Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) after proxy wars: reconceptualising the consequences of external support

Abstract

The phenomenon of war by proxy has received inadequate academic analysis. At the same time, an understanding of how ex-combatants are demobilised, disarmed and reintegrated into society after conflicts that have seen large-scale third-party intervention has been systematically overlooked. In seeking to rectify this gap and transform understanding of peacebuilding after proxy wars, this article will enhance the conceptualisation of the effect of proxy wars on post-conflict development. In order to achieve this, the article is split into five main parts. The first section assesses disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and proxy wars in theory and practice to establish some conceptual fundamentals. The second section analyses the nature of proxy war and highlights the problems it poses for the commencement of DDR policies. The third section analyses how the implementation of DDR policies has historically accounted for the role played by external actors. The fourth section utilises a case study approach to look at the DDR consequences of the recent proxy war against Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria and Iraq. The fifth section ties the policy and scholarly issues together by exploring some important lessons for DDR policy design and implementation after proxy wars.

Keywords:

• Proxy war
• DDR
• intervention
• ISIS
• disarmament
• development

Introduction

The phenomenon of war by proxy has received inadequate academic analysis. At the same time, an understanding of how ex-combatants are demobilised, disarmed and reintegrated into society after conflicts that have seen large-scale third-party intervention has been systematically overlooked. In seeking to rectify this gap and transform understanding of peacebuilding after proxy wars, this article will enhance the conceptualisation of the effect of proxy wars on post-conflict development by recasting the relationship of third parties who intervene in favour of other actors in intra- and inter-state wars explicitly as a benefactor–proxy bond.

The article poses four fundamental research questions. First, it asks how disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) strategies have been implemented by external parties and internal policymakers after proxy wars. Second, it asks whether the implementation of DDR programmes enhances the chances of building a more stable post-conflict environment in the wake of third-party intervention. Third, it asks how the recent large-scale proxy war waged against Islamic State (henceforth ‘ISIS’) inside Syria and Iraq created a DDR dilemma given the significant amounts of weaponry that flooded the battle space. Finally, building on the specific case study of ISIS, it asks about the particular challenges that proxy wars create for the building of post-conflict development programmes.

Answers to these questions will reveal the interaction between and among: the geopolitical competition that leads to proxy involvement in conflicts, especially in the Global South; the management of access to weaponry in post-conflict environments; the contending short-term political desires to wage a proxy war and the long-term security effects; and the ultimate effect on the ability of governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to build effective development policies in post-proxy war contexts. Tracing these interactions is important as it fulfils a fundamental logic that a better understanding of the methods of war-fighting leads to a better understanding of the nature of the peace that follows.

Often subsumed into the wider narrative of the history of warfare, proxy wars need to be viewed in analytical isolation, constitutive as they are of particular motives, practices and component players. This requires applying analysis of ‘third-party intervention’ and/or ‘external support’ within the boundaries of a principal–agent relationship, thus removing it from the civil war studies literature which has largely monopolised the way in which such interventions have been studied. Proxy wars as a phenomenon have ‘not been an adept cross-disciplinary traveller’ (Mumford 2013, 2). The lack of cross- (or even inter- or multi-) disciplinarity in the study of proxy wars has led to the creation of methodological silos, which in turn has created alternative terminological discourses across different sub-fields (see Rauta 2018). In the latter half of the twentieth century, when superpower-fuelled proxy wars raged across Africa and Asia, the phenomenon of indirect intervention by third parties was subsumed within the wider discourse of Cold War history, denying proxy wars an independent platform of analysis. Fast forward half a century and the multiple proxy wars have earned the widely used sobriquet ‘international civil wars’ as a way of framing the interventions that have layered themselves on top of brutal internecine conflicts, especially those that still rage long after their Arab Spring-inspired origins in the Middle East. This terminological déjà vu is the product of major disciplinary and methodological challenges facing the study of proxy war.

As a phenomenon, proxy wars are empirically ubiquitous yet conceptually obscure, despite a recent study pointing to the emergence of a ‘third generation’ of scholarship on the topic (Rauta 2020). One reason for this is that states themselves rarely use the term ‘proxy war’ to describe their interventions. As Hindawi (2017, 124) points out, military support is often ‘presented as a way to empower groups resisting oppression and as an emancipatory tool that would promote the autonomy of legitimate local actors and their ability to defend themselves’. Political semantics have contributed to the conceptual stunting of proxy warfare. Euphemisms such as ‘security force assistance’ or ‘working by, with, and through local partner forces’ are often used instead (Fox 2019, 44).

Although the study of DDR has traditionally been in the realm of ‘peace studies’ and that of proxy wars in ‘conflict studies’, this article embraces Roger Mac Ginty’s (2019) observation of the complementary intellectual similarities between the two disciplines. Observing the effect of a form of conflict (proxy war) on a particular strand of peacebuilding (DDR) reflects what Mac Ginty (2019, 271) calls the ‘recognition that peace and conflict are complex social phenomena that require sophisticated analysis’. The bulk of the academic literature on DDR rightly concentrates on in-country processes and assesses the cross-cutting socio-economic and political issues that local ex-combatants must wrestle with. This paper, however, offers an alternative assessment – one based on the role played by international actors in creating DDR problems in the first place via large-scale weapons provision – and evaluates the consequences of badly implemented DDR on those same third parties.

