PIs Erica Borhard and Jack Snyder continue work on their project, “Dangerous Liaisons: Power and Influence in Proxy Alliances.” Proxy alliances appeal to states because they enable governments to project power, undermine rivals, and wage war “on the cheap” and, ideally, without attribution. However, states engaged in proxy alliances often find themselves at the behest of their far weaker allies—unable to influence their proxies’ behavior and drawn into unwanted conflict escalation on their behalf—and fail to achieve their strategic objectives. Given these potential pitfalls, why do states form proxy alliances? What accounts for variation in states’ successful leverage of proxies to achieve foreign policy goals? Our project will analyse patterns of power and influence in the context of proxy alliances and develop a theory of influence in proxy alliances, to test the claim that the very factors that make proxy warfare appealing—its clandestine, informal nature—threaten to undermine governments’ abilities to exert leverage over their proxies.