Mercenaries in DRC: “Do not come for adventure here”
In Season 2, Episode 10 of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by African politics and security expert Ben Shepherd. After 300 Romanian mercenaries were cornered by M23 rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in January, Ben reflects on the reasons behind the rebels’ advance and the perennial need for DRC’s government to look to external security providers for help managing threats.
Ben outlines how the Congolese military has been drawn into patterns of patronage that systematically undermine its effectiveness. They also discuss Rwanda’s support for M23, regional jockeying for access to DRC’s vast mineral wealth, and a recently thwarted coup involving three US nationals.
“The Mobutist system… is perversely stable in terms of maintaining itself, but it can’t do public goods and one of those public goods is territorial security. So that is perpetually outsourced.”
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About the podcast
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 normalization of contract warfare tells us about the world we currently live in, the future of the international system, and what war could look like in the coming decades.
Further reading
Through our Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, the Atlantic Council works with allies and partners in Europe and the wider Middle East to protect US interests, build peace and security, and unlock the human potential of the region.
Image: Members of the M23 rebel group gather to supervise Congolese potential recruits for the M23 rebel group before being taken to training centres run by M23 rebels, amid clashes between M23 rebels and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC), in Goma, North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, January 30, 2025. REUTERS/Arlette Bashizi