About
The initiative
Mercenomics is an independent research initiative on the business of force for hire, from private military and security companies to mercenaries and protection markets. It publishes the public records of that trade for free, with sources.
It is not a company, a charity or a registered organisation. It is a one-person initiative, started in April 2026 and run in the open, and it will say so for as long as that is true.
What "force for hire" means
Military or security work done for pay by a private company, instead of by a country's own army or police. Four kinds of actor appear in this work:
- Private military companies
- Firms that fight, train troops, or plan and run operations for governments.
- Private security companies
- Firms that supply guards for buildings, sites, ships, convoys and people.
- Military contractors
- Firms that run supply, construction, catering, translation and base support for armed forces. They are the largest group by number of people, and the most often left out of the conversation.
- Historical and criminal forms of the same trade
- Mercenaries, privateers and protection rackets. These are covered for context: they are the same economic arrangement under older or illegal names.
How this work is done
- Public records only. Government reports, court records, regulatory filings, and investigations published by established news organisations and research institutions.
- A source for every figure. No number appears without a reference to where it came from and the date it was collected.
- Limits stated next to the data, not hidden in a footnote. If a figure counts claims rather than deaths, or injuries by the country where they happened rather than the worker's nationality, the page says so beside the number.
- No accusations. Mercenomics repeats findings that official bodies or established investigations have already published, and attributes them.
- Corrections in the open. Mistakes are posted on the Corrections page with the date and what changed. Nothing is quietly edited.
- A right of reply. Any company or person named may send a response, and it will be published alongside the material, unedited except for length.
Independence
Mercenomics takes no money from the firms it covers. It has no funders, no advertising and no sponsorship. If that ever changes, it will be stated on this page before anything else is published.
Contact
The founder
Kazi Affnann Azom founded Mercenomics in April 2026. He is an independent researcher from Dhaka, Bangladesh, working on the economics of private military and security companies: how this work is contracted, what it costs, and who carries the risk.
He collects the official records, builds the datasets, and writes everything published here.
The question he is working on
When a government pays a private company to do military or security work instead of using its own soldiers, what changes? Not only the price: who bears the risk, who can be held to account, and what a state can do without asking anyone.
That question runs through every part of this site. The data comes first, because an argument about this industry is worth little without figures that can be checked.
More
- Full profile: background, interests, and how to get in touch.
- Projects: what is being built, in what order, and what is finished.
Working with Mercenomics
Researchers, journalists and students are welcome to write. Useful things to send: a public source that belongs in the library, a correction, or a question about how a dataset was built. Requests for data that does not exist yet are also worth sending, because they decide what gets built next.