The Destabilizing Effects of Foreign Paramilitaries in Africa

Foreign private militaries are murky organizations. Often structured like public state forces, but operating outside the official jurisdiction of any country, paramilitaries act outside of the law with little to no oversight. There is also a relative paucity of research focusing on the effects of private militaries in the countries in which they operate. Existing work on paramilitaries is often restricted to qualitative case studies, though this is by no means to the detriment of the literature. This study attempts to look at paramilitaries in global perspective, assessing where these actors come from, where they operate, and what their agendas are. I will supplement summary statistics and regression analysis with a case study focusing on Russia's Wagner group which operates in several African nations.