Managing Limited War and Hybrid Conflict: International Organizations and the Russia–Ukraine War

Abstract

This article examines how international organizations have managed the Russia–Ukraine war as a limited and hybrid conflict. It argues that the war should be understood simultaneously as an interstate war of aggression, a deliberately managed limited war from NATO’s perspective, and a hybrid conflict involving conventional operations, cyber activity, information warfare, economic coercion, humanitarian displacement, accountability politics, and reconstruction. To explain the mixed performance of international organizations, the article develops the concept of constrained institutional utility. The concept is distinguished analytically from related concepts including institutional resilience, regime effectiveness, and networked multilateralism. The literature review is organized around three scholarly debates: whether international organizations can meaningfully manage great-power war; whether hybrid and limited war requires new conflict-management metrics; and how institutional performance should be measured when war termination is indefinitely deferred. The article employs neoliberal institutionalism as its primary theoretical framework and structural realism as its corrective. The discussion extends the framework to comparable contingencies including Taiwan, the South China Sea, Iran–Israel escalation, the Korean Peninsula and Russia-NATO grey-zone confrontation. The article concludes that international organizations remain indispensable but structurally insufficient actors in limited and hybrid wars, and that their contributions are best assessed through the lens of constrained institutional utility rather than the binary standard of war termination.