No War, No Peace: Sub-Threshold Coercion and the New Normal for the Global South

In contemporary international relations, the most consequential shifts in how states compete often attract the least formal attention. Sub-threshold coercion—the deliberate use of economic pressure, information operations, and paramilitary instruments calibrated to stay just below the threshold of conventional armed conflict—has quietly become the default mode of great-power competition.

In his latest commentary,  titled “No War, No Peace: Sub-Threshold Coercion and the New Normal for the Global South,” BIPSS Research Assistant Nabib bin Zahid builds on the strategic logic first articulated by Schelling and later developed through the gray zone literature. It argues that sub-threshold coercion is not a violation of the rules-based international order—it is an exploitation of the order’s own architecture. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter creates the threshold; states have learned to operate precisely below it. The piece applies a three-layer conflict model—kinetic, grey-zone, and cognitive—to show how kinetic restraint is the design choice that enables grey-zone pressure, which is then consolidated and extended through information and narrative operations. Myanmar’s management of the narrative environment surrounding the 2017 Rohingya displacement into Bangladesh illustrates how the cognitive layer functions not as a propaganda supplement, but as a strategic instrument in its own right.