Armies for Hire: Mercenaries, Contractors, and Wagner
Who hires soldiers, what they pay with, and who bears the cost, from Renaissance Italy to 2026: the condottieri and Machiavelli's warning, and a legal definition so narrow that almost no one meets it; Executive Outcomes and the corporate turn of the 1990s; America's contractor wars, from Blackwater at Nisour Square to the Abu Ghraib verdict; the Wagner Group from Syria to Mali, its march on Moscow, and the Russian state's takeover as Africa Corps; Turkey's Syrian fighters and the Gulf's Colombian veterans; and the freelancers hired in Congo and Haiti. Where the subject argues with itself, over whether hired armies win and whether they make abuses easier to deny, each side's case comes before the course's reading. Nine worked examples, from three soldiers run through the law's six tests to Moscow's price against a poor state's budget. Opens with a Who's Who.