bilms, 2022). It is about the military forces working together with other actors in ‘grey-zones’ promoting strategic goals using a combination of means including cyberattacks, information warfare, economic pressure, law enforcement, technical aid, support for armed separatist groups, and working with private- and non-governmental actors (Dobbs, Fallon, Fouhy, Marsh, & Melville, 2020).
Russia’s attack on Ukraine is an example of a non-war escalating into fully fledged warfare. It started with Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its military support for separatists in the Donbas region in 2014. On 24 February 2022, it turned into a military conflict when the Russian military attacked targets throughout Ukraine. While the conflict since then clearly does bear characteristics of a conventional inter-state warfare, it remains a grey zone as war was not formally declared and the Russian government keeps on referring to it cryptically as a ‘special military operation’. Russia’s regular forces, diplomats and intelligence agencies together with Russian-supported networks of non-state actors including hacker groups, ethnic separatists, private military companies and quasi-state governments in the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (only recognized by Russia) have been engaged in a wide-reaching effort to undermine Ukraine’s sovereign statehood and bring about regime change. Ukraine’s defensive response has also been a coordinated one, combining regular state assets with resources and capabilities provided by private contractors, NGOs and citizen activists, and various forms of support from the international community.
While the Ukraine war is now a dominant global event, the ways in which the conflict is waged and the organizational implications thereof reflect a wider set of change dynamics in the international security environment which have unfolded over the last two decades. This includes – in no particular order – the rise of global terrorism and various kinds of fundamentalism, growing threats of cyber-attacks and cyber-crime, the rise of AI and growing reliance of armed forces on information technology on the battlefield and, last but not least, hybrid warfare and information operations aimed at destabilizing societies. As a response to these shifts, states have been re-organizing their modus operandi in war and diplomacy by – among other changes – cooperating with private contractors.
From a historical perspective, this is not an unprecedented development. Mercenaries on battlefields, and private traders or academics acting as diplomats on behalf of various principals, have been the norm rather than the exception since ancient times. Indeed, private corporations such as the 17th Century Dutch- and English East India Companies as ‘amphibious entrepreneurs’ (cf. Powell & Sandholtz, 2012) were instrumental in early globalization – shifting between their roles as private corporations and representatives of public authority of their home state and using standardized state-like repertoires in war and diplomacy, these private companies were key in spreading the standards of modern state governance world-wide. It was only with the rise of the modern (‘Westphalian’) state order in the mid-17th Century that the separation of the domains of states, markets and civil society has become institutionalized. Hence, the era of state monopoly on the conduct of war and diplomacy (most notably in the 20th Century) was somehow a historical exception. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a growing trend of outsourcing the delivery of public policies including in the core areas of sovereign statehood such as war and diplomacy. These change dynamics have rendered various types of integrated solutions combining resources of states and private actors increasingly ‘normal’.
The Rise of Interstitial Organizations on the Fringes of the State
Since the late 1990s, scholars in international political sociology have explored processes of how states and other actors deliver crisis management, defence and diplomatic solutions by combining resources and assets of the state with others drawn from multiple institutional domains. Concepts such as ‘security assemblages’ or ‘bricolage’ have been used to conceptualize such combined approaches. More recent work focused on what Leander (2014) termed ‘enmeshment’. This means delivery of state services (in this case intelligence) by organizations from multiple domains with processes integrated to such an extent that the very notion of separate public and private domains is contested. From an organizational perspective, the concept of ‘interstitial organization’ denotes organizations emerging in interstitial spaces between institutional domains, tapping into resources, rules and practices from these and recombining them (Bátora, 2021). These include, for instance, the European Union’s External Action Service (a body combining functions in diplomacy, defence, intelligence and development aid management) or private military companies (PMCs) combining rules and resources from state militaries with private market solutions.
The war in Ukraine provides multiple examples of the emergence of interstitial organizations through mechanisms such as transposition, recombination, refunctionality and/or fusion across institutional domains (Padgett & Powell, 2012). For instance, the Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance unit (Aerorozvidka) is an NGO founded in 2014 by civilian IT specialists and hobbyists building self-designed drones (R18 octocopters) from commercially available (and relatively cheap) parts and developing them for military reconnaissance purposes. Funds for building the drones are often raised in online crowdfunding campaigns globally. The drones are also deployed for relatively precise bombardment of enemy armoured units using simple hand grenades mechanically adapted by ground crews for airborne delivery to hit enemy armour or fortified positions. Technical adaptations are made using 3D printers donated by a Czech company; the communications backbone is provided by Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites. The link to the Ukrainian state occurs through several members of Aerorozvidka serving in parallel in Ukrainian intelligence agencies. According to multiple reports, Aerorozvidka’s operations were crucial in stopping a major Russian armoured column advancing towards Kyiv in March 2022. This then is, arguably, an example of an interstitial organization – an NGO using private sector resources directly involved in delivering core state functions in the domain of war.
