Description
The recent and fast developing body of work on proxy war, delegation, and external support has generated a range of important insights, but there has been little cumulative advance in understanding the causes of proxy war. One reason for this, we argue, is that in many cases those seeking to generate causal explanations are addressing subtly different questions. We therefore propose to distinguish claims about the causes of proxy war in terms of both their extension and intension. In terms of their extension, we point out the importance of distinguishing clearly between (i) claims about the causes of individual proxy wars, (ii) claims about the impact of a particular causal factor within a specified population of proxy wars, and (iii) claims about the propensities of particular factors in relation to proxy war. In terms of their intension, we draw on a contrastive understanding of causal explanation to distinguish claims about different aspects of how proxy war comes about. We point out, for example, that causal explanations might focus on the interests and motivations of beneficiaries, proxies, or both, taking the form of ‘selection’ mechanism or ‘demand-supply’ logics. Similarly, they might focus on why war breaks out, why the war that breaks out is a proxy one, or both. We proceed by laying out the problem, elaborating our distinction between different kinds of questions explanations of proxy war might address, identifying which of these questions have been most effectively answered so far, and identifying where further work would be especially valuable.
