Total hybrid war is not merely a new form of conflict. It is the symptom of a world that no longer knows how to produce peace except by administering war.

When the media, institutions, universities, platforms, currencies, norms, narratives, and health, energy or information crises become fields of operation, we are no longer simply witnessing an extension of military strategy. We are facing a civilizational mutation.

War is no longer found only where armies fight. It appears wherever societies are oriented, reconfigured, normalized and programmed. It no longer targets only a territory or an armed force. It targets perceptions, behaviours, loyalties, memories, words, thresholds of legitimacy, and the very conditions of judgment. This is the shift that must be understood.

A classical geopolitical article could describe the instruments of this new war: information, economy, law, sanctions, currencies, NGOs, digital platforms, permanent crisis, psychological operations, social engineering. This work is necessary. But it is not enough. For war without limits is not only a strategic mutation. It reveals something deeper: the state of an order that no longer truly recognizes an outside.

The unipolar world did not merely seek to dominate. It sought to define the very framework of legitimacy. It did not merely say: Here is our power. It said: Here are the laws, the norms, rationality, the economy, morality, security and information to which the world must conform.

A classical empire could recognize borders, adversaries, peripheries, and external zones. The unipolar world, by contrast, tends to transform every outside into an unfinished inside. What is not integrated must be integrated. What resists must be reformed. What refuses must be sanctioned. What doubts must be pathologized? What speaks differently must be classified as archaic, extreme, populist, conspiratorial, or disinformed.

The unipolar world is the dream of a world without an outside

This is why war can no longer remain separate from peace within it. If the entire world becomes the administrative interior of an order that thinks of itself as universal, every resistance becomes an anomaly. And if every resistance becomes an anomaly, peace ceases to be coexistence. It becomes normalization.

War without limits then appears as the strategic form of a world that no longer knows how to recognize the real plurality of human forms. It is no longer merely military. It becomes legal, financial, media-driven, academic, cultural, cognitive, health-related, climatic, and digital. It does not always seek to destroy. It often seeks to reconfigure.

War is no longer an event within peace. It becomes the very texture of administered peace. This transformation does not fall from the sky. It belongs to a long history: that of a West that has gradually confused reality with the model that claims to organize it.

A model is, first of all, a tool. It allows us to understand, simplify, anticipate, and represent. But when it becomes sovereign, it ceases to illuminate reality and begins to replace it. What enters the model becomes visible. What resists it becomes noise, delay, irrationality, or threat.

This confusion is particularly visible in scientism. Genuine science accepts that reality may correct it. It formulates hypotheses, confronts them with experience, revises them, and sometimes abandons them. Scientism does the opposite: it tends to protect the model through institutions, then to correct reality when reality does not correspond to the model. Science seeks to correct its models through reality. Scientism, conversely, seeks to correct reality through its models.

This inversion changes politics. Crisis becomes a mode of government. The indicator becomes an official reality. The hypothesis becomes a norm. The scenario becomes a constraint. Expertise becomes a device of authority. The citizen no longer directly encounters a situation; he encounters an authorized representation of the situation.

This is where social engineering begins: when living mediations are replaced by management interfaces. Families, professions, churches, schools, local communities, traditions, languages, and intermediate bodies transmit more than information. They form human beings. They give memory, patience, judgment, and a way of inhabiting time and the world. Management interfaces, by contrast, connect, measure, orient, simplify, and profile. They make man more accessible to the system, but not necessarily more formed.

Artificial Intelligence and Total Hybrid Warfare

A society thus modelled becomes programmable. To reprogram a society, one must first think of it as programmable. To govern by crisis, one must reduce crisis to indicators. To act upon behaviour, one must transform persons into profiles. To normalize peace, one must treat human resistance as an anomaly of the system.

Artificial intelligence then appears not as an accident but as the automation of this paradigm. It does not by itself create the programmable society. It arrives in a world that has already prepared for its coming. It classifies, profiles, simulates, predicts, optimizes, and personalizes. It makes it possible to automate cognitive warfare, map opinions, anticipate reactions, adjust narratives, filter visibility, and govern attention.

But the deepest danger is not merely manipulation. It is anthropological. A civilization eventually treats man according to the instruments it uses to know him. If man is known through his data, he will be governed as data. If he is known through his behaviour, he will be oriented as behaviour. If he is known through his profiles, he will be administered as a profile.

The risk is not that artificial intelligence becomes human. The risk is that man is increasingly treated as an imperfect predictive machine. This is why the question of total hybrid war exceeds strategy. It touches the very definition of man. Man is not merely an abstract individual, a legal, economic, statistical, and administrable unit. He is not merely a behavioural profile, a probability of reaction, or a sum of digital traces. He is a person: a living reality, eminently relational; responsible, capable of memory, speech, discernment, fidelity, and response.

The return of a multipolar world

Late Western history can also be read as a regression: from the person to the individual, then from the individual to the profile. It is against this background that the return of the multipolar world must be understood. The multipolar world is not an automatic salvation. It can be violent, unstable, and traversed by other forms of domination. But it at least means this: the single model can no longer absorb the world. The outside returns. Geography returns. Borders return. People return. Civilizations return. Traditions return.

The unipolar world was the dream of a model that had become the world. The multipolar world is the return of the world against the model. But this return will not be enough. A redistribution of power does not heal the man produced by the unipolar order. An abstract individual does not become a person again simply because the international order becomes multipolar. A society dependent on interfaces does not recover living mediations through a mere shift in geopolitical balance.

The way out must therefore be deeper. It must be geopolitical: to recognize the outside, borders, sovereignties, and the concrete forms of peoples. It must be epistemological: to restore to reality its role as judge of the model, to save science from scientism, and to distinguish the map from the territory. It must be anthropological: to move beyond the abstract individual and the algorithmic profile in order to recover the person. It must be spiritual in the broad sense: to recover living traditions, mediations that form, limits that orient, and paths that do not capture man but make him capable of more than the system.

Total hybrid war, therefore, forces us to ask a question larger than war itself: what is a habitable world? True peace cannot merely be the absence of conflict. It presupposes a recognized outside, assumed limits, living mediations, memory, peoples capable of sovereignty, sciences capable of humility, techniques restored to their proper place, and persons capable of discernment.

A civilization does not emerge from war without limits merely by perfecting its defenses. It emerges when it recovers what cannot be absorbed by war: the person, memory, transmission, silence, judgment, and the capacity to receive reality instead of reducing it.

The problem is not only that powers are confronting one another. The problem is that a model sought to become the world. And the world returns.

Olivier Roynard, French essayist and independent researcher on the relationship between geopolitics and the transformation of political and intellectual forms in the modern world. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2026/07/01/total-hybrid-war-and-the-crisis-of-the-unipolar-world-why-war-without-limits-reveals-a-civilizational-crisis/