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Home > Open Access Journals > JSS > Vol. 12 > No. 4 (2019)

 

Author Biography

Jakob Hauter is a London-based researcher focusing on Ukraine and Russia. Since September 2018, he has been a doctoral student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) of University College London (UCL). His research focuses on the interplay between domestic and foreign factors in the escalation of the conflict in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region. Between 2013 and 2018, he worked as an analyst for Russian and Ukrainian media and current affairs for a unit of the U.S. Embassy London. He holds an MA in Contemporary European Studies from the University of Bath and a BA in International Relations from the University of Dresden. He also spent time at Saint Petersburg State University and the University of Siena as part of his degrees and worked as an intern at the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Kyiv and the German Embassy in Moscow.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.12.4.1756

Subject Area Keywords

Civil war and internal conflict, Conflict studies, International relations, Irregular warfare, Nonstate actors, Russia

Abstract

Drawing the dividing line between civil and interstate war can be a difficult task. This task is made even more difficult by a gap in the current typology of armed conflict. The conflict studies literature in general and the coding rules of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program in particular acknowledge that internal conflict can involve external actors but ignore that interstate conflict can be disguised as internal rebellion. This creates an unnecessary risk of categorization errors and a risk of neglecting the potential complexity of interstate conflict in the modern world. This article uses Idean Salehyan's distinction between intervention and delegation, the Nicaragua Judgement of the International Court of Justice, and the debate on the causes of the war in eastern Ukraine to illustrate this point. On the basis of this discussion, it proposes the introduction of a new category – delegated interstate conflict – to create a more coherent and symmetrical typology.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their feedback, which greatly improved the present article. He would also like to thank his PhD supervisors, Professor Andrew Wilson and Dr Ben Noble, for encouraging him to publish this article and for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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