Fault line wars involve three tiers of participants plus diasporas

Evidence

States and groups have different levels of involvement in fault line wars. At the primary level are those parties actually fighting and killing each other. These may be states, as in the wars between India and Pakistan and between Israel and its neighbors, but they may also be local groups, which are not states or are, at best, embryonic states, as was the case in Bosnia and with the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. These conflicts may also involve secondary level participants, usually states directly related to the primary parties, such as the governments of Serbia and Croatia in the former Yugoslavia, and those of Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus. Still more remotely connected with the conflict are tertiary states, further removed from the actual fighting but having civilizational ties with the participants, such as Germany, Russia, and the Islamic states with respect to the former Yugoslavia; and Russia, Turkey, and Iran in the case of the Armenian-Azeri dispute. These third level participants often are the core states of their civilizations. Where they exist, the diasporas of primary level participants also play a role in fault line wars. Given the small numbers of people and weapons usually involved at the primary level, relatively modest amounts of external aid, in the form of money, weapons, or volunteers, can often have a significant impact on the outcome of the war. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 755

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the primary/secondary/tertiary participant taxonomy that structures Huntington’s fault line war analysis.
• XREF: The observation that modest external aid can swing small-scale wars connects to civil war intervention literature and current proxy-war dynamics in Ukraine and Syria.