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Selling security: Assessing the impact of militaryprivatizationRita Abrahamsen a & Michael C. Williams aa Department of International Politics, University of Aberystwyth, Aberystwyth, SY233FE, UKPublished online: 10 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Rita Abrahamsen & Michael C. Williams (2007) Selling security: Assessing the impact of militaryprivatization, Review of International Political Economy, 15:1, 131-146, DOI: 10.1080/09692290701751332

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Review of International Political Economy 15:1 February 2008: 131–146

Selling security: Assessing the impactof military privatization

Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. WilliamsDepartment of International Politics, University of Aberystwyth,

Aberystwyth, SY23 3FE, UK

ABSTRACT

The rise of the private military industry has become an important and contro-versial issue in international politics. This article reviews the contributionsof four books that analyse the rise and consequences of the privatization offorce. Placing military privatization in a broader political context shows howa fuller understanding of these developments requires a global focus andan emphasis on their relationship both to global capital and to shifting stateforms where the public and the private, the domestic and the international,are being rearticulated.

KEYWORDS

Military privatization; mercenaries; governance; private security.

Deborah D. Avant (2005) The Market for Force: The Consequences of PrivatizingSecurity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xiv + 310 pp., ISBN13 978-0-521-85026-1 (hardback), ISBN 13 978-0-521-61535-8 (paperback),$24.00.

Madelaine Drohan (2003) Making a Killing: Why Corporations Use ArmedForce to Do Business, Toronto: Random House, 376 pp., ISBN 1-59228-577-5 (hardback), $16.95.

Robert Mandel (2002) Armies Without States: The Privatization of Security,Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, x + 169 pp., ISBN 1-58826-066-6 (hardback),$49.95.

Peter W. Singer (2003) Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Mili-tary, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, xi + 330 pp., ISBN 0-8014-4114-5(hardback), ISBN 0-8014-8915-6 (paperback), $19.95.

Consider the fates of three individuals. First, Bob Denard, once France’s topgun-for-hire and post-colonial Africa’s quintessential ‘dog of war’, until

Review of International Political EconomyISSN 0969-2290 print/ISSN 1466-4526 online C© 2008 Taylor & Francis

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his recent death on trial in Paris for an attempted coup in the Comoros in1995. The coup was ultimately put down by French troops, but Denard,whose other adventures have taken him to Nigeria, Angola, Congo, andYemen, claimed that France often covertly supported his actions. Second,Simon Mann, ex-officer in the Scots Guards and the SAS, currently servinga seven year sentence in Zimbabwe for his involvement in a plot to over-throw the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. The financial andpolitical backers of the plot have not been finally established, but suspi-cion points towards Mark Thatcher and other British and internationalfinanciers with interests in the West African country. Finally, in his Londonoffice suites, Tim Spicer, former colleague of Mann and former head ofSandline International, made famous by the ‘arms to Africa’ scandal andaborted private military activities in Sierra Leone and Papua New Guineain the late 1990s. Among other lucrative contracts, Spicer’s current firm,Aegis Specialist Risk Management, has a $293 million agreement with thePentagon to protect and coordinate civilian contractors in Iraq.

These three stories capture an important transformation in the privatemilitary sector. While Denard and Mann seem to fit recognizably within along tradition of morally dubious and legally suspect or prohibited merce-nary activities by loosely-knit groups of individuals, Spicer’s Aegis repre-sents a new development in international politics: the rise of the corporatemilitary industry and its close cooperation with a range of clients includ-ing transnational corporations, NGOs, and foreign policy and military es-tablishments. Although most spectacularly evidenced in the activities of‘military contractors’ in Iraq, the scale, scope, and impact of military priva-tization goes well beyond that conflict, and raises fundamental analytical,political, and ethical questions.

The four books under review make considerable contributions towardsunderstanding the rise and implications of military privatization and cor-poratization. In particular, the books make two important departures fromwhat could be called the first wave of literature on private military actors.Much of the first wave literature focused on the spectacular activities of thelikes of Denard, Executive Outcomes and Sandline, and did not hesitate intheir strong moral condemnations of such interventions (e.g. Arnold, 1999;Musah and Fayemi, 2000). According to this view, private military actorswere a ‘scourge of the Third World’ and were frequently portrayed as ‘ruth-less peddler[s] of violence and subversion for money’ (Arnold, 1999: 56). Bycontrast, the more recent treatments aim for a more balanced and informedview. Rejecting the term ‘mercenaries’ as an increasingly inadequate de-scription of the private military industry, they argue that the diversity andextent of private military activities cannot be adequately captured in onesingle term, nor can its moral complexities be contained within the sim-ple opposition of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, or in their automatic condemnation asillegitimate or illegal.

