Sanctions research has mostly focused on states, leaving a major gap: how sanctions work against hybrid actors that are both non-state armed groups and instruments of state power, like Russia’s Wagner Group. This paper develops a game-theoretic model of the ongoing interaction between a sanctioned private military company and the states sanctioning it, treating sanctioning as a continuous process rather than a single event. The model captures three things existing approaches usually miss. Targeted actors can actively reorganize (rebrand, reroute finances, relocate) rather than simply comply or collapse. Maintaining sanctions is itself costly and can break down over time. And a sanction’s real-world bite fluctuates as political and economic conditions change. The model predicts three possible outcomes: sanctions that provoke reorganization instead of retreat, sanctions that durably degrade the target, and sanctions that produce repeating cycles of pressure and recovery. Using the Wagner Group as an illustrative case, the paper argues that sanction effectiveness against such actors hinges less on the initial designation than on whether enforcement can be sustained faster than the network can adapt. The framework is intended to generalize beyond Wagner to other modular, transnational armed actors operating under shifting patron and host-state protection.
