About the author(s):
Lisa K. Dicker is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and Clinical Instructor in the Harvard Negotiation & Mediation Clinical Program’s Dispute Systems Clinic, collaborating with organizations such as the UN IOM, the US Institute of Peace, Justice Call, and Freedom House. Prior to joining Harvard Law, Lisa was Counsel at a global pro bono law firm where she advised on peace negotiations, conflict prevention, transitional justice, and post-conflict democratic transitions. Lisa’s practitioner work and research is at the intersection of public international law and conflict resolution. Her work has been published in journals including the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution, the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, the University of Memphis Law Review, and the ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law, among others. Lisa holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in Political Science and Asian Studies from the University of Tennessee.
Erin Rebecca Bloom is a Consultant with Metropolitan Group, where she specializes in democracy and corruption narratives. She previously worked for a global pro bono law firm where she provided strategic advising on peace negotiations, ceasefires, and transitional justice. Erin specializes in fragile states and post-conflict transitions, violence prevention, and conflict resolution. She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Willamette University, and holds a Certificate in Transnational Law from the University of Geneva.
This post forms part of the Wagner Symposium hosted by the Armed Groups and International Law blog. The introductory post can be found here. The symposium seeks to foster deeper discussion on how best to address the Wagner Group and its affiliated entities.
Security sector reform (SSR) is a highly complex and difficult process that aims to rehabilitate and, if necessary, rebuild state security forces to ensure accountability, civilian oversight, and adherence to the rule of law. This process is challenging in any context, but becomes more complicated when foreign actors and entities are involved and must be accounted for.
SSR is “the political and technical process of improving state and human security by making security provision, management and oversight more effective and more accountable, within a framework of democratic civilian control, rule of law and respect for human rights.” SSR addresses the strategic, organizational, and operational levels of state security forces – including the military, police, and intelligence services – to transform them into effective, law abiding forces with civilian oversight. In many scenarios, foreign security forces are involved in providing some or all of the aforementioned security activities – none to any greater degree than the Russian-backed Wagner Group, a quasi-private military company that operates in dozens of countries under opaque circumstances and unclear legal frameworks. It is this scale of operation and lack of accountability and oversight that creates a unique set of challenges where the Wagner Group is concerned.
The use of foreign mercenary forces can be traced back thousands of years, nearly as old as the concept of organized militaries themselves. However, the modern proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) has been rising over the last thirty years, as states have commissioned “surrogate” forces to supplement more conventional state-run military and police forces, used both inside the borders of that state and in territory of other states. These private actors may be traditional mercenaries (individuals hired to serve as embedded members of a foreign army), security contractors (hired for specific roles, such as protecting infrastructure or private security), or support staff for discrete non-combatant activities (such as research and analysis, intelligence gathering, military asset maintenance, or support for cyber operations). The legality and acceptability of each of these uses is a topic for another article, but notably, these uses differ greatly from the independent, offensive, and broad role that the Wagner Group steps into in conflicts.
Due to its status as a civilian-military entity sometimes under the “nominal control” of the Russian security apparatus, the Wagner Group has been able to accumulate resources and force strength at a scale that dwarfs any other PMSC. This has allowed the Wagner Group to establish a significantly more dominant presence in states with weakened or insufficient security apparatuses. In fragile, impoverished, and unstable states that struggle to provide security or enforce the rule of law, the Wagner Group can provide much-needed stability and power to a struggling government. However, these same circumstances create opportunities for exploitation and encroachment when it comes to the Wagner Group’s mission and strength of force. In the Central African Republic, for example, the Wagner Group “embedded itself within the country’s political, economic, and social structures,” establishing increasing control over CAR’s natural resources, and using its military and policing presence to secure its economic interests in gold and diamond mines and the timber industry. In Mali, the military government – with Russian assistance – brought in the Wagner Group in 2021, with around 1500 Wagner Group personnel replacing French troops who had been supporting efforts against Salafi-jihadist groups. Wagner Group activities involved offensive military operations seeking to recapture areas from separatist control, training Malian forces, and providing security for senior officials. Wagner Group operations in Mali peaked in 2023, with 2000 personnel including a small air force. For these services, it is estimated that Wagner Group charged Mali approximately $10 million USD per year – twice the budget allocated for Mali’s Department of Justice.
The breadth of the Wagner Group’s presence, the scale of its activities, and the secrecy under which it operates creates key challenges for SSR processes, which we will cover in this article. For the purposes of this article, we are focusing only on SSR contexts where the Wagner Group is working alongside, within, and in place of state security forces (as opposed to fomenting or instigating opposition or paramilitary activity, like in Sudan, or invading activities in like Ukraine). The challenges the Wagner Group poses in SSR processes are particularly acute in contexts where they are significantly supplementing, leading, or replacing what should be state security force functions, and will be the focus of the following sections.
Key Challenge 1: The lack of transparency and the entrenchment of the Wagner Group will make it difficult to assess the SSRs needed.
The first step in well-designed SSR processes is determining the precise reforms needed to achieve the goals of SSR. The Wagner Group is a purposefully opaque entity, and its precise activities, numbers, funding streams, chain of command, capabilities, and origins of personnel as a whole and in any given context are strategically obscured and any limited data available typically comes from external third-party reporting. Moreover, the Wagner Group’s operations themselves are nontransparent, including when violations of domestic and international laws occur in the course of their activities. While there is third-party documentation and reporting on crimes and atrocities committed by the Wagner Group, there is likely significantly more that happens in the shadows.
