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.