Sand in the gears: Sabotage in world politics

Abstract Sabotage is ubiquitous but little understood in international relations. Sabotage, especially in terms of attacks on infrastructure and property, has increased in recent years and has taken a more central role in national security discourse across Europe. Unfortunately, scholarship is underdeveloped and fragmented across disciplinary silos, leading to conceptual confusion about the nature and scope of sabotage as a form of statecraft. This article seeks to provide conceptual clarity, and in doing so, lay the foundations to better understand and respond to such activity. It does so first by synthesizing ideas from disjointed literatures on conflict, intelligence, terrorism, public administration, and cybersecurity, before distilling key characteristics of sabotage and offering a novel definition. The article finds that sabotage is the weaponization of friction to degrade the performance of systems from within. Sabotage has a strategic logic distinct from related concepts of covert action and subversion: corrosively turning friction into advantage. This logic limits its impact as stand-alone tool but makes it particularly well-placed to enhance and enable other policy instruments. By placing sabotage on the research agenda and theoretically advancing scholarship on ‘secret statecraft’ more widely, this article has significant implications for understanding and responding to contemporary security challenges.