Proxy is Not a Pejorative
by Amos Fox
11.15.2024 at 06:01am
Let’s begin by stating in the affirmative that the word proxy is not a pejorative. This includes the ideas of proxy war, proxies (i.e., the actors), proxy strategy, and principal-proxy relationships. Now having cleared the collective air, let’s explore why this is the case.
The highly contested and emotionally charged nature of proxy wars, which is also known as “conflict delegation,” is an emotionally charged concept in war, has led to two dominant perspectives in how it is studied and discussed by scholars, institutions, and other researchers.
Some scholars approach the subject from an impassive position of causal identification and realistic assessments of the proxy dynamics. Scholar Tony Pfaff offers another way of thinking about this approach. He states that researchers can approach the subject from a morally neutral position, and just focus on structural causality. Others, however, take an emotional position. These scholars, institutions, and other researchers focus on idealizing the proxy and ignoring how the structural of principal-proxy dyads impacts the character of the relationship between the dyad’s two actors, and advocate for fanciful language that lightens the ostensible negativity associated with the term proxy.
Causal realists work to align practice and empirical evidence to enhance existing theories of proxy and create new theories where extant concepts don’t exist or are no longer useful. Scholars approaching the subject from an idealized mindset do not operate in empirical causality, but instead use whimsical idealizations about personal and group connections to discuss the subject.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2024/11/15/proxy-is-not-a-pejorative/