Arguably, during the late twentieth century the notion of ‘intervention’ became explicitly tied to the nascent ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) agenda and the debates surrounding humanitarianism. This, to a large extent, overshadowed the continued presence of proxy interventions undertaken for reasons entirely alien to the liberal foreign policy agenda of the West in the 1990s. The debates around R2P and proxy wars actually share some common ground, especially the controversies caused by third parties in perpetuating conflict dynamics (Dunford and Neu 2019). As such, the reasons behind regional and superpower intervention in the Global South since the end of the Cold War need greater exploration as a way of casting light on the impact of third parties on post-conflict development policies. The result is a recasting of post-conflict DDR initiatives that take a much fuller account of the agential relationships behind weapons provision.

Over a decade ago Özerdem (2009, 48) argued that ‘the issue of third party intervention and its role in DDR processes deserves closer attention’. This attention has not been forthcoming. This article goes some way to filling that gap by moving beyond interpretations of third parties as neutral, often international, arbiters of post-conflict peace accords. By assessing such influence through the lens of proxy wars we can see just how biased and pervasive third-party intervention is in intra- and inter-state wars. To achieve this, the article is split into five main parts. The first section assesses DDR and proxy wars in theory and practice to establish some conceptual fundamentals. The second section analyses the nature of proxy war and highlights the problems it poses for the commencement of DDR policies. The third section analyses how the implementation of DDR policies has historically accounted for the role played by external actors. The fourth section utilises a case study approach to look at the DDR consequences of the recent proxy war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The fifth section ties the policy and scholarly issues together by exploring some important lessons for DDR policy design and implementation after proxy wars.

The link between DDR and proxy wars in theory and practice

The concept and practice of DDR emerged as a response to the destructive aftermath of civil war and fragile political settlements, reflecting the merging of security and development narratives in the post-Cold War world. DDR processes were seen as a vital first step in transitioning societies away from violence to more peaceful modes of transformation and preventing the relapse into conflict (Shibuya 2012). Ex-combatants (and the availability of weapons) are seen by international development policymakers as potentially destabilising, and therefore dedicated programmes have been developed to tackle this issue, and provide a route for combatants away from their military roles and into productive, peaceful capacities, thus contributing not only to peace and security but also to sustainable development, and promoting community livelihoods (UN, 2014). DDR is often seen as a technical problem, approached through blueprinted guidelines, uniformly applied in very different contexts. But DDR is inherently political and conflictual, shaped by fundamentally complex socio-economic issues.

This article understands DDR processes after proxy wars in a historical and contemporary context, by confronting and exploring the challenges posed by pervasive and massive third-party intervention. It defines proxy wars as ‘the indirect engagement in a conflict by third parties wishing to influence its strategic outcome’ (Mumford 2013, 1). This can include the delivery of weapons caches, money and other materiel to a favoured militia group, state military or insurgent party. The presence of a proxy intervention during a pre-existing conflict inevitably greatly increases the volume of weapons in a warzone, thus creating a sizeable DDR problem in the post-conflict period. Yet proxy wars are about more than just weapons supply as a business transaction. They are also about securing strategic leverage over a pre-existing conflict and political influence over the post-conflict body politic. According to Fox (2019, 46), proxy wars can be defined by three distinct features: the centrality of principal–agent relationships; the role of power in framing those relations; and the role of time. These elements mark proxy warfare out from just arms trading, which is largely transactional in nature and lacks the embedded temporal and power dimensions of a principal–agent dynamic.

Proxy warfare is a regular feature of modern conflict. It has retained an essential appeal to states despite the end of the Cold War, the initiation of a global ‘war on terror’, and the rise and fall of different competitor superpower states. Analysis by Salehyan (2010, 500) of the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) data from the Correlates of War (COW) project showed that in the six decades since the end of the Second World War indirect proxy assistance to rebel groups was more prevalent than direct inter-state conflict. Modern-day proxy wars have become, in military parlance, arms-length ‘effects-based operations’ whereby a specific objective is desired (such as the downfall of an authoritarian regime) at the avoidance of a foreseen consequence (conflict escalation with a rival superpower, for example) and at an acceptable monetary cost – all of which is achieved without a state having to directly commit military forces of their own, thus ensuring an acceptable ‘blood’ cost in terms of casualties.

There has been some excellent recent research on the role of third parties in intra-state conflicts (for example see Tamm 2016; Sawyer, Cunningham, and Reed 2017; Karlén 2017). This builds upon a wider body of civil war literature from the last two decades that has posited explanations of third-party interference in the conduct and cessation of such wars (including Regan 2002; Cunningham 2006, 2010; Regan and Aydin 2006; Balch-Lindsay, Enterline, and Joyce 2008; Salehyan, Gleditsch, and Cunningham 2011; Aydin 2012). Yet much of this literature has focussed predominantly on direct state intervention and not indirect means of external support channelled through proxies, which can pose a substantial set of problems for conflict termination given the embedded nature of local agents whose willingness to disarm can be influenced by external benefactors. In 2010 Idean Salehyan noted that proxy warfare was a ‘term that has been applied descriptively to particular insurgencies’, studies of which lacked ‘a proper theoretical or empirical grasp of why states choose such a strategy’. Over a decade later, the intellectual landscape has changed. New studies have carved out a much more distinct academic niche for the standalone study of proxy warfare that has deeply probed its causes, conduct, and consequences (for example see Hughes 2012; Mumford 2013; Rauta 2018, 2020; Groh 2019; Berman and Lake 2019; Rondeaux and Sterman 2019; Rosenau and Gold 2019). This article goes even further by leveraging greater conceptual understanding of the role of external intervention, focussing on the DDR legacy rendered by third parties in inter- and intra-state conflicts explicitly though the lens of proxy war.

