Introduction

To achieve a mediated settlement, the challenge for any mediator is to ensure a minimal level of consent between the warring factions. To build this consent, the mediator needs to understand the aims and drivers of the parties, and how those drivers can be appealed to (using a combination of carrots and sticks) to craft a mutually acceptable settlement. In a conflict in which the primary actors are backed, guided or even controlled by an external third party, gaining this consent becomes even more challenging and can quickly turn a mediation process from a two-sided game of draughts into a multi-dimensional game of chess without clearly defined rules.

To date, classical mediation processes have struggled to effectively engage with and influence the behaviour of external supporters to a given conflict in the pursuit of a settlement. This is not helped by the fact that the subject of proxy wars is ‘historically ubiquitous yet chronically under analysed’ in contemporary security studies (Mumford, 2013a; 2013b), while analysis of mediation and proxy conflict has been all but ignored to date. Studies that have focused on this phenomenon have produced disagreement about what constitutes a proxy war and its key elements. There have been some notable efforts to analyse ‘proxy warfare’, ‘limited warfare’, or the ‘indirect approach’ (Liddell-Hart, 1967; Bar-Siman-Tov, 1984; Byman and Kreps, 2010; Freedman, 2015; Byman, 2018; Carson, 2018) from state-centric perspectives (Bar-Siman-Tov, 1984; Hughes, 2014) to more flexible and holistic models which account for the increasing role of transnational non-state groups, private military providers and other non-state entities with sponsor–proxy relations (Loveman, 2002; Mumford, 2013a; Rondeaux and Sterman, 2019).

If there is one major point of agreement in the existing literature, it is that proxy warfare is characterized by a distinctive relationship between a principal-sponsor who delegates some authority over the pursuit of strategic war aims to a proxy-agent (Rondeaux and Sterman, 2019). For the sake of the present analysis, and bearing in mind operational objectives attached to mediation, this chapter takes a flexible and holistic view of proxy conflicts similar to that of Andrew Mumford, who defines proxy warfare as