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Much first wave literature also tended to read the privatization of secu-rity as a prime example of the erosion of sovereignty and state power. In nosmall part this is due to Max Weber’s classic definition of the state as ‘a hu-man community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimateuse of physical force within a given territory’ (Gerth and Wright Mills, 1946:77–8), thus making the monopoly of violence a defining characteristic ofstate sovereignty itself. From this starting point, the contemporary emer-gence of private military actors was readily interpreted as an automaticindication of state weakness, or of a redistribution of power away fromthe state towards a multiplicity of private, often foreign, actors. While thebooks under review show some affinities with this position, they also begina problematization of the public/private dichotomy, drawing attention tothe emerging imbrication or fusion of private security actors with publicstructures. As such, military privatization does not necessarily point toan erosion of state power and sovereignty, but is instead to be analysedas part of broader social, political, and economic transformations in gov-ernance. The books under review make important contributions towardsunderstanding what is at stake in contemporary security privatization, yet,as we will argue briefly in the concluding part of this essay, the transfor-mations in security governance may be even broader and more significantthan these studies suggest.

UNDERSTANDING MILITARY PRIVATIZATION

Private force has a long history. Deborah Avant, Robert Mandel and Pe-ter Singer alike set their accounts against the backdrop of the consolida-tion of the modern state and its famous Weberian capacity to exercise amonopoly of legitimate violence within its borders. In the early modernera, they remind us, the distinction between public and private violencewas not nearly so clear-cut. Throughout history, contracted soldiers haveinfluenced the outcome of wars, and military entrepreneurs are far from arecent phenomenon. In the middle ages, a condotta (contract) system flour-ished, allowing business guilds, nobles, and cities to hire private force.The wealthiest man in seventeenth century Europe, for example, is said tohave been Count Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose fortune arose from theactivities of his private army. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, the Chartered Companies wielded extensive military force aspart of their state-designated mandate to engage in long-distance trade andestablish colonies, and by 1782 the English East India Company’s armedforce outnumbered that of the British army at the time, consisting of over100,000 British, German, Swiss and Indian soldiers. It was also not un-common for states to contract for the private provision of force: the ThirtyYears War was fought by armies consisting primarily of mercenaries, andperhaps more surprisingly, during the American War of Independence

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the British contracted nearly 30,000 German troops (so-called Hessians) intheir struggle against the American colonists. Their brutality is said to havegalvanized colonists against the Crown (Singer, 2003: 33).

In this sense the ‘novelty’ of private military force should not be exagger-ated, but its re-emergence at the end of the twentieth century is neverthe-less worthy of exploration and explanation, as the history of modern stateformation is to a significant extent also the history of the gradual exclu-sion of private violence. By roughly the middle of the nineteenth century,the role of private military contractors had diminished significantly, as thestate gradually consolidated the use of force in the exclusive hands of pub-lic authorities and agents. With the modern state, citizen armies becamethe norm and while market allocation of security never fully disappearedfrom the battlefields, it was, as Avant notes, often ‘informally organized,secretive, and directed to a specific customer base’ (20). Indeed, the idea ofthe state’s monopoly of legitimate violence has become one of the definingmarks of modern sovereignty, and one of the state’s most jealously guardedprerogatives. In light of this history, it is tempting to read the re-emergenceof private military force as a ‘new medievalism’, signalling a fragmentationand dispersion of power and violence akin to that of the medieval period.Importantly, however, contemporary private military force stands in a verydifferent relationship to the state than its medieval counterparts, and there-emergence of private military actors is linked to a range of broad social,political and economic transformations.

