Navigating Diffuse Maritime Information Settings: A Heuristic for Improved Analysis of Hybrid Threats

This article introduces a heuristic designed to improve the understanding and identification of hybrid threats. In recent years, hybrid threat scenarios in the maritime domain have increasingly drawn attention, posing significant challenges for authorities and security agencies due to their ambiguous and nonattributable nature. Maritime incidents highlight the inherent vagueness and complexity of such events, which complicate timely detection and categorization by responsible institutions. The heuristic presented in this article demonstrates that effectively addressing hybrid threats requires an integrative perspective, as can be found in the third wave of security research—one that clearly maps the relationships and connections among involved actors as well as their embeddedness in global structures. This comprehensive approach enables scholars to understand hybrid threats as interconnected, multi-layered phenomena and to derive resilience criteria for the practice of security actors.