Author Archives: David Isenberg

When the Wagner Group, Africa Corps’ predecessor, entered Mali in December 2021, it was pursuing a resources-for-security deal like the one it had achieved in the Central African Republic. Along with my co-authors Chris Faulkner and Colin Clarke in our book, Moscow’s Mercenaries, I documented Wagner’s lessons learned, including the false hope that future operations would match the ease with which Wagner captured the state in the Central African Republic. There, the organization built a reputation as the guarantor of national security, and in return it gained full access to the state bureaucracy and economic access across the country — from gold and diamond mining all the way to beer and liquor sales. However, as I first argued in 2022, Mali proved a much harder nut to crack. Wagner’s failure to secure extractive resources in Mali was the beginning of the end for the organization, but Africa Corps — an organization directly beholden to the Russian state — has also failed to secure access to Malian gold after taking Wagner’s place. Continue reading →