Russia’s Corporate Soldiers: The Global Expansion of Russia’s Private Military Companies

Abstract

power expansion one should look within Russia at the relationship between the state and society. Great power politics may be less important than the domestic pressures experienced by a corrupt and highly personalised regime. This is an important and timely insight: Russia’s foreign policy adventures quite often serve the needs of the ruling elites, especially the imperative to preserve power. Stoner confronts the traditional realist approach to international relations, one that views states as guided by external circumstances and zero–sum games between major powers. There is something fatalistic and very 19 century in such a view of interstate relations, whereby the decision-making process is taken out of the hands of decision–makers and is presented as an expression of external circumstances beyond their control. The role of the individual or even groups of individuals in history is thus downplayed or simply ignored. Such an approach removes agency and therefore responsibility from the perpetrators of human rights abuses or aggression against neighbouring states. And, importantly, the realist conception of international relations leaves very little agency for smaller and less powerful states, who often find themselves hostages to the whims, delusions and ambitions of major powers. Researching and writing her book prior to the current war against Ukraine, Stoner nevertheless prophetically sounds the warning bells about a regime that may look for salvation and durability in external aggression. But her warning is not just to those who may be and have been direct victims of Putin’s grievance narrative. Highly personalised autocracies tend to be fragile and lack self-restraining mechanisms. They aspire to stability and domination but in the process often embark on a path towards self-destruction. Stoner’s excellent book was published in 2021; in 2022, however, it appears that when applied to Putin’s Russia the word resurrection should be put in quotation marks.