"BLACK CAT IN A DARK ROOM": EXAMINING THE IMPACT OF RUSSIA'S WAGNER GROUP IN THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC AND MALI.

• Author: Mussa, Marco

INTRODUCTION (1)

"[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 peace-keeping 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 actively participated in the annexation of Crimea, as part of Russia's contingent of "polite people" who took over the peninsula in 2014, and was later noted to have participated in the infamous battle of Debaltseve in January 2015, the group's visibility reached new heights once Vladimir Putin announced the commencement of Russia's "special military operation." (7) Since then, Wagner, led by its chief Yevegny Prigozhin, has emerged as a leading force behind Moscow's invasion, playing a crucial role in the Russian capture of Soledar in January 2023 while being engaged in the bloody Bakhmut offensive as of April. This newfound notoriety has been further amplified not only by the Group's recruitment of prisoners to be used as "cannon fodder," (8) but also by the growing public feud between Prigozhin and the Russian Defense Ministry, whom the warlord accuses of upstaging, and undermining, the work conducted by the mercenaries. (9)

Wagner's growing importance to the Russian military effort in Ukraine has catalyzed interest in the group within the international forum. (10) At the same time, its widespread presence in other contexts, such as Africa, has drawn little attention to its activities undertaken and its crucial role as part of Russia's illiberal peacebuilding model. Deployed in multiple geographic areas to advance Putin's strategic agenda, the African continent is where Wagner has recently played a more prominent role, particularly in Libya, Mali, Sudan, the Central African Republic (CAR), and others. Against this background, its increasing relevance has not heretofore been matched by adequate scrutiny. Both the literature on Russia's foreign and security policies, and the one concerning PSMCs, have been, until recently, relatively underdeveloped concerning this specific actor. Wagner in particular has been fundamentally understudied, a lack made all the more visible by Moscow's full-fledged invasion of its neighbor.

Furthermore, the nexus between Wagner's activities and their implications on local peace and security has been largely ignored by in the debate. As such, in order to grasp the Group's impact on those aforementioned dynamics, especially when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict and its future evolution, it is crucial to investigate its activities beyond the European theatre. Consequently, this work can be conceived as an attempt to fill this lacuna by looking at where the group has been active the longest, namely Sub-Saharan Africa. To this end, the paper will first introduce the conceptual frameworks employed, outlining the theoretical insights on the Russian peacebuilding and conflict management model, and those on the impact which resorting to PSMCs has on the state. Subsequently, two case studies--CAR and Mali--will be introduced, and the conceptual tools presented in the first section will be applied to these two geographical contexts. The objective is to highlight how the Wagner Group interacts with the contemporary African state and the broader illiberal peacebuilding strategy, and the repercussions that this interaction has elsewhere in the world.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS

Russia's "Illiberal" Conflict Management Approach

"Pax Rossica," Moscow's model of peacebuilding and conflict management, is arguably in its embryonic stages, lacking a comprehensive theoretical backbone or a cohesive doctrine. Nevertheless, the Kremlin's form of mirotvorchestvo, which can also be translated as "peacekeeping," first began to figure as a prominent component of Russia's foreign and security policies with the rise of Putin in the early 2000s, in turn finding the nucleus of its identity in its "ideological and normative" opposition to the "liberal models of peacebuilding" and conflict resolution. (11) Scholars such as Roy Allison have noted that the theoretical and doctrinal divides in peacebuilding approaches between the Kremlin and the liberal West are, at their very core, linked to the phenomenon of "normative friction" which has arisen in light of Russia's contemporary "quest for respect" and recognition as a great power and "equal partner" of the West. (12)

Moscow has long viewed the so-called "diffusion" of liberal norms across the world, and specifically within Russia's post-Soviet "near abroad," as a direct affront to the country's identity as a sovereign state, as well as its "national security" (13) Therefore, and somewhat unsurprisingly, the Russian government has long championed the primacy of sovereignty norms, which should, in Moscow's opinion, be reinforced by a "strong state [structure] and a [bullet-proof] political order." (14) Liberal ventures, such as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), have in turn been portrayed by the Kremlin as simply a "fig-leaf" for "western-backed regime change," (15) while liberal peace frameworks have been deemed inherently ineffective and destabilizing. (16) Furthermore, and most importantly, within the context of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, Russia has wholeheartedly prioritized "order over justice" or human rights, advocating for "short-term goals of conflict management" over long-term solutions (17) while simultaneously disregarding calls to address the "structural causes of conflict," by "reducing opportunities and resources" for rebel and/or opposition mobilization through the direct use of "state coercion" and "hierarchical power structures." (18)

Therefore, Russia's so-called "counter-norm entrepreneurship" can be distinguished by a number of underlying principles which have defined Moscow's engagements in conflict areas, ranging, most notably, from the Chechen insurgency in the 1990s to the Syrian Civil War in the past decade. (19) David Lewis has noted that the Kremlin's approach is, firstly, based on the brute "use or threat of force," seeing the Russian establishment combine potential mediation efforts with conventional coercion. (20) This emphasis on power projection also feeds into Moscow's focus on the negotiations themselves, since although Russia leaves the door open to mediation with "multiple actors regardless of ideology," it prioritizes such initiatives only from a "position of strength." (21) Furthermore, the Kremlin also prefers to engage in "multipolar," rather than multilateral, internationalized deals, believing that the key actors in resolving conflicts are "states... [rather than] international organisations [or] civil society." This notion also inadvertently feeds into the final component of Russia's conflict management approach: the West is, by its nature, viewed as a "problem, not the solution," meaning that its involvement should be "managed and minimized." (22)

In addition, the aforementioned principles, quite interestingly, overlap with the importance that Russia places on the control of so-called social domains" within a fraught context, specifically public discourse, physical space, and economic resources. (23) Moscow actively limits any attempts at open public discussion and communication, constraining dissenting voices through direct "hegemonic discourse," which actively employs news and media sources in order to control knowledge production. (24) Moreover, the Kremlin's conflict management approach makes good use of the "political, physical and symbolic dominance of space," evident in military patrols, encampments and urban reconstruction, a framework which directly opposes "political autonomy or...