Review essay: proxy warfare and mercenaries

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Levitt, “Combating the Networks of Illicit Finance and Terrorism.”

2. Fox, “Conflict and the Need for a Theory of Proxy Warfare,”

3. Ibid, 64.

4. The Shia Popular Mobilization Groups in Iraq, despite being labeled by most Western governments as being Iranian proxies were a good example of this. See Mansour and Jabar, “The Popular Mobilization Forces,”

5. Khan and Zhaoying, “Iran-Hezbollah Alliance Reconsidered:, Daniel L. Byman, Hezbollah’s Dilemmas.

6. The Guardian, April 25, 2022.

7. Quoted in Frank Hoffman, “Defining and Achieving Success in Ukraine.”

8. Although focusing on hybrid warfare (a concept which itself has proven problematic), Fridman, Russian Hybrid Warfare, offers a good description of how these approaches have been politicized on both sides.

9. McGregor, “Russian Military Intelligence,”