The three academic books under review (Avant, Mandel and Singer)share a broadly similar account of the expansion of private military actors,combining a wide array of material and ideational factors. Robert Mandelsees security privatization as driven by four basic factors. The end of theCold War, which provided both a ‘pull’ factor due to the downsizing of statemilitaries and international commitments, and a related ‘push’ factor of de-mobilized military personnel able to move into the opportunities created.At the same time, an increasing reluctance on behalf of developed statesto engage in intervention in unstable areas provided a market of develop-ing governments, corporations, and international organizations needingprivate security services. Another factor is the shift in structure of theprivate security providers themselves, involving an explicit disavowal of‘mercenary’ activities, and the adoption of a corporate model that stressesresponsibility and fosters legitimacy. Finally, there is a widespread senseof insecurity and fear on behalf of individuals, along with an increasingperception that governments alone are incapable of addressing such risksadequately. Non-governmental organizations and transnational corpora-tions are thus becoming increasingly important contractors of private se-curity services, as they strive to secure their employees and continue theiroperations in risky environments.

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As trade in military and security services is not tracked by tradedatabases, estimates and data about its growth and value are not alwaysreadily available. The figures nevertheless paint a clear picture of a bur-geoning sector: the 2003 global revenue for the private security industrywas estimated at over $100 billion (Singer, 2003b: 60), up from $55.6 billionin 1990 (Vines, 1999: 47). Private security companies (PSCs) with publiclytraded stocks grew at twice the rate of the Dow Jones Industrial Average inthe 1990s (Avant, 2005: 8). Between 1994 and 2002 US-based PSCs receivedmore than 3,000 contracts worth over $300 billion from the US Departmentof Defence (Avant, 2005: 8). In the war on Iraq, private security companiesare said to be the second largest member of the ‘coalition of the willing’(Avant, 2005: 8). In short, private military actors are today present on ev-ery continent, and operate across a wide spectrum of activities includingwarfare, peacekeeping and aid relief.

The breath and reach of the contemporary private military sector is use-fully captured by Singer’s study, which provides an important contribu-tion through its extensive description and categorization of the diversity ofprivate military companies (PMCs). As part of this categorization, the inad-equacies of the simple label ‘mercenarism’ in capturing the diversity of thesector emerge with particular clarity. Using the ‘tip of the spear’ analogydrawn from military analysis, Singer develops a threefold categorizationof PMCs. The first is the combat-active ‘military provider’ firms such asExecutive Outcomes in the 1990s, or Blackwater in today’s Iraq. He stressesthat while much public attention has been focused on these firms, the dy-namics of military privatization are far more pervasive. In fact, the mostextensive forms of private military activity stretch back from the combattip, to encompass the extensive roles of ‘military consultant’ firms provid-ing training, advice and analysis. The most well-known companies in thisarea are MPRI, Vinnell, and DynCorp, which do everything from runninguniversity officer training programmes in the United States, to providingmilitary advice to foreign governments, to devising security sector reformprogrammes as part of US development policy. Singer’s third category isthe ‘military support’ firm, of which Brown and Root (and its oft-notedsubsidiary, Haliburton) is perhaps the most prominent. Brown and Roothas been directly integrated into the operational and logistical structuresof modern militaries, particularly in the United States. Indeed, one of thekey claims of both Singer and Avant is that it is increasingly impossiblefor the United States to exercise conventional military force without theactive participation of a wide range of private personnel who maintain(and even operate) weapons systems, and provide core logistical support.Outsourcing of military activities and services has escalated considerablysince the end of the Cold War, so much so that today the ‘US cannot go towar without contractors’ (Avant, 2005: 115).

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PRIVATE MILITARY FORCE IN THE STRONG STATE

The consequences of the rise of the private military industry are deeplycontroversial. Its proponents, the ‘optimists’ as Avant calls them, see in theprivate sector not only increased efficiency, but also the emergence of newactors able to play positive roles across a range of activities from socialstability, to humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping. In Singer’s lan-guage, this view regards the privatized military as ‘messiahs’ potentiallycapable of intervening effectively in situations where states are unwillingor unable to act, such as Rwanda in the past (Brooks, 2000) or Darfur today.On the other side of the debate are the ‘pessimists’ who view the privatemilitary as eroding state capacities, legitimizing the use of force for pri-vate ends, and placing military means in the hands of unregulated andunaccountable agents (e.g. Musah and Fayemi, 2000).