Another example of an interstitial organization is the private military company (PMC) Wagner Group associated with the Russian government. Officially, PMCs are not legal in Russia but an entity referred to as the Wagner Group does operate out of Russia and deploys private contractors into military-style operations supporting Russia’s strategic goals in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and beyond. As a PMC, the Wagner Group is not unique. PMCs have been a phenomenon on the rise world-wide since the end of the Cold War. The trend was initiated, primarily, by pioneering PMCs such as South Africa’s Executive Outcomes in the mid-1990s and then by a shift towards outsourcing of defence services in the United States since the mid-1990s and later boosted by their expansive involvement in support of US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq since the early 2000s involving PMCs such as Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy. Since then, most Western countries have developed complex regulatory frameworks for regulating activities of PMCs (e.g. the Montreux document) thus curbing some of the functional pathologies characterizing the Western private military industry of the early 2000s. However, Russia and other non-Western governments have not introduced any serious regulation and they use PMCs in their attempts to asymmetrically challenge the US, the European Union and other leading guardians of the liberal international order. In the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the Wagner Group has been directly involved in various hybrid operations since 2014 such as beefing up separatist units in the Donbas and occupying Ukrainian military bases in Crimea. However, since Russia’s launch of the ‘special military operation’ in February 2022, Wagner Group units have been directly involved in more traditional type of frontline warfare. According to numerous media reports corroborating information contained in think-tank reports and in public analyses of Western intelligence agencies, the Wagner Group is directly responsible for serious and systematic atrocities and war crimes against Ukrainian civilians including the massacre in Bucha. Clearly, growing reliance of governments on PMCs calls for systematic research into ways of ensuring democratic accountability and political control.
The European Union as an Incubator and Accelerator of Organizational Innovation in Defence and Diplomacy
In light of the ongoing war in Ukraine, it is also necessary to explore the organizational and institutional dynamics in the development of the EU’s external affairs capacities. It is commonly accepted that the EU’s actorness in global politics is anchored in an inter-institutional space between resources provided by member states and by EU institutions. What has been somewhat analytically overlooked is the dimension of private contractors and their systematic and growing participation in the delivery of the EU’s security and defence policy. This includes private contractor support in multiple domains in diplomacy, defence, development aid, law enforcement and border protection. There are numerous examples, where the EU’s global actorhood draws upon structures and procedures that recombine rules and norms. One of these structures is the above-mentioned EU’s diplomatic service – the EEAS. Another example is the ‘Support Group for Ukraine’ set up by the EU in 2014 – a structure operating partly in Brussels and partly in agencies of the Ukraine government, managing various aspects of political and economic cooperation between the EU and Ukraine and connecting multiple institutional domains including justice and home affairs, defence and civil society support.
A New Frontier for Organizational Research
As the above reflections indicate, the war in Ukraine – and other ongoing non-wars and/or ‘grey zone’ conflicts – exacerbate existing change dynamics in the global security environment, prompting us to examine implications of the emergence and operation of new organizational forms in the interstitial spaces between states, markets and civil society. We need to explore, first, what such developments mean for the nature and sovereignty of the state as a key unit of political organization. We need to understand how this recombination of private actors, civilian technology and military uses and practices affects the organization of the state’s military and diplomatic functions and, thus, how the state itself is changing with this systematic reliance on private sector and/or civil society solutions in defence and diplomacy.
Second, we need to explore the implications for processes of democratic scrutiny and accountability. How can institutionalized parliamentary procedures be extended to encompass private sector organizations and NGOs?
Third, we need to understand how these changes impact the established global order resting on the notion of the modern sovereign state as its main constitutive element. What do organizational mutations of the state in the form of interstitial organizations that emerge in spaces between institutional domains (i.e. on the fringes of state, market and civil society) tell us about the nature and principles of political organization?
Traditionally, organization scholars have had a tendency to steer clear of world politics. And yet, some of the most fundamental shifts in the global order are organizational and institutional in nature. Organization scholars should hence be at the forefront in analytically capturing, conceptualizing and explaining the ongoing global change dynamics in the domains of war and diplomacy.