This presents an enormous challenge for SSR in a state when the activities and personnel of the Wagner Group are intertwined with the state security forces: It is difficult to know who has accomplished what and who has done what. For example, in Mali, while the Wagner Group is sometimes taking on offensive military operations alone, in many other instances as its time in the state has progressed it is doing so combined with the Malian military and local militias. This makes it exceedingly complicated, in turn, to disentangle the Wagner Group from the state security forces for the purpose of understanding what needs to be addressed by SSR, including capability and capacity deficits, oversight issues, responsibility for harms and crimes that must be addressed, and so forth.
Key Challenge 2: Due to the Wagner Group’s outsized and prolonged role in many contexts, SSRs will risk creating a power and security vacuum.
A precondition of SSR is that a “minimum level of security is required to advance the process” because “SSR cannot be implemented in a security vacuum.” In contexts in which the Wagner Group is present at the behest of the domestic government, it is because the state security forces are significantly lacking in the ability to maintain security and control in the state.
The Wagner Group is taking on not only discrete tasks, but in certain contexts (primarily in Africa, where it operates under the rebranded “Africa Corps” structure) has taken on a more entrenched role in the state security apparatus. For example, Wagner increased its direct military presence in the Central African Republic in 2020 in response to rebel group activities, with 2600 of its trained soldiers fighting alongside the CAR military and UN peacekeeping forces to regain control of the area. Over the following three years, the Wagner Group has maintained an active presence on the ground in CAR, and was involved in over one-third of the incidents of political violence recorded in the country. Notably, the CAR military itself has only around 14 to 15 thousand troops (an increase from 10 thousand in 2020). By some estimates, Wagner personnel participated in over 90 percent of Malian Armed Forces operations in Central Mali.
This significant presence and operational load in comparison to the domestic security forces begs the question of how SSR could take place for domestic security forces if they are largely reliant on an external PMSC for much of the state’s security functions. The Wagner Group’s model is certainly not to assist in growing the size, capacities, and capabilities of the domestic forces; that would be bad business. Indeed, the dependence of the state on Wagner can weaken the already struggling state security sector over time as reliance on Wagner causes continued diminishing of skills, capabilities, and capacities. SSR would require a departure or significant reduction of the Wagner Group presence to reform state security forces, but that is likely to create a power and security vacuum in the intervening years that it will take to reform and bolster the state security forces such that they can maintain security on their own.
Key Challenge 3: Typical SSR mechanisms will struggle to address the issues created by the Wagner Group.
Though the mechanisms used to achieve SSR are varied, commonly used means include legal and policy reforms, structural changes to the forces, training programs, accountability processes, and personnel vetting and lustration. The Wagner Group will create challenges in implementing these mechanisms, especially in contexts where they are deeply entrenched in state security forces and have taken on significant security functions. Beyond the difficulties already discussed in assessing what SSR reforms are needed in such contexts, the Wagner Group’s presence will likely create obstacles in establishing civilian oversight, clear chains of command, frameworks to ensure adherence to the rule of law and rules of engagement, and respect for human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed, PMSCs like the Wagner Group often structure themselves purposefully to avoid — or at least seek to obscure and confuse — rule of law and accountability at the state level as well as under international law, and states contracting with the Wagner Group often seek out its assistance in order to circumvent the limitations law places on state security forces and to avoid the state being held accountable for the perpetration of crimes. In the instances where Wagner departs or significantly reduces its presence, new challenges will arise in filling the gaps in their absence, especially in states with limited or insufficient resources and personnel themselves. There may also be a strong domestic security sector resistance to restraint and alignment with rules, rights, and laws, given that the state personnel trained by and working with the Wagner Group learned another model of engagement. And finally, the implementation of critical SSR mechanisms, like legal and policy reforms and structural changes to the forces, requires significant state control over armed actors to bring them in line with civilian oversight, clear chain of command, abiding by rules of engagement, and respect for human rights and rule of law. These efforts are certainly difficult to undertake if Wagner is still present in the state, but also extremely challenging in the wake of their presumed absence, given the erosion of state control over security that will have occurred during their presence.
Moreover, accountability processes and personnel vetting and lustration may be difficult for a number of reasons. First, the Wagner Group is known for having committed widespread abuses and violations, and their lack of transparency and murky status under law creates barriers to investigating and prosecuting them, leading to a culture of impunity. This could make it difficult for the state to establish accountability processes for members of their own forces. Additionally, if state personnel vetting and lustration and accountability processes focus on removing from their forces and potentially prosecuting individuals who committed violations of rights and laws, it may generate resentment if there is not any accountability for Wagner Group personnel who committed the same acts. The Human Rights Watch notes that the Malian government has made “scant progress” in investigating abuses of international humanitarian and human rights violations in the country, including those perpetrated by Wagner. For example, following the 2022 massacre of hundreds of civilians in Moura, the Malian government blocked all efforts by the international community to investigate the incident and prosecute those responsible. Similar incidents in CAR have gone uninvestigated as well. Moreover, it may be legally difficult to establish who was responsible for what when state forces were intermixed with Wagner Group forces and the chain of command was murky.
Conclusion
These key challenges are only the beginning of difficulties for SSR where the Wagner Group has become deeply intertwined with the state military over a prolonged period. However, at their core is a need to identify strategies to disentangle the Wagner Group’s activities, capabilities, capacities, contributions, and crimes from those of the state security forces and to create means to support the state in holding security and control without Wagner while the state undergoes reforms.