21 Episodes

  1. "Do not come for adventure here": Mercenaries in DRC

    Published: 2/28/2025

  2. “No, really”: American PMCs in Gaza

    Published: 1/30/2025

  3. A mercenary client collapses

    Published: 12/23/2024

  4. Air force for hire

    Published: 11/30/2024

  5. Sledgehammer: The Wagner cult in Syria

    Published: 10/23/2024

  6. "Borrowed servants"? PMCs and sadism at Abu Ghraib

    Published: 9/26/2024

  7. I was a Blackwater mercenary in Iraq

    Published: 7/27/2024

  8. Mercenary meatgrinder: The price of Bakhmut

    Published: 6/26/2024

  9. What makes Colombian mercenaries so interesting?

    Published: 5/29/2024

  10. American hit-squad in Yemen

    Published: 4/24/2024

  11. Mercenaries and Gaza

    Published: 1/9/2024

  12. What's Charlie Sheen got to do with it?

    Published: 11/28/2023

  13. Prosecuting the Wagner Group

    Published: 10/26/2023

  14. Tracking mercenaries

    Published: 9/21/2023

  15. Semtex teddy bear: The mercenary build-up in Libya

    Published: 8/24/2023

  16. Mercenary bloodline: The war in Sudan

    Published: 7/6/2023

  17. “What just happened?” The Wagner Group mutiny

    Published: 6/30/2023

  18. What's so bad about mercenaries?

    Published: 5/30/2023

  19. What Russian mercenaries tell us about Russia

    Published: 4/27/2023

  20. Defeating the Wagner Group

    Published: 3/21/2023

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The Guns for Hire podcast is a production of the Atlantic Council’s North Africa Initiative. Taking Libya as its starting point, it explores the causes and implications of the growing use of mercenaries in armed conflict. The podcast features guests from many walks of life, from ethicists and historians to former mercenary fighters. It seeks to understand what the normalisation of private warfare tells us about the world as we currently find it, but also about the future of the international system and about what war could look like in the coming decades. Written and hosted by Dr Alia Brahimi.