Proxy Warfare and the Future of Conflict: Take Two

Rauta, Vladimir

doi:10.1080/03071847.2020.1736437

Cited by 31 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Examples of the materialization of this model are: the support given by the US to Iraq for the defeat of ISIS, the support provided by Russia to Syria in the framework of the civil war, etc. Regardless of the model in which proxy warfare fits, it will remain a preferred form of conducting conflicts, repositioning spheres of influence or releasing tensions on the international stage and will remain "a core feature of the contemporary and future strategic and security environment" [9], because, in theory, proxy war is a simple solution to a complex problem. In practice, however, it has been found that proxy war is actually a simple solution only in the short term, because the evolution of events is unpredictable and most of the time the consequences and effects are not anticipated and are very difficult to manage.…”

Section: Main Models Of the Agent-sponsor Relationship In Modern Prox...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional Models of the Sponsor-Agent Relationship in Proxy Warfare

Cîrdei

Tudorache

Ispas

2023

International Conference KNOWLEDGE-BASED ORGANIZATION

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Proxy wars are a form of confrontation whose origins are lost in the mists of history. In the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, this type of war experienced a sharp development due to the changes that took place on the international scene. Due to the fact that the great powers avoided direct confrontation during the Cold War, for fear that this confrontation would degenerate into a new conventional or even nuclear world war, they chose to use proxy warfare as a pressure relief valve, a way to put the opponent in difficulty, to gain influence or even economic, political or other benefits. Proxy wars can take place both between states and between groups within a state, or between a terrorist group, paramilitary organisation, etc. and a state, and the common element is given by the fact that one or both of the parties benefit from external support, especially in the form of armaments, ammunitions, intelligence, expertise, advice from a sponsor of which it becomes an agent. In exchange for the sponsor's support, the agent offers him a series of advantages, influence, etc. The sponsor obtains strategic advantages without direct involvement, without exposing himself and without settling national and international image costs, while the agent is actively involved in combat operations, it is he who must ensure the achievement of objectives to satisfy both his own expectations and those of the sponsor.

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Section: Main Models Of the Agent-sponsor Relationship In Modern Prox...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional Models of the Sponsor-Agent Relationship in Proxy Warfare

Cîrdei

Tudorache

Ispas

2023

International Conference KNOWLEDGE-BASED ORGANIZATION

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“…In this context, it is relevant to understand proxy war as "a violent armed interaction resulting from the polarisation of competing political goals" between two rivals in which at least one engages the other indirectly through a third party, the proxy (Rauta, 2018, p. 467). Moreover, policymakers should think about assessing how different actors might employ proxies (Moghadam & Wyss, 2020;Rauta, 2020b), as well as the existence of different proxy logics or modalities (Fox, 2020), by considering insights derived from understanding proxy wars both as a global problem, but also one with decisively specific regional characteristics (Rauta, 2021a).…”

Section: Keeping It Simple: Hybrid Threats and Hybrid Warfarementioning

confidence: 99%

Global Britain in the grey zone: Between stagecraft and statecraft

Rauta

Monaghan

2021

Contemporary Security Policy

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The United Kingdom's integrated defense and security review put "grey zone" or "hybrid" challenges at the center of national security and defense strategy. The United Kingdom is not alone: The security and defense policies of NATO, the European Union, and several other countries (including the United States, France, Germany, and Australia) have taken a hybrid-turn in recent years. This article attempts to move the hybrid debate toward more fertile ground for international policymakers and scholars by advocating a simple distinction between threats and warfare. The United Kingdom's attempts to grapple with its own hybrid policy offer a national case study in closing the gap between rhetoric and practice, or stagecraft and statecraft, before an avenue of moving forward is proposed-informally, through a series of questions, puzzles, and lessons from the British experience-to help international policy and research communities align their efforts to address their own stagecraftstatecraft dichotomies.KEYWORDS Hybrid warfare; hybrid threats; grey zone; defense strategy; United Kingdom; Integrated ReviewIn a speech now seen as a prologue to the United Kingdom's (UK) recent review of national security, Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy (Integrated Review), General Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the Defence Staff, described the present and future strategic context as "a continuous struggle in which non-military and military instruments are used unconstrained by any distinction between peace and war" (Prime Minister's Office, 2020b).Carter's answer to this challenge was the new Integrated Operating Concept 2025 (IOpC25), which represented "the most significant change in UK military thought in several generations" and would lead to "a fundamental transformation in the military instrument and the way it is used" (Prime Minister's Office, 2020c). The Integrated Review follows Carter's assessment,

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“…The reformers' scholarship has expanded exponentially across special issues, think tank reports (Rondeaux & Sterman, 2019), monographs (Groh, 2019;Jones, 2017), and roundtable discussions (Wirtz et al, 2020). More importantly, it has linked proxy wars to a wide range of security issues, and provided more robust discussion of some core problems: provision of support and control of proxies (Moghadam & Wyss, 2020;Rauta, 2020), and moral/ethical dilemmas of supporting proxies (Pfaff, 2017;Pattison, 2018). No wonder that this expansion had conflict research ask the question of "how might we incorporate the idea of proxy war in the study of civil war to broaden the general understanding of how civil wars occur and end?"…”

Section: Reformersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Strategy and strategic interaction provide a theoretical framework to assess complexity in a way that provides meaning to the sets of political violence meeting on the battlespace: of the delegating state or non-state actor, of the proxy, of the intermediary facilitating the provision of support between sponsor and proxy, as well as of the target and their sponsors, if any (Rauta, 2020). This is perhaps even more relevant given that when we identify a proxy war we often identify a complex of inter-locked proxy wars.…”

Section: Strategy and Proxy War Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Rauta

2020

Contemporary Security Policy

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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.

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Proxy Warfare and the Future of Conflict: Take Two

Cited by 31 publications

References 0 publications

Functional Models of the Sponsor-Agent Relationship in Proxy Warfare

Functional Models of the Sponsor-Agent Relationship in Proxy Warfare

Global Britain in the grey zone: Between stagecraft and statecraft

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

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