Framers, founders, and reformers: Three generations of proxy war research

ABSTRACT

The rapid expansion of the proxy war literature invites an examination of its advances and developments. This article’s aims are threefold. First, to assess proxy war literature with a view to understand how it has progressed knowledge. Second, to map the field’s effort to cumulate knowledge. Third, to think creatively about the future directions of this research agenda as it addresses a problem no longer at the periphery of contemporary security debates. This article proposes a novel categorization of the evolution of our thinking about proxy wars across three “generations”: founders, framers, and reformers. Following on from this, it provides an assessment of the literature’s assumptions in order to show what remains, or not, under-studied. In doing so, it makes a case for a historiography of the idea of “proxy war,” and one for embedding strategy in analyses of wars by proxy.

KEYWORDS:

• Proxy war
• cumulation
• strategy
• history
• security
• external support

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Adam Humphreys and Luca Trenta for comments on earlier drafts, the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and very constructive feedback, and the journal’s editor, Hylke Dijkstra, for his support.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributor

Vladimir Rauta is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. He researches proxy wars and has published articles in International Relations, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He is currently working on a book project analyzing the contemporary dynamics of proxy wars.

Notes

1 The greatest gulf exists between proxy war literature and conflict research studying external support to rebels in civil war. Not only has the latter minimally interacted with the former, but it has unjustifiably invalidated the analytical utility of the notion itself as a relic of the Cold War. In effect, the two have been speaking past each other, with their respective bibliographies being almost entirely different (Berman & Lake, 2019; San-Akca, 2016; Salehyan et al., 2011; Salehyan, 2010; Byman et al., 2001).

2 Available at: https://www.pwinitiative.org/.

3 For example, where Borghard (2014) uses “proxy alliances,” Cragin proposes “semi-proxy wars” (2015).

4 A similar point is advanced by Marshall (2016) for the study of proxy wars.