Yevgeny Prigozhin, the erstwhile leader of Russia‘s Wagner Group mercenary force, was blown up by Russian President Vladimir Putin in retaliation for his aborted June 2023 coup attempt. But Wagner remains very much alive. Today, Wagner is a kingpin criminal enterprise that holds great sway over numerous African governments. These include Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Libya, Mali, and Niger.
Wagner is just the tip of an iceberg of rising non-state actors that have the funding, armaments, and ambition to undermine national governments and international security greatly.
Offering violence in support of corrupted African regimes or military juntas, Wagner has successfully displaced Western counterterrorism forces and diplomatic efforts in favor of Moscow’s political agenda and its own financial interests. Where French and American forces were loath to support military actions that jeopardized human rights, Wagner is happy to eliminate anyone who threatens its partners. This includes innocent civilians, such as the 300 Malian boys and men who were summarily executed with Wagner participation in March 2022.
In return for its violent support of allied regimes, Wagner helps itself to gold and diamond mines. Sometimes, it takes a controlling stake in mining enterprises. Other times, as in Sudan, Wagner fighters simply conduct raids, killing miners and seizing control. In the Central African Republic, Wagner has used rape and murder to assert control over the country’s lucrative gold mining industry.
Employing well-armed mercenaries as the lever by which to secure or displace corrupt African governments, Putin is ensuring the compliance of numerous governments to Russian strategic interests. At the same time, Wagner personnel are able to enrich themselves and their masters at Russia’s GRU military intelligence service. The essential condition is one in which a non-state actor, Wagner, has made itself a multistate mafia client for sovereign nations. And while Wagner might serve the interests of those that employ it, the people of nations where the group operates will suffer under the group’s brutality and its cultivation of corruption.
It’s not just Wagner.
Southwestern Somalia remains beleaguered by the malicious influence of the terrorist group al Shabaab. From its haven, the group plots mass casualty attacks, such as the 2013 atrocity in Nairobi’s Westgate mall and two truck bombings in Mogadishu that killed nearly 600 people in 2017.
Just across the Gulf of Aden, the Houthi rebels in Yemen continue to hold hostage a key choke point for international maritime traffic. Armed and funded by Iran but also benefiting from rich smuggling activities, the Houthis have controlled Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, for 10 years. The group also retains control over a large area of Western Yemen, enabling its forces to target Red Sea shipping easily. So significant is the Houthis’ strength that even a large international flotilla of U.S.-led warships has failed to stop the attacks. Dozens of cargo vessels have been hit.
While the Biden administration’s reticence to take more aggressive action is part of the problem here, Yemen’s geography and the Houthis’ resilient resource base illustrate how a non-state actor can cause massive damage to international security. As Marine Log notes, “Alternate shipping routes around Africa add about 11,000 nautical miles, 1-2 weeks of transit time, and approximately $1 million in fuel costs for each voyage. For many shipping companies, the combined costs of crew bonuses, war risk insurance (roughly 1,000% more than pre-war costs), and Suez transit fees make the additional time and financial costs traveling around Africa less expensive by comparison.”
Apart from underlining the U.S. Navy‘s idiocy in reducing funding for cheap laser defenses against missile attacks, the Houthis have forced the Navy to expend dozens of multimillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile defense systems to intercept their attacks. These systems would already be in short supply in a prospective war with China over Taiwan. Their depletion thus poses a critical threat to other U.S. national security interests.
Islamist terrorist groups pose broader concerns. The Islamic State is reconstituting its forces via its ISIS-K syndicate. ISIS-K’s success comes via effective propaganda and leadership and the relative safe haven it has secured in Afghanistan since the U.S. military withdrawal and ensuing Taliban takeover. But its March massacre at a Moscow concert hall notwithstanding, ISIS-K is now actively plotting attacks against numerous Western targets, including in the United States. Six suspected ISIS-K terrorists who had illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border were arrested in major East Coast cities this summer.
Similarly, even as it suffers unprecedented blows from Israeli action, the Lebanese Hezbollah continues to hold major sway over political machinations in Beirut. Lebanese politics remain paralyzed due to Hezbollah’s demand that it set the form of the next government. Though funded and supported by Western powers, the Lebanese armed forces remain reluctant to challenge Hezbollah’s power base in the belief that doing so would lead to another bloody civil war. In turn, the very presence of Hezbollah’s weapons allows it to hold Lebanese sovereignty in a stranglehold.
