Hybrid balancing as classical realist statecraft: China's balancing behaviour in the Indo-Pacific

Abstract

Abstract Hybrid warfare has recently attracted scholarly attention. Despite its importance, hybrid warfare research remains underdeveloped, as it sometimes falls into the trap of ‘simplistic hypothesis testing’, which focuses on narrowly defined military factors while downplaying the fundamentals of international politics (e.g. balancing and diplomacy). This article fills this gap by constructing a new theoretical concept called ‘hybrid balancing’ by introducing the essence of hybrid warfare into classical realism, based on the scientific realism in the philosophy of science as a meta-theoretical foundation. ‘Hybrid balancing’ consists of three ideal types of balancing beyond the traditional hard one: political, economic and informational balancing. As a plausibility probe to show that the argument is sufficiently grounded in evidence to justify further research, I illustrate the new concept by examining China's hybrid warfare in the Indo-Pacific, an arena of geopolitical competition between China and the United States. The implications of the research are that it (1) shows the significance of ‘agency’ over ‘structure’ to solve the agent–structure debate, (2) develops a new theoretical concept explaining non-military aspects of balancing, (3) overcomes ‘simplistic hypothesis testing’, and (4) sheds new light on the Indo-Pacific, which had been overlooked in previous research around hybrid warfare.