Mercenaries in the Service of Authoritarian States
By using mercenaries and ostensibly private security services, China and Russia project power and protect their interests abroad without openly deploying their armed forces, argue Julia Friedrich and Niklas Masuhr in this CSS Analysis. However, in doing so, the two countries follow two very different paths.
In a European context, the privatization of military tasks is often associated with the use of Western private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, there are increasing reports of other state actors turning to private military services. Outsourcing the government’s security functions to private providers, or creating new security tasks for nominally private security providers, is thus not only a Western phenomenon.