The Middle East Studies Forum invites you to the webinar ‘Proxy War Research: Progress, Pitfalls and Promises’ presented by Dr Vladimir Rauta from the University of Reading (UK).

This session is organised as part of our project on ‘Proxy Wars in the Middle East and South Asia’, sponsored by Carnegie Corporation New York (grant no. G-18-55949).

Proxy wars research has been growing exponentially over the last decade in reference to the phenomenon’s empirical spread. From the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, and overlapping with a range of conflict scenarios such as great power competition and the ‘by-with-through’ COIN paradigm, proxy wars are ‘all the rage’.

In Dr Rauta’s recent work, he has suggested we think about the proxy war literature as having developed across generations. In doing so, Dr Rauta underlines the successful progress of the debate, instead of emphasising shortcomings or problems.

Entitled ‘Proxy War Research: Progress, Pitfalls, and Promises’, this talk pushes the argument further by probing some conceptual, theoretical, and empirical aspects concerning how we’ve been studying proxy wars, whose clarification yields the benefit of drawing the contours of a cumulated, creative, and cross-disciplinary future research agenda.

You can access the webinar flyer here.

To find out more, including information on the speakers and how to connect to the Zoom session, please visit the MESF website.