Mandel, Singer, and Avant seek to avoid these two extremes. Mandelpoints out that the state’s traditional monopoly of violence should not bemistaken for its necessary legitimacy. States have often used this capacityin dubious ways, and still do. More controversially, he argues that ‘theevidence does not show convincingly that public security is better thanprivate security’ (141). As a general statement, this might well be true, butit requires much greater specificity – not to mention more careful argument– than Mandel provides. Most importantly, it is necessary to be clear thatthere is rarely if ever a purely ‘private’ form of security, and that all formsof private force exist in some relation to a public authority that influencestheir impact and behaviour.

This is the prime concern of Deborah Avant’s compelling and systematicanalysis, which demonstrates convincingly that although the impact of pri-vatization varies it always redistributes power over the control of violence(6). Avant’s argument is developed by exploring three different situations:states contracting for the private delivery of security services, states reg-ulating the export of security services, and, finally, non-state actors (inter-national non-governmental organizations and transnational corporations)financing security services. The result is a nuanced and sophisticated anal-ysis, which nicely captures the complexities as well as the extent of con-temporary military privatization. Drawing on insights from economic andsociological institutionalism, the key variable that Avant identifies is thecapacity of states. Strong states are best able to manage the risks of pri-vatization and harness private force to produce new public goods. Weakstates, on the other hand, may have most to gain from privatization in thesense of buying extra capacity, but they are also the least able to manageprivate forces for the public good.

As the world’s only superpower, the US has to a significant extent beenable to use privatization to its own advantage, and by regulating the ex-port of private military services it has to a degree been able to monitor and

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control their activities. Moreover, by becoming a main customer of PMCs,the US has also been able to control or influence the companies relativelysuccessfully through consumer power as companies hesitate to behave inways that would jeopardize future government contracts. Privatization hasacted as a force multiplier for the US, which regards PMCs as an oppor-tunity to augment its influence abroad. The existence of private militaryforce also opens up the possibility of ‘foreign policy by proxy’, wherebythe government can pursue its goals without committing the money ortaking the political risks associated with committing troops to farawayand dangerous countries. A prime example of this is the US financing ofMPRI’s training programme for the military in Croatia, which is widelybelieved to have played a crucial role in the defeat of Serbia. At the time,the contract was highly controversial, as it was perceived to strengthenone side of the conflict. As a key sponsor of the Dayton Peace Accord theUS was required to appear neutral, but by outsourcing the training to aprivate firm the government was able to retain its neutral status while stillchanging events on the ground in its favoured direction.

However, there are costs, or dangers, to privatization even for strongstates, and Avant’s analysis draws particular attention to the loss in demo-cratic control and oversight that follow from the transfer of military forceto private actors. Private actors, often motivated by their own economicand corporate interests, gain an important role in policy formulation andimplementation. Although the state retains control of the budget and alsothe selection of contractors, the privatization of force favours executivesrelative to legislators, it reduces transparency in a way that advantages thegovernment relative to the electorate, and it opens the way (through theprovision of information) for private interests to affect policy implemen-tation and goals (Avant, 2005: 60). This is particularly the case in the US,where Congress faces numerous information hurdles and there is ampleopportunity for the executive branch to evade democratic scrutiny andpublic debate.

Singer provides a troubling illustration of this change in the controlof force in his account of US involvement in ‘the war on drugs’ through‘Plan Columbia’, a US-funded $7.5 billion strategy to assist the Columbiangovernment in counter-narcotics operations. Although Congress preventsUS troops from being involved in counter-insurgency efforts, this obstaclehas been circumvented by outsourcing Plan Columbia to PMCs which aresubject to no such limitations, nor to direct Congressional oversight orapproval. According to Singer, between $770 million and $1.3 billion hasgone to finance PMCs in Plan Columbia, and corporations like DynCorpare known to operate helicopter gunships and to have undertaken combatroles. In this way, the US government appears one step removed fromcontroversial actions and from criticisms, and can pursue its objectiveswithout the scrutiny of Congress. As Singer puts it somewhat ironically, by

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contracting private actors ‘the sometimes inefficient limits of a democraticsystem on governing are lessened’ (211).

Other potential costs of privatization include the long term loss of ex-pertise within military establishments as core tasks are outsourced, andthe corresponding concern that if skills are lost within the public sector,they might not be easily recovered if deemed necessary at some futurestage. Similarly, there is the risk that dependence on private actors for thedelivery of key services makes military operations susceptible to disrup-tions caused by market factors. A telling example is offered by Singer, whorecounts how almost one-third of the Canadian Army’s equipment andsoldiers were effectively held hostage for nearly two weeks onboard a pri-vate transport ship, due to a financial dispute between two subcontractingagents (160).

