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INTRODUCTION1
"[Africa] is not a major part of Russian foreign policy, but it's like many things that Putin has done throughout his twenty years in power, which is to use things opportunistically."2
- J. Peter Pham (former U.S. Special Envoy for the Sahel under the Trump Administration)
Although the resort to private security providers goes back centuries, the modern understanding of the phenomenon, centered on the "corporate identity" of current private security and military companies (PSMC, also abbreviated PMC), emerged after the end of the Cold War. It is particularly during the 1990s that the "write a cheque and end a war" logic gained momentum, with some brilliant exploits-notably Croatia-followed by more controversial instances, such as Sierra Leone. In parallel, countries such as the United States started employing these actors to pursue an interventionist foreign policy without the risk of remaining stuck in muddy conflicts with national troops.3 Others, especially in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, called for greater use of PSMCs to provide UN peacekeeping missions with ready-to-deploy divisions and avert similar tragedies in the future.4
Despite the benefits of resorting to private entities, which include their expendability (both political and material), flexibility, and arguable efficiency, many observers have drawn attention to the potentially disruptive effects of the "commodification of the use of force."5 Allowing other players to exercise military power in place of the government has led many to call for the diffusion of state authority.6 As will be highlighted in the following pages, the idea of overcoming the state-centred, Weberian understanding of the monopoly on the use of force is not the only ground of concern vis-avis the privatisation of security. Nevertheless, despite the criticisms voiced against the resort to PSMCs, they have gradually become a lucrative and geographically-widespread phenomenon, encompassing activities beyond mere war-fighting, such as consultancy, military training and logistical assistance.
One of the most well-known and recent examples of the privatization of security is the Wagner Group, the Russian private actor with murky ties to the Kremlin. Over the past decade, Wagner has progressively established itself as a crucial component of Moscow's peacebuilding toolbox and, more broadly, of its foreign policy. If anything, this reality has been clearly evident during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although the Group...