Mercenary: genealogy of a concept in international relations CGLG Event with Guest Speaker Dr Malte Riemann

At this CGLG event, Malte Riemann, Assistant Professor at Leiden University, will join us to discuss his book proposal, Mercenary: Genealogy of a Concept in International Relations.

Mercenaries, once relegated to the annals of history, have re-emerged as a pressing concern for international security. In conflicts spanning the globe, from Libya over Nagorno-Karabakh to Mali, the use of mercenaries has garnered increasing attention. The recent involvement of the Wagner mercenary group in the war in Ukraine captured global interest, propelling the topic to the forefront of scholarly and public discourse (Kinsey, 2023; Cusumano and Kinsey, 2022; Gentil-Fernandes, Morrison and Otto, 2023).

Curiously, the mercenary is frequently portrayed as a timeless figure, seemingly involved in conflicts since the beginnings of recorded history. As Sean McFate recently remarked: “Mercenaries are everywhere in military history, starting with the Bible.” (2019, 11). Scholars and practitioners in international relations (IR) and other disciplines repeat the view that mercenaries are a historical constant that can be found always and everywhere, allowing scholars to make grand historical claims about the organisation of force within world history (Thomson, 1994; Avant, 2001; Percy, 2006; Singer, 2006; Salzmann, 2008; Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009; Panke and Petersohn, 2012; Parrott, 2012; Crawford, 2015; Casiraghi, 2022; Olsen, 2022).

However, this prevailing perception deserves closer scrutiny. Mercenary: Genealogy of a Concept in International Relations challenges the established belief in the enduring nature of mercenaries and demonstrates how the concept of the mercenary has been historically produced. By tracing its development from the 15th century to the present, this book shows that the mercenary is not as “old as war itself” (Percy, 2006) but that the concept emerges in 19th-century Europe before spreading globally in the mid-20th century through the process of decolonisation.

As such, this book dismantles the assumption that the mercenary predates the modern state and the system of states, revealing that its existence is grounded within and shaped by these modern achievements.