Hostile acts don’t always arrive with a clear signature.

Nefarious actors shape elections without leaving irrefutable evidence of ballot manipulation. Rogue states interfere with infrastructure through actions that resist clean attribution. State-backed hackers can warp information environments while avoiding immediate blame.

Ambiguity does much of the work, deniability reinforces it, and legal contestability slows responses further. Accumulated over time, such incidents impose economic cost and political strain on targeted nations. They can also create paralysis in terms of how a targeted nation should respond. Governments find it harder to respond when responsibility cannot be firmly established and when the incident falls below the threshold associated with armed retaliation.

Such actions thus sit in the space between routine peacetime activity and open warfare, an area that has come to be known as the “gray zone.”

Where is the ‘gray zone’?

Policy and military communities began using the term “gray zone” in the early 2010s to describe environments in which states pursue an advantage against a rival without crossing a line that would justify the use of overt force in response.

This kind of activity can be sustained and strategically meaningful even when it doesn’t resemble conventional conflict. Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election offers a widely cited case. U.S. intelligence assessments concluded that hacked material was paired with timed disclosure and online amplification, with the aim of eroding confidence in........

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