Wagner Group—A Tool and Target of Great Power Competition in Africa: Implications for Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wagner Group, the armed non-state actor linked to the Kremlin, is both a tool and target of great power competition in Africa. Moscow employs Wagner Group as a tool to consolidate and expand the Russian presence on the continent. Washington designated Wagner Group as a transnational criminal organization in January 2023 in response to the Russian entity's roles in Ukraine and Africa. This article explores the implications that Wagner Group, and the great power dynamics that envelop it, pose for Canadian policy, especially vis-à-vis Africa. It contends that Wagner Group's activities in Africa upset longstanding Canadian expectations about armed non-state actors and their role in extractive industries, and undermine, with Russian support, the UN and its peacekeeping in Africa. However, mounting a robust opposition to Wagner Group in Africa, as Washington hopes for, will require greater commitment, focus, and risk tolerance than Ottawa has shown in recent years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".