The relationship between a benefactor (the ‘principal’) and their proxy (the ‘agent’) rests on a complex balancing of intersecting interests and incentives (Berman and Lake 2019, 5). The creation of a transnational relationship with a benefactor extends the number of options open to rebel groups, augmenting their financial position, military capacity, and political support (Hazen 2013, 3). As this article demonstrates, the supply of weaponry by the benefactor has historically been used as an incentive to influence proxy behaviour, often to encourage a greater alignment of interests. However, the utility of proxies to help facilitate an indirect intervention in the short term is not always congruent with their long-term efficacy in ensuring a strategic objective is met (Groh 2019, 3). There has been a tendency on behalf of benefactors to assume that utility can mature into efficacy if enough weapons and money are supplied. The proliferation of arms into a pre-existing conflict zone is the price states have been willing to pay for the attainment of indirect strategic gain – which has brought with it significant, yet frequently overlooked, post-conflict DDR consequences.

Africa is the continent most afflicted by proxy wars in the modern era. It is also the scene of the majority of DDR initiatives. In the two decades after the end of the Cold War, Africa hosted two-thirds of all DDR programmes (World Bank 2009). Africa proved to be the scene of aggressive proxy-waging between the superpowers during the Cold War. In the first two years of the Angolan civil war, for example, the US government, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had channelled $32 million and weaponry worth $16 million to their favoured faction, the anti-communist Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA) (Garthoff 1994). When looking back at the Soviet use of proxies across Africa during the Cold War it can be argued, as Bruce Porter (1984, 236–237) has done, that ‘Soviet involvement [by proxy] in local conflicts has been highly successful … [which] must be attributed largely to its capacity to deliver arms rapidly and in the amounts necessary to fulfil the battlefield requirements of its clients’. Yet little or no thought was put into how those arms would be controlled, recalled or destroyed once the proxy intervention had come to an end. Indeed, proxy war-waging has revealed itself to be bereft of post-conflict planning – and this has been to the detriment of development policies.

After the end of the Cold War the US shifted away from seeking outright victories for their proxies in civil wars (fuelled by the zero-sum fears of Soviet expansionism wrought by the global bipolar power structure) and instead allowed their new unipolar dominance to permit proxies to seek negotiated solutions (in part due to what can be labelled ‘benefactor inattention’ and the halting of weapons supplies as Washington recalibrated its global grand strategy). In short, the shift in international order affected the ways that proxy wars, as prosecuted by superpowers, were brought to a close (Howard and Stark 2018, 129). This has implications for the way that those weapons supplied by superpower backers were regulated in a post-conflict setting, especially if negotiations hung on DDR requirements placed on warring parties.

The end of the Cold War also brought about a second noticeable trend in such conflict: proxy wars driven by international powers were largely replaced by proxy wars driven by regional powers via the cross-border percolation of armed groups. Such proxy wars, witnessed especially in Africa, have seen their character shift from internationalised conflicts of an ideological nature, to regionalised interventions motivated by inter- and intra-state competition for power and resources. As Jon Abbink (2003, 407) has argued in relation to African conflicts:

The nature and extent of proxy wars need to be studied more systematically because they have a serious impact on long-term stability and regional peace in Africa and reveal patterns of international and regional African power politics that often get neglected.

This neglect can be reversed in part with greater academic assessment of the relationship between DDR mechanisms after proxy wars and the wider development policy landscape.

The United Nations (UN 2014) acknowledges that DDR has become an integral part of modern post-conflict peace consolidation. This article adopts the UN proposition that DDR supports ex-combatants to become active participants in the peace process through removing weapons from the hands of combatants; taking the combatants out of military structures; and integrating combatants socially and economically into society. By applying this to research on proxy war legacies this article transforms understandings of the particular strains that proxy war-waging places on DDR strategies, so that recovery and development can begin. It reveals how development policies in post-conflict situations are impinged upon by the legacy left by large-scale weapon supply and sponsorship by third parties. The article creates a bridge between the two related disciplines by shedding light on a perennially present but under-explored trend of modern conflict (proxy wars) and exploring what happens to DDR policies in post-conflict development planning once third parties have walked away from their ‘arms-length’ conflict.

