Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) and Civil War Severity in Sierra Leone

This paper focuses on Sierra Leone to explore the repercussions of PMSCs’ presence on civil war dynamics, specifically war severity. It investigates whether PMSCs’ role in conflict zones escalates or de-escalates civil conflict. I analyze the 2024 Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Event Dataset version 24.1 to advance the argument that PMSCs’ activities in conflict zones become a mechanism to strategically increase conflict severity substantially in weak states where they replace or supplement clients’ forces’ battlefield efforts. This occurs because PMSCs temporarily improve government and pro-government forces’ counterinsurgency capacities and simultaneously influence rebels to shore up their capacities, which drives rebels’ revenge-seeking capabilities in the post-PMSCs period.