Finally, the privatization of military capacities by states raises key issuesof cost and efficiency. While most analysts agree that privatization canbring cost reductions in some sectors, particularly in the short term, theprivatization of force has specificities that complicate this situation. Mostsimply, even the strongest states tend to lack the capacity and expertise tomanage the ever-increasing number of contracts issued. When contract-ing for activities in conflict zones, these difficulties are increased by thefact that performance standards are intrinsically difficult to draw up, andcompliance procedures even more difficult to ensure. The result has beensome rather spectacular boondoggles, as evidenced in a number of cases inIraq, which have done little to support the efficiency argument, howeverpolitically expedient military outsourcing might be.

WEAK STATES, CORPORATE GREEDAND PRIVATE SECURITY

For many, the main causes of concern regarding private military companiesrelate not to their impact in strong states, but rather their activities in poor,or weak, states such as Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea and EquatorialGuinea. Here, PMCs are often seen as central in maintaining a fundamen-tally unequal and unfair relationship between rich and poor countries.This in large part is the story of Madeline Drohan’s book Making a Killing, acompassionate account of how corporations have used armed force to dobusiness in Africa. Her story begins in the 1880s, with Cecil Rhodes’ use ofarmed force in the expansion of his southern African commercial empire.It continues throughout the next century and a half, as Drohan recountsthe relationship between corporate actors and armed violence across thecontinent in episodes ranging from the activities of King Leopold in theCongo, DeBeers in Sierra Leone, Union Miniere in Katanga, and Lonhroin Mozambique to the more contemporary operations of DiamondWorks(and Sandline) in Sierra Leone, Shell in Nigeria and Talisman in Sudan.

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By showing just how consistent the use of armed force by corporationshas been across Africa, both geographically and historically, Drohan’s workprovides an important account of an all-too-often forgotten record of thelinks between organized violence and international capital in the develop-ing world. By in effect defining the privatization of security as the use offorce by and in the interest of corporate actors, Drohan brings into view theskeletons in a range of corporate closets. By implication, the book serves asa useful warning against excessive faith in the currently fashionable movetowards ‘corporate responsibility’; vigilance is needed, lest commercialgreed is dressed up as humanitarian intervention. It has happened before,most starkly in King Leopold’s Congo, where as many as 10 million Con-golese were killed in the pursuit of wealth, ostensibly to end the Arab slavetrade.

Although Drohan’s focus is almost exclusively on the corporate incen-tives for the use of force, her powerful journalistic account resonates re-vealingly with analyses that examine the attractions and pitfalls of militaryprivatization for weak states. By definition, weak states have less capacityand control of the means of coercion in the first place, and the opportunityto buy extra muscle has the potential to strengthen the state vis-a-vis itsadversaries, whether internal or external. As Singer argues, this leads tothe possibility of ‘strategic privatization’ where states allow the activitiesof multinational corporations on their territory so long as they providetheir own security. The result, as he argues was the case in Angola in 1996,is that a government can increase its economic base while at the same timereducing or redirecting its military commitments (168). In this way, theimport of external force can be a means of strengthening the government –though as William Reno (1998) has shown in his study of warlord politics,this is not necessarily connected to any conception of security as a publicgood.

Nor does private military force necessarily help towards consolidatingor building a centralized, legal-rational Weberian state. Avant’s institution-alist analysis shows that weak states often lack the ability to deal with theconsequences of privatization, and that the diffusion of control that resultsfrom hiring private forces may weaken rather than consolidate state au-thority. The classic example is Sierra Leone. When the government in 1995contracted Executive Outcomes (EO) to fight the advancing RUF rebels, itdid temporarily strengthen its power. In the space of a few weeks, the EOtroops drove the RUF out of the capital Freetown and also recaptured thediamond mining areas. But when the EO contract was terminated, the RUFadvanced again, and in the long term, the state’s ability to control the use offorce seems to have been further eroded through the contract with EO, andlater with Sandline. Power and control was diffused towards the PMCs,as they gained influence over key political decisions. Military outsourcingalso strengthened local social forces such as the Kamajor militias, which

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were trained and deployed by EO. As the Kamajors primary loyalty wasnot necessarily to the government, but to their ethnic chiefs, the contractwith EO can be seen to have created future challenges for state reconstruc-tion and consolidation. Importantly, political control and influence alsopassed to the outside mining companies that financed the military opera-tions, and that subsequently received lucrative concessions. Although bothEO and Sandline were hired to serve Sierra Leonean national goals as de-fined by the President at the time, the fact that both contracts were securedby private firms with the promise of future mining proceeds raises seriousquestions about ‘their ultimate purpose’, as Avant puts it (98).

