From Protest to Proxy War: How Domestic Unrest Can Serve Diversionary Purposes

In the 1997 film Wag the Dog, a fictional U.S. administration manufactures a foreign crisis (in Albania) to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal at home. The premise is memorable, tapping into a long-standing idea in political science: leaders under pressure may escalate foreign conflict to divert attention from domestic problems.

A new paper by Harris scholars Austin L. Wright and Konstantin Sonin, with coauthors Natalie Ayers (Harvard University), Christopher W. Blair (Princeton University), and Joseph J. Ruggiero (University of Virginia), asks a sobering real-world question: when leaders face threats to their authority, does escalating violence abroad actually happen, and can we see it in the data?

Their answer, grounded in unprecedented evidence from eastern Ukraine, is yes.

The “diversionary theory of war” argues that leaders may use foreign conflict to shore up political support at home, by rallying national identity, scapegoating external enemies, or distracting the public from domestic grievances. Which is to say: distract the people. While the logic is intuitive, proving it empirically has been difficult: wars are rare, costly to initiate, and entangled with strategic behavior that obscures cause and effect.

The new paper shifts the focus from the onset of wars to something more subtle and more common: escalation within ongoing conflicts, especially proxy wars. Escalation offers many of the political benefits of diversion without the risks of starting a brand-new war.

“Diversionary conflict is often treated as a dramatic decision to start a war, but our findings show that it is also about escalation within conflicts that already exist,” said Sonin, the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at Harris. “Proxy wars give leaders a lower-cost way to manipulate public attention when domestic opposition intensifies.”

To formalize this intuition, the authors developed a model rooted in modern theories of regime change. The model shows how leaders facing unrest can use proxy-driven escalation, paired with state-controlled media narratives, to manipulate public information and weaken opposition coordination. This strategy is especially attractive for regimes that are already under pressure but still capable of shaping what citizens see and hear.

The heart of the paper draws on a remarkable new dataset: more than 1.8 million recorded ceasefire violations from eastern Ukraine between 2015 (after Russia annexed Crimea) and early 2022 (when Russia invaded Ukraine, launching the full-scale war). These records were compiled from daily reports by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission, which tracked violations of the Minsk ceasefire line using patrols, sensors, and aerial surveillance.

“By combining micro-level data on violence with evidence from state media, we’re able to directly observe how domestic unrest and foreign escalation move together,” said Associate Professor Austin L. Wright. “The pattern suggests that proxy warfare can function as a deliberate political tool, not just a byproduct of international conflict.”

Each incident includes precise information about timing, location, targets, and tactics, allowing the researchers to observe patterns of violence, including questions of when, where, and how.

When the authors pair this conflict data with granular information on opposition protests inside Russia, a striking pattern emerges: periods of heightened domestic protest are followed by increased separatist violence in eastern Ukraine. The escalation is not random; it aligns closely with moments when the Russian regime faced visible challenges at home.

Escalation was not limited to the battlefield. Using large-scale text analysis of Russian television, radio, and print media, the authors show that opposition protests inside Russia were accompanied by more inflammatory and hostile coverage of Ukraine. As domestic unrest rose, state-aligned media increasingly emphasized anti-Ukrainian narratives, helping justify violence abroad while diverting attention from political dissent at home.

A central contribution of the paper is showing how proxy conflicts (rather than direct wars between countries) can serve diversionary purposes. Proxy wars are relatively low-cost, deniable, and flexible. They allow leaders to intensify violence without formally declaring war, making them especially attractive tools for diversion.

In the case of Russia, long-standing territorial and identity disputes surrounding Ukraine heightened public sensitivity, increasing the potential payoff of diversionary escalation. This helps explain why the Donbas conflict, already simmering for years, became a vehicle for managing domestic political risk.

The findings shed new light on debates that span international relations, political economy, and authoritarian politics:

• Rather than choosing between repression and diversion, regimes can deploy both simultaneously, combining police crackdowns, propaganda, and foreign escalation.
• Domestic political pressures matter not just for whether wars begin, but for how they intensify.
• Understanding patterns of proxy escalation may help analysts better anticipate when local conflicts are at risk of widening.

By introducing a massive new dataset and linking micro-level violence to domestic political incentives, the paper opens new avenues for studying conflict, mediation, and authoritarian strategy. It also offers sobering context for understanding the escalation that preceded Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 under Vladimir Putin.

Wag the Dog may be satire, but this research shows that the logic behind it is very real.