Armed Forces, Hybrid Threat Landscapes, and the Risks to Democratic Resilience

Contemporary armed forces are operating in an unprecedentedly complex security environment, simultaneously forced to confront high-intensity external threats, ranging from near-peer state aggression to grey-zone warfare and acute domestic challenges, including political polarization, civil unrest, and informational threats. This panel examines how militaries worldwide are adapting their doctrines, structures, and mandates to counter this dual-threat landscape and analyses the profound systemic consequences of these adaptations. The panel explores the blurred line between external defence and internal security, tracking how the expansion of military purview into cyber defence, domestic counter-disinformation, and civil stabilization can inadvertently trigger subtle forms of domestic militarization. The aim is to explore how these shifts alter traditional civil-military relations, occasionally providing mechanisms or cover for democratic backsliding, executive overreach, or the erosion of institutional checks and balances. This panel offers a critical framework for understanding how states can defend against modern, multi-dimensional threats without undermining the democratic values they are sworn to protect. Essentially, papers submitted to this panel must look at three major pillars: 1) The Blur of the Mandate: How external "grey-zone" threats (like cyber or foreign interference) force the military into domestic spaces. 2) The Institutional Shift: How expanding military responsibilities can lead to a normalization of military in the domestic domain, and 3) The Democratic Cost: The risk that a highly securitized political environment lowers public resistance to democratic backsliding and weakens civilian oversight.