On 20 November 2025, the BIPR welcomed Emily Holland for a conference on hybrid threats and European security. In this conference, Holland discussed the growing prominence of hybrid attacks in Europe and the strategic challenges they pose for NATO, European states, and critical infrastructure protection. Hybrid attacks, she explained, combine military and non-military tools—such as cyberattacks, sabotage, economic pressure, disinformation, and diplomatic destabilization—to blur the line between peace and war. Their purpose is rarely destruction for its own sake; rather, they are designed to sow doubt, confusion, and psychological pressure within targeted democratic societies. A key assumption behind these strategies is that democracies are less resilient to pressure, whereas populations in authoritarian states such as Russia are perceived as more accustomed to hardship.

Holland identified several reasons why hybrid attacks are highly effective. First, they are asymmetric: they are cheap to execute but expensive to respond to. For example, repairing a damaged pipeline costs vastly more than sabotaging it in the first place. Second, they are deniable, creating attribution problems. Uncertainty over which actor is responsible complicates response mechanisms and blurs the line of responsibility—whether the burden falls on governments, private infrastructure companies, or international bodies. Third, hybrid attacks exploit the belief that Western societies lack strategic endurance and cannot sustain long-term, ambiguous pressure.

Europe is particularly vulnerable due to structural features of its economic and security systems. Critical sectors such as energy are deeply interconnected, cross-border, and often governed by overlapping national, international, and commercial responsibilities. Holland illustrated this with the example of a pipeline between Norway and Germany: if it were damaged, responsibility for repairs would be unclear, especially if the infrastructure lay in international waters. Every piece of infrastructure presents different ownership, legal, and jurisdictional challenges, making consistent, predictable defense mechanisms difficult to standardize.

A further challenge lies in governance and information sharing. Critical infrastructure is often operated by private companies that are reluctant to provide sensitive data to governments or international agencies. As a result, there is no comprehensive European or NATO-wide map of critical assets. Paradoxically, Russia does maintain such mapping capabilities, supported by long-term investment in intelligence and undersea operational capacities dating back to the Soviet era.

Holland then discussed NATO's response architecture. Protecting undersea infrastructure—pipelines, offshore platforms, ports, communications cables—requires coordination among diverse actors ranging from navies and intelligence services to private corporations, insurers, and national ministries. NATO must also determine what "normal" activity looks like in order to detect anomalies, a task made more challenging by data fragmentation. Artificial intelligence now offers new opportunities by integrating satellite, oceanic, and commercial data streams in real time to enhance detection and attribution.

To strengthen resilience, Holland outlined several priorities: improving public-private information sharing through trust-building mechanisms; building redundancy and diversification in supply chains and energy sourcing; conducting scenario-based exercises to test decision-making across borders and sectors; and reinforcing societal resilience by improving public understanding of disinformation and propaganda.

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hosted by Professor Andrew C. Winner


Dr. Emily Holland is the Director of the Eurasia Program, Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia and International Security Fellow at the Centre for International Security at the Hertie School, Berlin.

From 2020-2025 Holland was the Research Director and an assistant professor in the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the United States Naval War College, and in 2024 she served as the Deputy Political Advisor for Critical Undersea Infrastructure at NATO Maritime Command (Northwood, UK). Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and a visiting fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, the European Council on Foreign Relations (Berlin), and the German Institute for Economic Research (Berlin).

Her research focuses on the nexus between international trade and security, including the geopolitics of energy, Russian foreign policy, and European security. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, The Washington Post, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, the Journal of International Affairs, and The Christian Science Monitor amongst others. Holland regularly designs and facilitates table top exercises, scenario-based discussions, and workshops on security, trade, energy and infrastructure protection for the US Navy, NATO and other audiences. She has been featured on CNN, NPR, Government Matters, The Energy Show, Chain Reaction and the WarCast amongst others.

Holland is the co-principle investigator of a Minerva DECUR Partnership grant from the U.S. Department of Defense on national security implications of critical mineral supply chains ($368,000 over two years). Holland holds a PhD, MA, and BA in political science from Columbia University.