Proxy War: An Attempt to Put a Retrospective and Ambiguous Concept into a Specific Framework

Abstract

There are two dominant perspectives in the literature regarding the concept of proxy war, which was forgotten in the post-Cold War era but is now regaining popularity. The group led by Karl Deutsch defines proxy war as the intervention of other states in a civil war in a country, and the situation where the civil war in question gains an interstate conflict nature. The other group argues that proxy war was a common form of warfare even before 1945. This study problematizes two perspectives. Accordingly, a new conceptual framework of proxy wars is constructed, aiming to eliminate the conceptual ambiguity caused by these two perspectives.