Secessionist Conflicts as Arenas of Strategic Competition for External Patrons: Case Studies from post-Cold War Europe

In the context of external involvement in secessionist conflicts patronage of conflict parties by powerful backers – and the resulting patron-client dyad - is widely discussed in the study of separatism and de facto statehood. However, much less attention is dedicated to the relationships and dynamics between various patrons involved in the opposing sides of conflicts. This topic used to be prominent in traditional IR works on patron-client relationships (PCRs) such as that of by Shoemaker and Spanier. They established that a key motivation for patrons entering the PCR is to gain strategic advantage against geopolitical rivals. As these works were predominantly written in the Cold War era, they almost exclusively focus on the competition between the two hegemonic superpowers of that time: the US and the Soviet Union. As such, they fall short in grasping the reality of an increasingly multi-polar world in which the configuration of global and regional powers have significantly altered. After a long decade following the implosion of the Soviet Union strategic competition is on the rise again in Europe as US and Russian interest has been increasingly clashing in the "near abroad" of Russia and beyond. Furthermore, the European Union, while lacking its own military, has become a key player in the European security nexus and states such as Turkey are progressively seeking strategic advancement in their neighborhood. In this multi-polar configuration, both the extent of contested spheres of influence and the intensity of strategic competition increases, resulting among others in a new arms race and wars with arguably proxy/surrogate characteristics such as that in Ukraine. The proposed paper attempts to rework the PCR concept for this altered post-Cold War security order in Europe by studying a particular scene of strategic competition between patrons: secessionist conflicts. As these conflicts tend to occur in contested geopolitical spaces, they attract special attention from regional and global powers and often involve powerful rivals as patrons of the opposing sides. For example, Kosovo could be seen as a proxy conflict between the US and Russia, or the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict – which involves a disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia – could be interpreted as part of the struggle for dominance in the South Caucasus between Russia and Turkey. These conflicts could serve as a form of "low-level" warfare between the patrons, as they seek to protect their interests, advance their agendas and deter their competitors through low cost proxy means. Hence, the expectation is that the presence of high intensity strategic competition is likely to have significant impact on secessionist conflicts and could dramatically alter the conflict calculus and expectations about the conflict outcome. The proposed paper seeks to explore how strategic competition among external patrons play out over time within a case and across various cases in a qualitative comparative approach. The goal is to investigate how patron states exploit secessionist conflicts and how the presence and intensity of strategic competition among them shapes the relationships with their clients, the conflict calculus, and expected conflict outcomes.