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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".