The global cold war

Em processament

Proxy wars and the contemporary security environment

The chapter is structured as follows: first, attention is be paid to the issue of theorising proxy wars. The chapter defines proxy wars by observing how they differ from cases of third-party military intervention. Here, the focus is on differentiating the Proxy Agent from third parties such as mediators or auxiliaries. Second, the chapter addresses the question of ‘Why do states engage in proxy wars?’, and attempts an examination of contenting and competing explanations. These two aims are then put to the empirical test. By using two recent and ongoing cases of proxy wars, the theoretical discussion is brought into the empirical realm. The chosen cases are, first, the situation in Ukraine emerging from the 2013 protests and culminating with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and, second, the collapse of the Syrian state and the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Because proxy wars have generally been linked to the Cold War period and, thus, came to be associated with a superpower practice of avoiding direct interaction, the chapter moves away from discussing classic proxy wars such as the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état, the civil war in Angola (1975–2002), or the Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia (1977–1978). A view from a post-Cold War security standpoint significantly expands our understanding of this ever-present security problem

How Civil Wars Help Explain Organized Crime—and How They Do Not

Large-scale organized crime occupies a gray zone between ordinary crime and political violence. The unprecedented scale of drug-related crime in Mexico has led to its description as an insurgency or even a civil war, a conceptual move that draws on recent studies that have associated civil war with large-scale criminality. By questioning both the “crime as civil war” and “civil war as crime” models, I argue that instead of folding the two phenomena, we should draw primarily from the micro-dynamics of civil war research program to identify areas of potentially productive cross-fertilization. I point to four such areas, namely, onset and termination, organization, combat and violence, and governance and territory. I conclude by sketching a theoretical and empirical agenda for the study of large-scale organized crime