Strategic Communication as a Governance Function in Countering Hybrid Threats

Abstract

Hybrid threats challenge democratic states by exploiting societal vulnerabilities, while remaining difficult to detect and attribute. Contemporary research has emphasized whole-of-society responses, aimed at building societal resilience. However, the role of strategic communication within this response architecture remains insufficiently conceptualized and is often reduced to discrete functions such as counter-disinformation, crisis messaging, or counter-narrative production. This article argues that strategic communication should instead be understood as a governance function. Drawing on literature on hybrid threats, societal resilience, governmental communication, and strategic communication, the article identifies five interrelated governance functions: sensemaking, coordination, legitimacy, intervention, and learning. It then proposes a six-phase framework that embeds these functions across the full response cycle: vulnerability mapping, detection, assessment, response design, communication and coordination, and evaluation and learning. The article further examines the role and limits of technological tools in supporting this cycle, arguing that such tools can enhance situational awareness and decision support but cannot substitute human judgment and institutional coordination. Finally, it identifies democratic safeguards and framing risks that should constrain strategic communication responses, including misaligned, excessive, misattributed, and ambiguous framing. The article contributes a conceptual model for understanding how strategic communication can support resilient, proportionate, and democratically legitimate responses to hybrid threats.