DDR policies and the proxy problem

DDR-related academic work has grown in recent decades (for example see Özerdem 2002; Muggah 2006; Berdal and Ucko 2013), and new avenues for research on the topic have been established (as identified by Torjesen 2009). An increasing amount of DDR literature has started to take a thematic approach to the study of post-conflict policies, focussing on how specific issues are addressed, including HIV awareness (Marwali et al 2010), cross-cultural sensitivities (Özerdem 2002) and territorial disputes arising from the return of displaced persons (Özerdem and Sofizada 2006). However, much of the DDR scholarship has tended to almost exclusively look inwards at the steps taken by domestic combatants to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate ex-militants. The role played by external parties in flooding conflict zones with weaponry, money and trained fighters has thus been overlooked in the development literature as a key factor capable of destabilising post-conflict environments.

Berdal and Ucko (2013, 316) rightly observed that much of the DDR literature hitherto has been focussed on what they label the ‘mechanics’ of DDR policy implementation, leaving the ‘context and politics’ surrounding the cessation of a conflict in the shade. The context and politics of post-proxy war environments has not been fully assessed in the academic literature until now and remains an important, yet under-explored, contextualising factor that can help lead to lasting and sustainable peace given the lingering influence of third-party political influence and weaponry. Even the UN’s (2014) Operational Guide to Integrated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Standards (IDDRS) makes no mention of the effect of third-party interference on the strategic planning or operational performance of UN DDR programmes, nor does it mention it as a major cross-cutting issue that could impact other linked processes (such as security-sector reform). The mechanics of DDR implementation at the international level are blinded to the lingering effect of externally sourced weaponry and political influence. Even so-called ‘second generation DDR’ (UN 2010, 3), which conceptually tries to ‘support the peace process, create political space and contribute to a secure environment’, does not reflect the ways in which the post-conflict political space can be shaped by third parties whose interference during the conflict phase may not have diminished, or indeed face up to the legacy of sizeable numbers of weapons still remaining in-country that were provided as part of a proxy–benefactor relationship.

The transition to a ‘New World Order’ after the end of the Cold War – a period embodied by superpower-fuelled proxy wars – was a chance to solidify the ‘liberal peace agenda’ as DDR initiatives across the Global South moved former socialist countries towards a security model more in line with the Washington Consensus (Özerdem 2009, 2). Yet this opportunity was lost. In the immediate post-Cold War period a round of civil wars across Africa (including in Ethopia, Mozambique, and Namibia) were let loose through a combination of the profligacy of small arms and the reluctance of the US and Russia to reinvest political capital in a continent no longer on the front lines of a superpower confrontation (Spear 2006, 63). Having spent decades as a battleground for Cold War proxy wars, African nations in the 1990s were left by their former superpower benefactors to deal with the legacy of regular arms supplies and political interference. Therefore, the first major set of DDR initiatives across the continent were infused with the consequences of previous proxy wars.

In the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, DDR programmes were initiated in over 30 countries worldwide. Two-thirds of these were in Africa (World Bank 2009, 1). Many of those early programmes operated their disarmament and demobilisation policies on a ‘one-gun-per-person’ policy (Knight and Ozerdem 2004, 500). This will have massively simplified the calculation of weapons in a post-conflict environment as well as overlooked the amount of externally supplied weaponry on top of pre-existing in-country arms. Indeed, the cessation of an armed conflict does not always equate to the cessation of desire for weapons by former combatants (Muggah 2006, 192). Third-party benefactors therefore remain of vital importance in post-conflict settings as a willingness to maintain a supply of arms has the capacity to destabilise the durability of any peace settlement. This tests the veracity of on-going proxy–benefactor relations and the mutual levels of influence, which are subject to both push and pull factors (for example, the benefactor wants to continue influencing events or the proxy demands more weapons).

In the mid-1990s Berdal (1996, 18) identified three factors that had enabled global small and light arms provision: first, the supply and demand environment facilitated by a decentralised weapons market; second, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent untracked flow of Soviet weaponry into a global market place; and, third, weapons from Cold War-era conflicts covertly being redeployed to ‘hot’ conflict zones. This final point really touches upon the perennial dynamics of proxy wars on DDR, as it is often externally provided weaponry that can be stockpiled and then subsequently sold on. Berdal’s additional observations about the actions and responsibilities of generic ‘external actors’ in DDR processes are pertinent specifically to the benefactor from the proxy war conflict, including the ability of influential third parties to encourage all former warring factions to adhere to a peace process (Berdal 1996, 59); the ability of external actors to vary the level of arms control in the country given the transnational nature of the weapons trade (20); and how on-going international/regional power rivalries can agitate further violence at the communal level (23).

It is also important to consider both the security and the economic value of weapons to ex-combatants in the disarmament phase (Berdal 1996, 17). As post-conflict disarmament and trust-building grow symbiotically, the market value of weaponry still in-country decreases. This becomes an important moment to remove and destroy arms in advance of potential gun-smuggling to other conflict zones (Spear 2006, 65). Similar dilemmas exist in the demobilisation phase too. Paul Collier’s (1994) acknowledgement of the existence of macro- and micro-insecurity during post-conflict demobilisation is particularly pertinent in post-proxy war situations given how the macro-insecurity felt by large-scale fighting units (such as national armies) who had been proxies during the conflict could lead to the re-ignition of third-party interference if they have maintained links with proxy war-era benefactors.

