4 - Contractors and Hybrid Warfare

Summary

This Chapter focuses on governmental use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) to evade the law of state responsibility, using offering as a case study of Russia’s deployment of a shadowy corporation known as the Wagner Group as a case study. The cChapter then suggests ways in which we might rethink the law of state responsibility in order to respond to the increasing threat of this sort of hybrid warfare. Drawing from scholarship on global legal pluralism, the cChapter argues for a less formalist and more functionalist analysis of the law of state responsibility. I I n the context of hybrid war, formalist conceptions of the state allow governments such as Russia to skirt state responsibility solely because there may be no formal contract between Russia and a PMSC such as the Wagner Group. One possible response then is to reinterpret Article 8 of the Articles of State Responsibility so that it looks at the real functional ties between a state actor and a PMSC, along with the “governmentality” of the function the PMSC performs.