John Lechner
@JohnLechner1
Writer and reader. “Death Is Our Business” out with Bloomsbury in March 2025. rep @EditorSig
DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS launches today! Grounded in my five years working in CAR, Mali, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria. Featuring interviews with 40 #Wagner mercenaries, executives, and affiliates. Pick it up wherever books are sold! amazon.com/Death-Our-Busi…
La próxima semana es mi cumpleaños. Acabo de hacerme un autorregalo que tiene muy buen pinta. #GuerrasPosmodernas
DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS launches today! Grounded in my five years working in CAR, Mali, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria. Featuring interviews with 40 #Wagner mercenaries, executives, and affiliates. Pick it up wherever books are sold! amazon.com/Death-Our-Busi…
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has convicted two leaders of a predominantly Christian rebel group in the Central African Republic for multiple war crimes committed against Muslim civilians during the country’s civil war in 2013 and 2014. aje.io/gghneh
Had a great time talking “Death is Our Business” and all things Wagner Group today with @DisgracedProp
John Lechner x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
For @SouthwestReview, spoke with the brilliant @criveragarza about fiction, non-fiction, Josefina Ludmer and Lyn Hejinian. Link below.
Great talk on Wagner and @JohnLechner1’s book with my colleague @JMeservey! Looking forward to reading it.
U.N. sanctions more Haitian gangs | Miami Herald miamiherald.com/news/nation-wo…
It's Franz Boas's birthday, always a good day to revisit his introduction to the Handbook of American Indian Languages, one of the few things that I think all (linguistic) anthropologists should read
🎙️@JohnLechner1 joins me on the latest episode of the Guns for Hire podcast. We discuss the #Wagner Group's recruitment methods, beauty pageants in the CAR, his experiences interviewing dozens of Russian mercenaries, and being spirited away by the security services in Mali 🎧
A few thoughts on today's large-scale and simultaneous attacks across Western Mali today, even though this is not even the complete list of attacks and incidents: jeuneafrique.com/1702706/politi… The first is that, as the article notes, this was the first major attack of its kind 1/7
🇲🇱 Speaking to @JohnLechner1 on why his wife proved to be the best wife ever as he was getting kidnapped in Mali. patreon.com/posts/bonus-18…
"DIOB starts with the breakup of Yugoslavia and those wars that have haunted the world ever since. Vladimir Putin cited the Kosovo “precedent” [in] Crimea, and Russian warlords like Igor Girkin, a Bosnian War veteran, went on to play a preeminent role in Eastern Ukraine."
Thank you, @lilyslynch for recommending DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS in @jacobin's Summer Reading Guide! "An unusually sensitive piece of war correspondence... Lechner argues Wagner represents a new kind of warfare, one that emerged with mass privatization." jacobin.com/2025/06/summer…
Not great news in Niger...a number of reported local mutinies, following on from earlier reports several weeks ago. What's interesting is that we're seeing this in Niger rather than Mali and Burkina Faso, which are suffering more from jihadists. rfi.fr/fr/afrique/202…
Interesting point of view. warontherocks.com/2025/06/i-foug…
“It’s an idea that Crews, the author of fifteen novels and countless pieces of long-form journalism, often returned to: there is the life that is lived, and then its rival, a counterlife, where every flaw is hidden and one can feel whole.”—@char_leelee harpers.org/archive/2025/0…