Establishing the particular political dynamics and conflict context of a proxy war within assessments of the subsequent DDR policies is an important scholarly and policy-relevant endeavour. Robert Muggah (2009, 5) has suggested a four-fold typology of contexts for DDR: pre-crisis/conflict; during conflict; post ‘cross-border’ conflict; and post ‘internal’ conflict. As useful as this is, such a typology rests on an assumption that the conflicts are either intra- or inter-state in a strict sense. Belligerents are either contained within the boundaries of the state or involve neighbouring countries. It overlooks the distinct lineage of international third-party intervention in regional and civil wars, which complicates traditional intra/inter-state conflict binaries. This author would suggest a new addition to Muggah’s typology: post-proxy war. This could help showcase the relationship of warring factions to third parties and the influence this has on the levels of weaponry, the willingness of proxies to demobilise, and the direction of decision-making within armed groups in post-conflict environments.

Post-proxy war DDR

To a large degree, the arming or training of proxies by benefactor states is based on the strategic assumption that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Yet the absence of effective DDR mechanisms opens third parties up to ‘blowback’, or unintended policy consequences, because of the scope for those weapons to be passed on to hostile groups or used against the state in future wars. The assumption that the adoption of a proxy war strategy is the quickest way to bring a war to a swift end by indirectly allowing one side to gain an advantage in terms of manpower, training or weaponry is fundamentally challenged if we look at the track record of recent proxy wars. The understanding that proxy interventions actually prematurely end an existing conflict belies evidence, especially in the African case, that on the whole they actually prolong such conflicts, largely because a weak warring faction is boosted to the point of creating a stalemate (Cunningham 2006). This makes it imperative to understand how the removal of such weapons from warzones and the reintegration into society of former proxies after the third party has ended its involvement can improve the chances of widespread development policies being enacted. Successful DDR after a proxy war reduces the capacity for weapons to flow to future proxy wars, thus reducing the propensity for blowback further on down the line that could harm the interests of the initial proxy war benefactor.

Such blowback can be high profile or subtle, immediate or delayed in its manifestation (Johnson 2002, 17–18). The future consequences of foreign policy decisions are arguably exacerbated in proxy war situations given the often fleeting relationship between the benefactor and the proxy, and the typically short-term nature of the benefactor’s strategic objective. This leaves the results of the intervention open to unintended long-term consequences. The proliferation of proxy wars during the Cold War intensified the frequency of blowback. As Chalmers Johnson (2002, 237–238) concluded:

world politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century – that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.

Johnson’s cautionary assessment should not only encourage us to reflect more deeply on the contemporary consequences of proxy wars waged in the past, but also make policymakers and scholars alike more vigilant as to the potential long-term implications of initiating short-term proxy wars being waged now. The weapons channelled to today’s proxy wars are the spoilers hindering the DDR processes of tomorrow.

Perhaps the most exemplary manifestation of blowback affecting post-conflict DDR strategies is how the Stinger missiles provided by the US to the Afghan mujahedeen during the late 1980s found themselves used in conflicts much farther afield after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. The use of Stinger missiles by non-state actors with whom no direct Stinger sales had been made, but who had interaction with Afghan groups supplied with American Stingers, was reported in Bosnia, Iran, Kashmir, Tunisia and the Palestinian territories in the years after the Soviet withdrawal (Kuperman 1999, 253). Indeed, so concerned did Washington become at the spread of Stinger usage that President George H. W. Bush authorised a $65 million ‘buy back’ programme to help the CIA retrieve as many of the missiles as possible. The results of this initiative were negligible, with only a small fraction of the Stingers recovered, leaving somewhere between 300 and 600 unaccounted for (Kuperman 1999, 254). The effects of this particular proxy war decision both long outlasted the original conflict it was designed to influence and unwittingly spilled over the borders of the country they were intentioned for. It acts as a cautionary tale when assessing the effect of proxy war-waging on post-conflict DDR – as indeed does a deeper dive into the proxy war waged by states against ISIS since 2014.

The proxy war against ISIS and the DDR implications

Since the establishment of ISIS’s self-declared ‘caliphate’ in 2014, a myriad of foreign nations have been funding and arming an alphabet soup of militia groups. Syria is a particularly anarchic proxy war involving a broad network of shifting relationships between proxies and their benefactors, each with different goals in mind. The incredibly swift rise of ISIS, combined with their disregard for any other group or country, made strange bedfellows out of the resultant anti-ISIS coalition. America found itself united with Iran and other Gulf states in the effort to quell the rise of this virulent movement. The chimaera of strategic success by proxy was a powerful one. During his term in office, President Obama tried to resist this allure. Two months after ISIS declared its caliphate in 2014, Obama (in Friedman 2014) dismissed the notion that a more intense proxy war against the group would have stemmed its advance: ‘This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth … was never in the cards’. Yet this flippant dismissal of the proxy war option belies actions that he was forced to take in the subsequent years as the forces opposed to ISIS, especially inside Syria, shed their amateurism.

