Private military companies are reshaping conflicts across Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe raising fundamental questions about accountability and the monopoly of force
Introduction: The Privatisation of War
The idea that military force is the exclusive preserve of states — that only governments have the legitimate authority to organise and deploy lethal force — is a relatively modern concept, dating primarily from the consolidation of the European state system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Before that consolidation, private military enterprise was common: mercenary armies, privateers licensed to attack enemy shipping, and military contractors who raised, equipped, and commanded forces on behalf of the highest bidder were standard features of the international security landscape.
That model never entirely disappeared, and in the twenty-first century it has returned with renewed vigour and new sophistication. Private military companies — ranging from logistics and base support contractors supplying Western militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Wagner Group’s operational deployment in conflicts from Syria to Mali — are active across multiple theatres simultaneously. Their activities raise fundamental questions about accountability, about the laws of armed conflict, about the relationship between commercial incentives and strategic outcomes, and about what it means for the state to maintain a monopoly on the use of force.
Section I: The Wagner Group and the Russian Private Military Model
The Wagner Group — the Russian private military company that deployed in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Mozambique, and Ukraine — was the most significant private military enterprise of the early twenty-first century, not despite its connections to the Russian state but because of them. Wagner functioned as a tool of Russian foreign policy, deploying in contexts where the Kremlin sought military influence without formal military commitment, providing deniability for Russian-sponsored operations, and enabling the projection of Russian power in ways that bypassed formal military command structures and international scrutiny.
The June 2023 mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, and his death two months later in a plane crash widely attributed to Russian state action, demonstrated both the dangers of cultivating powerful private military actors and the difficulty of controlling them when their interests diverge from those of their principal. Wagner’s successor arrangements — the Africa Corps operating in the Sahel under different branding and command structures — continue to demonstrate the utility of private military enterprise as a tool of state-adjacent power projection.
| “Wagner demonstrated that a private military company with state backing can do things that formal military forces cannot — operate in grey zones, provide deniability, circumvent accountability mechanisms, and develop a loyalty to its commander rather than to the state. That model is being studied and emulated across multiple countries.” — Dr. Sean McFate Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council; author, The New Rules of War |
Section II: Western Contractors and the Accountability Gap
The privatisation of military functions is not exclusively a Russian or authoritarian-state phenomenon. The United States relied on private military contractors to an extraordinary degree in Iraq and Afghanistan — with contractor personnel at times outnumbering uniformed military personnel in both theatres. Firms like KBR, DynCorp, MPRI, and many others provided logistics, base support, training, intelligence, and in some cases direct security services in contexts where the line between contractor and combatant was legally and ethically blurry.
The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal — in which private contractors employed as interrogators and translators were present during or involved in documented abuse — exposed the accountability gap that privatisation creates. Military personnel are subject to military law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Contractors operating in conflict zones exist in a legal grey zone where jurisdiction is contested, accountability mechanisms are weak, and the commercial incentives of their employers may not align with the strategic and ethical requirements of the mission they support.
Section III: The Accountability and Law Challenge
International humanitarian law — the laws of armed conflict — was designed primarily around state militaries operating under clear command structures with defined chains of responsibility. Its application to private military actors is legally contested, practically difficult to enforce, and frequently inadequate to the situations in which private military companies operate. The Montreux Document of 2008, a non-binding international text developed under Swiss and International Committee of the Red Cross auspices, articulates the responsibilities of states with respect to private military companies operating in their territory or under their jurisdiction — but it has not been universally adopted and has no enforcement mechanism.
The growth of private military power creates a structural challenge for the international humanitarian and legal framework: as more military activity is conducted by actors who are not formally state military forces, the legal frameworks designed to govern state military behaviour become progressively less applicable to the actual conduct of armed conflict. Updating those frameworks to address private military actors — without creating regulatory regimes that simply drive the industry into less regulated jurisdictions — is a governance challenge that international institutions have not yet fully engaged.
Conclusion: The State, the Market, and the Monopoly of Force
The rise of private military power is not merely a tactical or operational development — it is a structural challenge to one of the foundational principles of the modern international order: that states hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of organised violence. When private military companies conduct combat operations, train foreign military forces, influence political outcomes in weak states, and operate across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously in ways that no single state fully controls, the effective monopoly on organised force that the international order assumes is eroding.
Managing that erosion — preserving meaningful accountability for the use of lethal force while acknowledging the legitimate roles that private security and military contractors play in modern security architectures — requires both national regulatory frameworks and international governance mechanisms that are currently inadequate to the scale and sophistication of the private military industry. The alternative — a security landscape in which private military force is available to any actor willing to pay for it, without effective accountability — is one with profound implications for the stability of the international order.
