Document Type : Original Independent Original Article
Highlights
Introduction
The classification of armed conflicts constitutes an indispensable precondition for the application of international humanitarian law (IHL), since the applicable rules, the scope of protection afforded to victims, the status of detainees, and the responsibility of parties cannot be determined until the legal nature of a conflict is established. IHL has traditionally relied on a binary distinction between international armed conflicts, governed primarily by Common Article 2 of the Geneva Conventions, and non-international armed conflicts, governed by Common Article 3 and Additional Protocol II. This dichotomy proved workable in classical interstate and internal conflicts, where the parties were generally identifiable and their relationships were relatively transparent.
Contemporary warfare, however, has substantially complicated this framework. The proliferation of proxy wars, indirect state intervention, the involvement of non-state armed groups, hybrid warfare, and multilayered conflicts has blurred the boundaries between the two traditional categories. In proxy wars, a supporting state may shape the conduct, capacity, or strategic direction of an armed group without openly entering the conflict, leaving the visible battlefield actor and the effective driving actor misaligned. In multilayered conflicts, a single crisis may simultaneously encompass several distinct hostile relationships—between a host state and domestic armed groups, between a host state and an intervening foreign state, among rival armed groups, and between coalition forces and various belligerents—each potentially governed by a different legal regime.
Against this background, the central question addressed in this study is how proxy wars and multilayered conflicts challenge the traditional criteria for classifying armed conflicts under IHL. The underlying hypothesis is that, notwithstanding their continued doctrinal validity, the traditional criteria require more precise, multifactorial, and relationship-specific application in order to remain workable in contemporary settings characterized by multiple actors and indirect involvement. The study aims to identify the principal classification challenges arising from proxy and multilayered warfare, including the difficulty of identifying the genuine party to a conflict, the attribution of a proxy group's conduct to its sponsoring state, the conditions under which an internal conflict becomes internationalized, and the determination of the applicable legal regime for each distinct hostile relationship within a complex crisis.
Methodology
The study adopts a descriptive-analytical method. It draws on primary international instruments, most notably the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, alongside the jurisprudence of international tribunals—particularly the International Court of Justice's judgment in the Nicaragua case and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's Tadić decisions, which articulate the competing "effective control" and "overall control" tests. The analysis further relies on specialized reports issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross, together with relevant legal doctrine in both English and Persian, in order to evaluate how the traditional classification criteria—intensity of violence, organization of armed groups, and the nature of foreign intervention—operate, and where they fall short, in proxy and multilayered conflict settings.
Findings
The findings indicate that the central difficulty in contemporary IHL is not the absence of applicable legal criteria, but rather the inadequacy of their simple, linear application to situations in which the visible actor, the effective actor, and the sponsoring state do not coincide. Four distinct challenges emerge in relation to proxy wars.
First, identifying the genuine party to a conflict becomes problematic when a supporting state shapes an armed group's operational capacity through financing, training, intelligence, or strategic direction while remaining formally absent from the battlefield. Second, attributing a proxy group's conduct to its sponsoring state encounters a significant evidentiary obstacle: the ICJ's effective control test, which requires control over the specific operation in which a violation occurred, sets a demanding threshold that sponsoring states can often evade, whereas the ICTY's overall control test, focused on organization, coordination, and general support, offers greater analytical flexibility but risks overextending the concept of intervention if applied without restraint. Third, it remains unclear at what threshold of foreign support an internal conflict becomes internationalized, since political or limited financial support does not suffice, while operational, organizational, or strategic dependency may. Fourth, sponsoring states can exploit this very ambiguity to deny responsibility, presenting their involvement as merely political or humanitarian support rather than operational control, thereby widening the gap between battlefield reality and legal accountability.
Multilayered conflicts generate a further, independent set of challenges. The first is the simultaneous coexistence of international and non-international hostile relationships within a single crisis, such that no single overarching classification can adequately capture the legal reality—exemplified by conflicts such as those in Syria, Yemen, and Libya, where host states, domestic armed groups, foreign forces, and proxy actors are concurrently involved. The second is the determination of the applicable rules for each distinct relationship, since the legal regime governing detention, targeting, and command responsibility may differ depending on which relationship a given act falls within; a relationship-based, or "pairing," approach is therefore needed instead of a single overarching label for the entire crisis. The third challenge concerns the convergence of multilayered conflicts with hybrid warfare and below-threshold actions—cyber operations, economic pressure, information warfare, and so-called "gray zone" activities—which may substantially influence the course of hostilities without independently triggering IHL, thereby obscuring the threshold for the law's application. The fourth challenge concerns the resulting ambiguity in the protection of victims: when the legal nature of a conflict and the applicable rules are unclear, the protection owed to civilians and detainees, and the possibility of holding responsible parties accountable, are correspondingly weakened.
Conclusion
The study confirms its underlying hypothesis: the traditional dichotomy between international and non-international armed conflicts retains its foundational validity, but its straightforward, single-criterion application is insufficient in the face of proxy and multilayered warfare. The central challenge is not a legal vacuum but the need for a more rigorous and relationship-specific application of existing criteria—criteria that account for the actual degree of operational control, the intensity and continuity of foreign involvement, the real independence of armed groups, and the plurality of concurrent hostile relationships within a single crisis. IHL must accordingly strike a balance between two competing imperatives: avoiding an excessive expansion of the concept of armed conflict that would absorb every tension-laden or security-related situation, and avoiding an overly restrictive or formalistic reading of the criteria that would obscure the genuine role of sponsoring states and the complexity of multi-actor conflicts. Achieving this balance through a relationship-by-relationship analysis, rather than a single overarching classification of an entire crisis, is presented as the principal means of preserving the protective function of international humanitarian law in contemporary warfare.
