Violence as a Condition: Structure, Composition, and the Use of Lethal Force

Since 2014, Russia’s Wagner Group has gained prominence, expanding its role from driving Russian foreign policy across many African and Middle Eastern countries into an integral part of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In this paper, we first draw on the one-sided violence (OSV) literature to show how organizational incentives explain Wagner’s violence against civilians pre-November 2021. Despite the static context of organizational incentives, Wagner’s OSV lethality increased dramatically after the initial invasion. While prior research on this topic assumes organizations to be unitary and rational, we use personnel composition as an additional explanatory factor to explain OSV. Situated within research on combat psychology and health sciences, we introduce pre-combat experience (PCE) as key to understanding how training contributes to the use of OSV. By clarifying the role of PCE on OSV, we provide novel theoretical logic and empirical evidence explaining how individual-level experience aggregates to unit-level violence.