Collectively, the proxy warfare approach adopted by the West and Arab powers was a sign that they were trying to inflict death by a thousand cuts upon ISIS rather than inflicting a singular blow via a major land invasion – and this had significant DDR implications. The Global Coalition settled on a hybrid strategy that revealed a preference for a mix of limited kinetic action (lower risk air strikes and an increasing reliance on special operations forces [SOF]) and a dependence on proxies to take the fight to ISIS on the ground. The result was an uncomfortable strategic premise for Operation Inherent Resolve – defeat ISIS but without expending too much conventional force whilst displacing the highest kinetic risk to others (Mumford 2021, 2). The war against ISIS shows us how indirect interventions to aid proxies are increasingly utilised to augment traditional forms of direct military intervention rather than being used as a standalone form of intervention.

A large step forward in the American proxy war against ISIS was taken in September 2014 when Congress passed House Joint Resolution 124 (Continuing Appropriations Resolution #2,015, 2013–2014), which legislated for the Pentagon to ‘provide assistance to elements of the Syrian opposition and other Syrian groups for … defending the Syrian people from attacks by the Islamic State …’. Neither the specific nature of such assistance nor the identity of the recipient groups was detailed in the resolution, but it denoted a doubling down on indirect efforts by Washington to use Syrian militias to dislodge ISIS from its strongholds. The following summer, President Obama underlined America’s commitment to proxy war by stating that in the absence of American forces ‘an effective partner on the ground’ would be necessary to sponsor so that ‘ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] can be pushed back’ (BBC News 2015). Yet deficiencies in the original ‘train and assist’ programme the president had announced a year earlier were now obvious. Not only were heavy losses inflicted on the American-backed militias, it was also clear that the number of graduates from American-run training camps in Jordan and Turkey was woefully low. US Central Command (CENTCOM) commander General Lloyd Austen was forced to admit to the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2015 that only ‘four or five’ Syrian rebels were actively fighting ISIS having completed the training, despite an initial target of 5000 (Ackerman 2015). This prompted a revamp of the rebel assistance programme. The Pentagon committed to increasing the level of combat training that affiliated rebel groups received in the camps run by the CIA, as well as providing them with more intelligence and encouraging the groups to coalesce in larger numbers.

But US control over their proxies was tenuous at best. As Brigadier General Kevin J. Killea, the chief of staff of the US mission tackling ISIS, said at the outset of the relaunch: ‘We don’t have direct command and control with those forces once we do finish training and equipping them when we put them back into the fight’ (quoted in Schmitt and Hubbard 2015). The US was having not only quantitative problems finding numbers of recruits but also qualitative ones in terms of securing recruits that were still receptive to American direction. Proxy selection in Syria needed to take into consideration not just their ability to kinetically resist and push back ISIS but also their ability to control and run the territory they retake. This would have enhanced the effectiveness of the ground campaign to degrade ISIS whilst maintaining some legitimacy (and continuing American influence) over the post-ISIS situation. However, this balance was never truly attained. Symbolic of this was an incident in early 2016 when it emerged that two different Syrian proxies being sponsored by different agencies of the US government had turned their American-supplied weapons on each other. In a turn of events that came to epitomise the incoherence of the US anti-ISIS proxy war, skirmishes between the CIA-backed Furqa al-Sultan and the Pentagon-backed YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, or People’s Defence Units, the Syrian branch of the Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê, or Kurdistan Workers’ Party [PKK]) created the farcical situation of America fighting a proxy war against itself (Giglio 2016).

One of the key proxies that the West used as a conduit for use of force against ISIS is the Kurdish Peshmerga militias. This relationship began soon after the declaration of ISIS’s caliphate. Military advisors from the UK, as well as the US and France, were sent to train Peshmerga fighters in the use of heavy machine guns, urban warfare operations, and strategic planning. One of the British military advisors noted the increased level of training that this proxy war effort involved compared to other previous indirect interventions: ‘One of the things we’ve agreed to do is not to give them anything without showing them how to use it. That’s not always been done in other conflicts’ (Parkinson and Nissenbaum 2014). These Peshmerga forces deployed alongside Iraqi Army troops in order to help retake territory around Mosul, Kirku and Irbil, as well as over the border into Syria, fending off ISIS forces from Kobani. However, in-fighting amongst the different Kurdish factions, namely the Yekîtiya Nîştimanî ya Kurdistanê (or Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK]), the Partiya Demokrat a Kurdistanê (or Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP]) and the YPG, made it difficult to homogenise policy towards Kurdish proxies (Kilcullen 2016, 138 and 157). Yet this did not stop the British government announcing in June 2015 that it was supplying an additional £600,000 worth of military equipment to the Peshmerga. This bolstering of the Kurds as proxies came off the back of the deployment of 1000 UK military trainers, as well as ‘50 tonnes of non-lethal equipment, heavy machine guns, nearly half a million rounds of ammunition, [and] 1,000 counter-IED [improvised explosive device] VALLON detectors’ (UK Ministry of Defence 2015) – as well as a substantial array of weaponry, including machine guns, armoured vehicles, and anti-tank rocket launchers, sent by the German government of Angela Merkel (BBC News 2014a). In the end, the bigger concern became what to do about weapons given to the Kurds in Syria after President Trump’s withdrawal of US forces in 2019. Senior US commanders urged for Kurdish fighters to be allowed to keep their US-supplied weapons. One Pentagon official was quoted as saying: ‘The idea that we’d be able to recover them is asinine. So we leave them where we are’ (Reuters 2018).

