Guardians of the Belt and Road

China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is widely recognized as an economic power play that could challenge U.S. influence geopolitically, particularly in vital and resource-rich regions around the world. Little attention, however, has been devoted to the importance of how China plans to secure and defend its economic interests along the BRI. China has increasingly employed private security contractors (PSCs) to safeguard its geo-economic interests in many regions of the world—in particular, politically unstable “gray zones,” such as Central Africa.