‘Proxy War’ - A Reconceptualisation

ABSTRACT

This article presents a definitional structure for the notion of ‘proxy war’ organised around three components: (1) a material-constitutive feature, (2) a processual feature and (3) a relational feature. First, the article evaluates the multiple usages of the term of ‘proxy war’ in light of its contested character. Second, it proposes a way of making sense of the literature’s conceptual turmoil by analysing the different attempts at defining the notion. To this end, it adds an important link to the methodology of concept analysis, namely the ‘semantic field’, which it re-introduces as a heuristic to identify ‘military intervention’ as a root concept for defining proxy wars. The article does so by identifying a type of semantic relationship between ‘proxy war’ and ‘military intervention’, namely sub-type inclusion.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for comments from Jürgen Brandsch, Rory Cormac, Adrian Florea, Corinne Heaven, Adam Humphreys, Niklas Karlén, Adam Scharpf, Henning Tamm, Luca Trenta, Tom Watts, Michel Wyss, the two anonymous reviewers, and the journal’s editors, especially Jonathan Fisher.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. In fact, the study of sponsorship of armed non-state actors has an even longer history across numerous sub-fields. One can identify at least three other research clusters: (1) state sponsorship of terrorism (Byman 2020); (2) covert action and secrecy (Cormac 2018); and (3) the study of proxies within area studies, from Africa (Tamm 2019) to the Middle East (Phillips and Valbjørn 2018, Hinnebusch and Saouli 2020). Given this ‘balkanisation’ of research, a discussion about the concept itself is a useful starting point for cross-field communication.

2. Notwithstanding the differences between ‘war’ and ‘warfare’ – the latter being understood as referencing technologies of fighting (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010), this article treats ‘proxy war’ and ‘proxy warfare’ interchangeably, leaving further conceptual refinement on this issue for future research.

3. Conflict delegation is defined here as a strategy in which a government commits material resources or military expertise to a non-state armed group abroad to target a perceived adversary (Salehyan 2010, 501). Hauter (2019) presented an attempt at bringing the intervention-delegation gap, and much more work is needed on the issue.

4. Some explanations for these problems follow logically from the fact that research programs (belonging to research sub-fields) ask specific questions and design custom-made concepts serving the requirements of different units and levels of analysis. Moreover, there are the usual culprits: theoretical and methodological preferences. This goes back to the qualitative-quantitative divide extending into conceptual problems (Goertz 2006, p. 2), cutting through the co-constitutivity of theory and concept, and ending in lack of inter-field communication (Guzzini 2013, p. 535).

5. Some of these new concepts can indeed provide an insight into the limitations of existing conceptual language. Moreover, as mentioned above, they are tied to different research aims while also underlining the competitiveness of the intellectual marketspace, fashionably driven by catchy terminology (Singer 2002). ‘Surrogate’, and ‘remote’ warfare are the latest iterations in the attempts to grasp the complexity of contemporary political violence. They are what Heuser called ‘bureaucratically convenient catch-all term’ (2014, p. 741), and not concerned with the discrete problem of waging indirect, war by proxy. ‘Sponsorship’ and ‘delegation’ underline the interest in understating wider processes affecting the incumbent notion of ‘civil war’ and the forms of violence it presupposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vladimir Rauta

Dr Vladimir Rauta is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. He researches proxy wars and has published articles in International Relations, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, RUSI Journal, and Contemporary Security Policy. He is currently working on a book project analysing the contemporary dynamics of proxy wars with a focus on the Middle East, out in 2022 with I. B. Tauris. Together with Assaf Moghadam and Michel Wyss, he is the co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Proxy Wars.