Rethinking Conflict

There is a recurring theme in academia, across government and at the pointy end of the digital stick concerning the significance of reconceptualising warfare, perhaps also conflict and – by logical extension – politics itself. In a Global information environment undergoing the relentless paroxysms of accelerating technological hyper-inflation, the facts of constant change and uncertainty have a tendency to overwrite, overflow and utterly redefine material borders, conceptual boundaries and the normative values and methods by which both adversaries and adversarial competition are conducted.

We will find ourselves in just a few short years inhabiting a world in which a mastery of warfare becomes a matter of who most successfully (and continuously) redefines their own conceptual vocabulary and cognitive grammar of conflict as much as who presents the most persuasive kinetic presence? We are perhaps already in that world and, for participant observers in the cyber domain (as we all ultimately are), we should already know that contemporary information-processing and communications systems have radically altered traditional ontologies of time and space, duration and distance, narrative and identity; as a result – the longer-term strategic and political effects are likely to be insidiously difficult to forecast.