Introduction
By grabbing the headlines over recent weeks, the Wagner company, under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin has helped bring Private Military Companies (PMCs) from out of the shadows. While the phenomenon of PMCs is not new, the last three decades have seen a significant increase in the outsourcing of military and security functions to private actors. The role of PMCs can range widely, from ensuring the physical protection of infrastructure abroad or the close protection of VIPs to performing critical combat tasks such as special operations.
This ART paper does not cover the soft end of the private security industry, for which many states around the world have introduced or adapted their legislation. It rather focuses on those companies operating in third countries and performing a wide range of combat or military tasks. Even these companies operate according to very different models. Some are fully integrated into the state military apparatus, whilst others function in a way which more closely resembles the traditional role of mercenaries.
The broad scope of PMCs mean that they constitute a military tool with potentially far-reaching consequences. They often operate outside any conventional legal framework, and their field of activity is expanding. The extent to which Wagner, as a private group, has been able to take the place of the regular Russian army on the battlefield in Ukraine, has been quite extraordinary. In this case, Wagner’s ‘client’ was the Russian state, although the relationship between Wagner and the military establishment has clearly been very tense. This tension spilled over into overt rebellion in June 2023 when Wagner clashed with the Russian armed forces and began marching on Moscow, having taken control of the city of Rostov, the HQ of the Russian Southern military district.
The circumstances surrounding the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin two months later have only served to underline the long-standing tensions between Wagner and the Russian state.
States turn to PMCs for different reasons, but this trend is part of a wider process of the dismantling and reconfiguration of some of the traditional tools of state sovereignty in response to the rapidly evolving security environment (border/territory control, protection of infrastructure, hybrid threats, propaganda…). In the West, this trend has frequently been driven by budgetary pressure, a response to public opinion to reduce direct state investment in the military (Cold War fatigue in the 1990s, for example) and the increasing complexity of some out-of-area operations. Elsewhere, the rise of PMCs can be seen as a direct consequence of the weakness of state structures generally and the military in particular. At the same time, conflict zones are on the rise. As a result, governments often turn to the private sector as a way of getting more value for their money.
Yet PMCs are increasingly seen as problematic. They can give rise to issues of legitimacy and accountability and can be seen as potentially undermining state sovereignty. Accountability issues mean that their effectiveness and their wider impact as a force for peace and stability can also be called into question. There remains also the issue of how to ensure their demilitarization once a conflict is over…
Read/download the PDF report here.
Leave a Reply