The challenge of non-state actors that are destabilizing nation-states also exists far closer to home.
Each year, more than 35 million Americans are estimated to visit Mexico. The vast majority enjoy themselves and return home safely. But the reason that these Americans are able to return with a smile rather than in a casket isn’t by luck.
It’s because the narcotraffickers want it that way. American tourists are valuable for the revenue they bring to the Mexican economy and, thus, also to the narcotraffickers who take a cut from their front businesses and corrupt politician allies. In contrast, the endangerment of Americans would carry significant risks of costly U.S. government retaliation and jeopardize the cartels’ vastly lucrative drug export trade. Unfortunately, the cartels are far less concerned with the welfare of journalists, law enforcement personnel, and honest politicians seeking to serve their people. Nearly 50,000 innocent people have been killed in the drug war that has ravaged Mexico since 2006.
Take the example of Alejandro Arcos, the mayor of Chilpancingo, who was murdered in October only one week after taking office. Daring to offer voters a stronger hand against the narcotraffickers, Arcos ended up with his head being left on a car hood (unlike ISIS, the narcotraffickers do not use sharpened knives).
Take the example of “Eduardo,” the police officer who, in 2019, had the professional courage to arrest a son of Sinaloa cartel lord El Chapo. Then-President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador quickly ordered the son’s release. But Eduardo was later ambushed and executed in a hail of more than 150 gunshots. The narcotraffickers rely upon their multibillion-dollar annual revenues to purchase high-end military equipment both from the U.S. and from corrupt Mexican military officials. They then buy off or eliminate those who oppose them.
Finally, take the example of Mauricio Solís, a journalist who was shot dead in October for his reporting on narcotrafficking. Well over 100 Mexican journalists have been murdered since 2006. Their number includes journalists under full-time police protection. Dozens of journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2006. But gangs that challenge the law with impunity exist across Latin America.
In his book Gangster Warlords, Ioan Grillo records how, in 2002, “The Brazilian investigative journalist Tim Lopes filmed gangs in a favela with a hidden camera. He had also filed another report that preceded a police crackdown. The gangsters discovered him, tied him to a tree, and conducted a ‘trial’ in which they found him guilty. They burned his eyes with cigarettes, used a samurai sword to cut off his arms and legs while he was still alive, put his body in a tire with gasoline, and set him on fire. They call this murder technique the microonda, or ‘microwave oven.'”
Mexico might be fun for Americans to visit, but it is a nation-state that exists under de facto control of the narcotraffickers. It is only due to the deference of the traffickers that Obrador now resides comfortably in retirement while the aforementioned others reside six feet under. The narcotraffickers make plain their ability to dominate the decisions of an otherwise democratically elected government. Their power was significant enough even to see the U.S. release former Mexican defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos. Arrested on drug charges during a 2020 visit to Los Angeles, Cienfuegos was released after Mexico threatened to suspend all counternarcotics cooperation with the U.S. The Mexican elite feared that Cienfuegos might spill the beans on their own corruption. Obrador couldn’t have that.
Sometimes, even if the violence is less visible, a nation is still captured by organized criminality.
On paper, Albania is a NATO member and a close democratic partner of the U.S. In practice, Albania is the drug trafficking capital of the West. Under Prime Minister Edi Rama, senior Sinaloa cartel associates meet openly with top government officials to launder their money and discuss drug operations in Europe. The Albanian mafia is regarded as one of the most aggressive in Europe, regularly targeting competitors for assassination and enjoining highly lucrative people smuggling networks.
These smuggling networks underline how the subjugation of one state to a criminal enterprise can bleed into the degradation of other states’ sovereignty. The migrant crisis across Europe has had profound political ramifications, bringing down numerous governments and causing major social upheaval in otherwise stable democracies such as the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany, for example.
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There is hope. The example of El Salvador, where Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s aggressive crackdown on gang criminality has transformed his nation from one of Latin America’s most dangerous to one of its safest, shows how bold action can pay dividends. But the rise of powerful non-state groups is posing a significant challenge to numerous nations and populations.
Whether nations will be able to hold the line remains an increasingly open question.
Tom Rogan is a foreign policy writer and editor for the Washington Examiner.