On this week’s Conflicted Community episode, we invite the researcher and author Jack Margolin onto the show, to talk about his recently published book, The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army.

Jack is an independent researcher and expert on modern mercenaries, focussing on conflict finance, guns and crime in data, who previously worked with the The Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

Continuing our Africa focus this season, Jack and Thomas discuss how Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of this Private Military Company, went from creating troll farms in St. Petersburg to sending troops to Syria and then Africa, with malign interests every step of the way. Jack explains how the ‘adhocracy’ Wagner operate in the region sees them exploit local resources for monetary gain, while also bolstering Russian interests in the region by doing the jobs that nation states and more cautious mercenary groups were not able to do. But after Prigozhin’s downfall last year, are the Wagner Group still around? And will they continue to offer despotic African governments something the West cannot?

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