Taylor & Francis Online | Niklas Karlén, Vladimir Rauta
Foreign states employ a sophisticated array of ten distinct control mechanisms—selection, programming, inducements, promises, threats, rewards, sanctions, checks and balances, reporting, and monitoring—to manage non-state armed groups (NSAGs) and mitigate the inherent risks of conflict delegation. This research challenges the prevailing simplistic understanding of state control over proxies, arguing that state support is far more formalized, structured, and regulated than commonly assumed. By leveraging principal-agent theory, the authors develop a fine-grained conceptual framework that addresses issues of divergent interests and asymmetric information, providing a more comprehensive and analytically precise tool for understanding state-proxy relationships. This refined understanding is crucial for both scholars and policymakers to assess state complicity in NSAG actions, formulate effective policies to disrupt problematic relationships, and navigate the complex legal and ethical implications of proxy warfare on international humanitarian law.
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