Proxy wars are still under-represented in conflict research and a key cause for this is the lack of conceptual and terminological care. This article seeks to demonstrate that minimizing terminological diffusion increases overall analytical stability by maximising conceptual rigor. The argument opens with a discussion on the terminological ambivalence resulting from the haphazard employment of labels referencing the parties involved in proxy wars. Here, the article introduces an analytical framework with a twofold aim: to reduce label heterogeneity, and to argue in favour of understanding proxy war dynamics as overlapping dyads between a Beneficiary, a Proxy, and a Target. This is then applied to the issues of defining and theorising party dynamics in proxy wars. It does so by providing a structural-relational analysis of the interactions between the above-mentioned parties based on strategic interaction. It presents a tentative explanation of the proxy relationship by correlating the Beneficiary's goal towards the Target with the Proxy's preference for the Beneficiary. In adding the goal-preference relational heuristic, the article advances the recent focus on strategic interaction with a novel variant to explanations based on interest, power, cost-benefit considerations, or ideology.

This article interrogates the role of non-state armed actors in the Ukrainian civil conflict. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it seeks to identify the differences between the patterns of military intervention in Crimea (direct, covert intervention), and those in the SouthEast (mixed direct and indirectproxyintervention). It does so by assessing the extent of Russian troop involvement and that of external sponsorship to non-state actors. Second, it puts forward a tentative theoretical framework that allows distinguishing between the different outcomes the two patterns of intervention generate. Here, the focus is on the role of non-state actors in the two interventionist scenarios. The core argument is that the use of non-state actors is aimed at sovereign defection. The article introduces the concept of sovereign defection and defines it as a break-away from an existing state. To capture the differences between the outcomes of the interventions in Crimea and SouthEast , sovereign defection is classified into two categories: inward and outward. Outward sovereign defection is equated to the territorial seizure of the Crimean Peninsula by Russian Special Forces, aided by existing criminal gangs acting in an auxiliary capacity. Inward sovereign defection refers to the external sponsorship of the secessionist rebels in SouthEast Ukraine and their use as proxy forces with the purpose of creating a political buffer-zone in the shape of a frozen conflict. To demonstrate these claims, the article analyses the configuration of the dynamics of violence in both regions. It effectively argues that, in pursuing sovereign defection, the auxiliary and proxy forces operate under two competing dynamics of violence, delegative and non-delegative, with distinct implications to the course and future of the conflict. Keywords Proxy war proxy agent auxiliary force Ukraine sovereign defection civil war Accounts of the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian Federation in March 2014 emphasized primarily its swift character (Snegovaya 2015), while pointing towards the coming of age of a shift in Russian contemporary warfare (Karber 2015) that had been on its way since the move towards what Major-General Vladimir Slipchenko called 'sixth generation of warfare' (Kipp 2012). Serhiy Kunitsayn, the ex-premier of Crimea and former Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine to Crimea, recalls to have been the last bulwark of the legitimate Ukrainian Government there at the time: I came to the office of the Crimean union of Afghan war veterans, where we decided to stand as a shield between the Russian and Ukrainian troops, and half an hour later the building was blocked and Aksyonov's 1 bands led by the 'green men' began to storm it. (Kunitsyn 2014) What started as protests in late November 2013 (Grytsenko and Walker 2013), and escalated into violent demonstrations over the course of the following months (Kramer and Higgins 2014), effectively turned into an internationalized civil war 2 with the annexation of Crimea...

This article presents a typology of armed non-state actors that shape the military dimension of hybrid warfare: proxy, auxiliary, surrogate, and affiliated forces. By focusing on the kinetic domain of hybrid warfare, the article offers a corrective to a debate which has so far ignored variation in roles and functions of non-state actors and their relationships with internal and external states and their regular forces. As a denominator, 'hybrid' identifies a combination of battlespaces, types of operations -military or non-kinetic -and a blurring of actors with the scope of achieving strategic objectives by creating exploitable ambiguity. However, there has been a disproportionate focus on what hybrid war supposedly combines across battlespaces and domains (socio-political, economic, informational), at the expense of who and how this combination takes place. Using the Ukrainian crisis as a theory-building exercise, the article suggests a four-category schema that identifies non-state actor functions as a tool to better represent the complex franchise of violence that is found nested next to non-military operations in hybrid activity. In so doing, the article speaks to a call for better conceptualisation the role of non-state violent actors in civil war, in general, and in hybrid warfare, in particular.

The rapid expansion of the proxy wars literature invites an examination of its advances and developments. This article's aims are three-fold. 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 2 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.

4contemporary civil wars into complex proxy wars in strategic settings ranging from South-East Ukraine 6 and central Africa 7 to the porous borders of Syria 8 and Yemen. 9In 2013, the RUSI Journal published Andrew Mumford's discussion on the role of proxy warfare in shaping future conflict 10 as a preamble to his wider analysis of the phenomenon. 11 Taken together, Mumford's work revived a debate long ignored by strategic and security studies. Fast forward six years and the future of proxy wars has become their present focus. For example, seven entries into the International Crisis Group's '10 Conflicts to Watch in 2020' are currently being shaped by proxy