For most of Europe’s history, private armies and mercenaries were the standard (McFate, 2014). This began to shift in the 17th century when European states with greater access to capital and larger rural populations were in a position to maintain standing armies (Tilly, 1992). Yet private warfare found new opportunities in Europe’s expanding colonial ambitions.
When colonial administrators arrived in Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they encountered formidable obstacles regarding terrain and governance. To overcome them, they embraced methods of value extraction and control by, inter alia, setting up roadblocks, raiding for labour, and outsourcing security to protect their interests. After independence, centralized post-colonial regimes employed similar tactics to exert control over populations and resources, with political elites consolidating their positions by leveraging access to, and gaining balance among, outside powers (Bayart, 2009). This mode of governance, however, tied many African states to cold war patronage networks, and when those networks collapsed in the late 1980s, external financial and military support—particularly in the form of US or Soviet backing—sharply declined.
While the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics focused on internal reform, western governments promoted privatization as the pathway to prosperity. Pressured by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to rein in public spending, some leaders, including Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, sold off state assets while contracting ethnic militias to fight on the government’s behalf (Craze, 2024).
The 11 September 2001 attacks accelerated the US privatization of warfare. Other major powers, such as the Russian Federation, followed suit. As the Russian Federation transitioned to a professional force, it outsourced conscripted labour to the private sector (Maglov, Olevsky, and Treshchanin, 2019), opening the door for businessmen such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner Group.
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