Understanding Short-of-War Strategies in the Context of Faits Accomplis

• In Event: Great Power Competition

Abstract

Should modern short-of-war conflicts over territory reshape our definitions of war? Russia's seizing of Crimea in 2014 and China's recent aggressive posturing in the South China Sea have laid the groundwork for analyzing short-of-war strategies, those which states use to take territory with the intention of avoiding conventional war. Examples include false information campaigns, cyber-attacks, threats of force, economic manipulation, undermining international law, and monopolizing ethnic divides. Western countries and influential collective security organizations continue to view these short-of-war strategies as new and a growing threat because they fall outside of strategies used in traditional wars. This liberal world order way of thinking about warfare hinders accurate policymaking in the West, leaving security concerns over territory susceptible to failure.

Through a historical comparative analysis, I examine cases of rapid seizures of territory between states, known as fait accompli, to determine the influence of short-of-war strategies on traditional Western-centric conceptions of warfare over territory. I focus on three major cases of states using short-of-war strategies to perform fait accompli: Russia's taking of Crimea in 2014, China and the Philippines's Mischief Reef incident in 1995, and the 1999 Pakistan-India conflict in the Kargil Mountains. I utilize an original short-of-war typology to determine the role of the most influential characteristics of the strategies states use to undermine traditional expectations of war over territory, highlighting their effects on international law, norms, and military thinking. Ultimately, I determine that liberal world order definitions of warfare do not align with modern-day conflicts and require new meaning.

Author

• Matthew Ellis, Purdue University