In February 2020 the Pentagon’s Inspector General (IG) reported that US Special Operations teams working with Syrian proxy forces fighting ISIS had not accounted for $715 million worth of equipment purchased for their ‘train and equip’ mission. The IG also declared that such weaponry had not been stored properly prior to dispersal, leaving thousands of ‘weapons and sensitive equipment vulnerable to loss or theft’ (Department of Defense Office of Inspector General 2020). The lack of a central repository system to document the distribution of such weapons to proxies was something in urgent need of rectification, the IG found, and goes to highlight how the lackadaisical pursuit of a proxy war has the potential to create significant DDR issues in the future.

The significant level of proxy war activity inside Syria by numerous countries meant that any political solution was going to have to involve those very same nations encouraging their partners inside Syria to come to the negotiating table. But it proved very difficult to break those bonds of alliance between the benefactors and their proxies. Three major consequences of proxy war-waging are worth reflecting on today in light of the fight against ISIS.

First is the danger of long-term dependence. On-going financial support will inevitably be needed to rebuild infrastructure inside Syria and Iraq. With the prospect of a large nation-building effort on its hands, all major players inside Syria in particular are going to receive offers of help that could spill over into outright dependence. This is now less of a concern for American proxies given President Trump’s surprise withdrawal announcement, but the influx of Russian personnel is a sign that the Kremlin is keen to invest in long-term partnerships in the country.

The second major consequence is the elongation or intensification of the violence. In October 2014 Vice-President Joe Biden (quoted in Ruthven 2016) aired concerns about the overspill effect of the Syrian conflict into the broader Middle East:

Our allies in the region were our largest problem … [they] were determined to take down Assad and have a proxy Sunni–Shia war, they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.

Although it is reassuring to see the new president show awareness of proxy warfare, Biden’s assessment failed to reflect the American role in perpetrating exactly the same strategy and compounding the situation further. In 2017, after spending more than $1 billion and amid widespread acceptance of the failure to leverage any significant strategic advantage, the White House ended Timber Sycamore, the CIA’s three-year long ‘train and equip’ programme (Mazzetti, Goldman, and Schmidt 2017).

Thirdly, it is worth considering how proxy interventions create the conditions for conflict over-spill and blowback. Sometimes the ghosts of proxy wars past do not haunt the corridors of power until decades later. In other words, we are a long way from discovering the true cost of the proxy war waged against ISIS. A Middle Eastern intelligence official told veteran foreign correspondent P. Cockburn (2015, 3) that ISIS fighters ‘are always pleased when sophisticated weapons were sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments’. This reality certainly shortens the time frame in which proxy war benefactors feel blowback from their actions. Indeed, the first ripples of blowback were felt just months after President Obama approved the ‘train and equip’ programme in mid-2014. By October that year ISIS had uploaded a video to the internet showing a cache of weapons that had been inadvertently dropped from the air over ISIS-held territory. The bundle (one of 27 dropped in that particular airlift) was intended for the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters defending the town of Kobane from ISIS fighters (BBC News 2014b).

A European Union-funded study in 2017 by Conflict Armament Research (CAR) concluded that a significant amount of Western-supplied weapons destined for rebel groups in Syria had fallen into the hands of ISIS. These weapons, the study concluded, ‘significantly augmented the quantity and quality of weapons available to IS forces – in numbers far beyond those that would have been available through battlefield capture alone’ (CAR 2017). Included in CAR’s database, which lists 1832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered in Iraq and Syria, is evidence that ISIS may have captured rocket warheads from anti-Assad militias in Syria that had originally been provided by the US and Saudi Arabia (Caster 2017).

This is even more significant when considered in conjunction with a report from Amnesty International (2015), which found that a sizeable portion of ISIS’s original weapons stock had been ‘seized from or has leaked out of Iraqi military stocks’. Despite high levels of domestic weapons resourcing, the proxy war concept is still applicable given the concomitant supply of newer, more sophisticated weaponry from third parties to ISIS’s opponents. Such weaponry inevitably added greater accuracy, and therefore lethality, to the conflict across Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. Even when one warring faction is able to draw upon large amounts of in-country weapons, the external provision of addition arms by third parties (who are often technological and defence superpowers) inevitably modernises the weapons arsenal at the disposal of one or more sides, thus demonstrating strategic leverage over the conflict (the hallmark of proxy war as a form of indirect intervention).

Some precautions have been taken to minimise blowback from the proxy war being waged against ISIS. Specialist American teams sent to Irbil and Baghdad to deliver weapons to selected proxies were requested to closely log the details of recipients in order to track the whereabouts of the arms in the future (Kilcullen 2016, 105). The proxy war against ISIS, like all modern proxy wars more generally, was the result of an acknowledgement of the management of contending risks. The Western powers who intervened vicariously against ISIS had calculated that the risks of possible escalation, elongation, dependence and blowback were outweighed by the shorter term potential for ISIS to be dislodged by local forces, whilst all the while preserving the political and economic capital that would have been expended on a major expeditionary ground war. Little or no thought, however, was given to how those indirectly supplied arms would be recovered once the war against ISIS had been concluded.

