Kazi Affnann Azom
About > Founder
Independent researcher, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Founder of Mercenomics, April 2026.
What he works on
The economics of private military and security companies: how military and security work is contracted out, what it costs, who is paid to carry the risk, and what happens to accountability when force is bought rather than commanded.
The work is empirical first. Before arguing about this industry, he builds the tables: official contractor counts, injury and death claims, and contract spending, each documented so another person can check it or disagree with it on the evidence.
Why this subject
Two things that are rarely connected. The first is that in recent wars the people doing the work were often not soldiers, and the risk they carried never appeared in the figures the public saw. The second is that many of those people come from countries like his own, recruited into jobs that turned out to be something else. Both are economics problems before they are anything else, and both are measurable.
Contact
Research interests
- Contracting and incomplete contracts
- What armed-service contracts can and cannot specify, and what happens in the gaps they leave.
- Principal-agent problems in hired force
- Why a force that is paid rather than enlisted behaves differently, and what the buyer gives up in control.
- Information asymmetry in recruitment
- What workers are told about a job, what the job turns out to be, and who profits from the gap.
- Where the cost lands
- Who carries the risk of outsourced military work, measured through injury and death claims set against contractor numbers.
Published work
Nothing is listed here yet. Papers and datasets appear on this page only once they can be read or downloaded. What is being built, and in what order, is on the Projects page.
Elsewhere
Links to profiles and repositories will be added here as each becomes active. Nothing is listed before it exists.