Implications and conclusion

In proxy wars the third-party intervenor is culpable for what Dunford and Neu (2019, 1086) call a ‘co-produced’ conflict, in which the supply of weapons and bolstering of favoured political factions simply ‘fuel wars in the most unrestrained way’ (Hindawi 2017, 125). Yet despite their historical track record of producing very few strategic gains despite their high cost (Mumford 2013), proxy wars continue to appeal to states. The allure of short-term influence in the absence of outright military intervention holds strong, as we have seen in Yemen, Syria and Ukraine. We are not likely to see an end to proxy wars any time soon. Therefore, the best we can do is raise awareness of their more deleterious consequences in order to mitigate their effects. The conjoining of debates about post-conflict DDR and the implications of proxy wars is one way we can do this. Successful disarmament requires more than just buy-in from former combatants and their communities. It requires investment from interested third parties too; otherwise, destabilising external interference can keep the arms flow going and prolong conflicts further. Third parties must make a more concerted effort to seek post-conflict solutions rather than simply create the problem of more enflamed conflict.

A bigger policy question raised by this article regards whether proxy war benefactors should automatically be asked to buy into post-conflict peace agreements more broadly, and the DDR programme more specifically, as a way of reducing the possibility of conflict reversion. Ideally, actors from the proxy war era need to be co-opted into the post-proxy war peace process as a means of strengthening the chances of a lasting peace – as the Syrian case study attests. The co-option of proxy benefactors by international organisations after future conflicts could help sustain mediation efforts, promote the chances of sustainable development and, crucially, cut off ready access to new weapons supplies. It is not just the international community in the broadest institutional sense that needs to be brought on board, nor solely the warring factions on the ground. Many of these factions have historically been sustained and guided by influential third parties. These benefactors must become stakeholders in the DDR process if lasting peace and development is to be achieved. This could come in the form, for example, of a contribution to a multi-donor DDR trust fund or the creation of a weapon buy-back scheme. Such moves would recognise just how proxy war benefactors are significant change agents and possible spoilers in DDR processes. These benefactors need to ensure that they adhere to the terms of the UN Arms Trade Treaty by ensuring that all supplied weapons are actually complying with their end-user certificate.

Future developments in the weapons of war will also have a significant impact on their provision during proxy wars and their post-conflict disarmament. This article has largely referred to the supply of guns and anti-tank missiles. Such weapons could be supplanted in decades to come by weaponised drones, robotics, or forms of artificial intelligence (AI). Such technological developments will bring new challenges to the process of tracking, tracing and decommissioning third-party-supplied military hardware. Yet it also offers the opportunity for new technologies to facilitate more efficient control of weaponry, where arms could be more effectively traced using enhanced microchips or enforced redundancy built into the weapons’ technology.

From a scholarly perspective, it is important to explicitly address the post-proxy war circumstances of DDR policy implementation, because of the complex yet influential relationship between the warring factions. The capacity – or, indeed, willingness – of proxies to demobilise or commit to reintegration also can rest on the dependency present in that relationship. This article picks up on Salehyan, Gleditsch, and Cunningham’s (2011, 734–735) call for future research on conflict to ‘look closely at circumstances where the lines between civil and international war are blurred’. Proxy wars operate in this blurry conflict zone where internal wars are made more complex and intractable because of external intervention. Analysis of proxy wars needs to be cleaved apart from generic assessments of ‘external intervention’ and given a consistent, independent platform of critical evaluation. Balch-Lindsay, Enterline, and Joyce (2008, 346) observed that the literature on third-party intervention in civil wars has focussed on two key components: duration and outcome. This debate can be moved forward by honing in on a third, overlooked, element: consequence. By assessing the implications for post-conflict DDR of third-party-provided weaponry and support we are able to offer a new interpretation of the effect of proxy wars in the short, medium and long term.

The short-term focus on attaining tactical victories against ISIS has left the West open to the possibility of longer-term blowback rendered by the strategic disruption to the wider region caused by empowered, well-armed non-state groups that have been used as proxies (Martin and Kozak 2016). The allure of utilising local actors to fight the ground war against ISIS became a quick-fix solution to the problem of no appetite for a large-scale invasion. It lacked intrinsic political awareness of the strange combination of militias that were being armed and instead became a technical exercise in weapons dispersal. The lack of conditionality on end-use or return is worrying, with significant implications for future DDR strategies in the region. An understanding of the effect that proxy wars have on post-intra- or inter-state conflict environments is important given the contemporary trends that point towards a likely increased use of proxy war strategies in the future (Mumford 2013). This includes the emergence of powerful regional actors, general public reluctance in the West for overt military interventions, and the rise of a ‘polyarchic’ world order that is recalibrating states’ alliances and perceptions of their own foreign interests (Pfaff 2017). The flood of weapons into current ‘hot’ proxy wars in Yemen, Syria and Ukraine is a living testament to the DDR conundrum to be addressed in these nations in the years to come.

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Notes on contributors

Andrew Mumford

Andrew Mumford is Professor of war studies in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of four books, including The West’s War Against Islamic State (2021) and Proxy Warfare (2013). He is editor of the ‘Studies in Contemporary Warfare’ book series (I. B. Tauris).