PRIVATE SECURITY AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

The role of PMCs in weak states raises important issues relating to the theo-retical usefulness and empirical accuracy of the public/private dichotomy.It is sometimes implied that security privatization in developing coun-tries takes the form of ‘resource enclaves’ where powerful multinationalresource corporations backed by heavily armed private security forces pil-lage the natural resources of a country with little connection to or regardfor the state’s interests. Indeed, Singer even quotes the UN Special Rappor-teur on the question of mercenaries as worrying about the emergence ofa form of ‘multinational neo-colonialism of the twenty-first century’ (188).As Singer points out, the private companies (both resource and military)will often respond that they have been invited into the country by the le-gitimate government, but he pertinently notes that this ‘misses the parallelto 19th century imperialism, which also usually began when a weak rulerrequested the original intervention’ (188).

However, an ‘ideal type’ multinational resource enclaves entirely cut offfrom the economic and political structures outside are actually quite dif-ficult to come by, and most enclave, both armed and unarmed, exist in acomplex relationship with the host state and its security forces. Here, thetendency to focus on security privatization as the private military is mis-leading, if not incorrect. In Angola, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, all frequentlydiscussed as ‘enclave’ economies, private security forces worked (and stillwork) alongside and in cooperation with public security forces. In otherwords, it is not so much the case that private capital and force work againstthe interest of some ‘public’ interest, but rather that the interests of thegovernment in power is intimately bound up, and even dependent on, theextraction of resources by private/foreign capital. For example, analysingthe ongoing conflict in the oil-rich Niger Delta in terms of private securityforces protecting multinational interests provides at best a partial story, asthe protection of oil installations and operations is provided by a complexnetwork of public and private, global and local security actors and servesdomestic as well as foreign interests.

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For all their strengths, the reliance on a public/private distinction is acommon shortcoming of much of the literature on security privatizationin international relations (IR). While analogies to nineteenth century im-perialism, or even to the emergence of a ‘new medievalism’, may be usefulin vividly conveying the challenges which security privatization presentsto theories mired in visions of total state sovereignty, they risk obscuringsome of the most important issues and the links to broader social and eco-nomic processes. As such it is crucial to focus not on military privatizationas an isolated process, linked primarily to the end of the Cold War and mil-itary institutions and dynamics, but to locate the re-emergence of privatesecurity as part of larger social, economic and political transformations inglobal and local governance. When approached as such, the implicationsand significance of security privatization for our understanding of the stateand of sovereignty in contemporary politics can be brought more clearlyinto focus.

Avant insightfully touches on this in the latter pages of her book, whenshe argues that security privatization should not be approached as one ofsimple privatization, but as part of a broader transformation of the rela-tionship between public and private, state and market. She observes thatthe ‘privatization of security does not so much transfer power from oneinstitution (the state) to another (the market) as pose challenges to the wayboth states and markets have functioned in the modern system’ (263). Asa consequence, she argues, analysis should start not from ‘ideal types’ ofstates and markets, but from the actual institutional forms that are emerg-ing. The future need, in other words, is for theoretical analysis groundedin detailed, empirical investigation.

In this context the discipline of IR can usefully borrow from studiesof security privatization in sociology and criminology. Perhaps becausethis literature is focused on commercial security, i.e. companies perform-ing policing functions rather than military functions, and deals primarilywith the domestic arena it has failed to gain much currency among IRscholars. Nevertheless, analyses in criminology and sociology have madeconsiderable contributions towards understanding recent shifts in secu-rity provision as part of transformations in structures of governance as awhole, and the almost exclusive preoccupation with military privatizationin IR has led to a neglect of important aspects of contemporary securitypolitics. Seen in the context of global transformations in governance, secu-rity privatization has been facilitated by three key developments; first, thedominance of neoliberal economic policies; second, the commodification ofsecurity and its concomitant constitution as a realm of expert knowledge;and third, the integration of PSCs into ‘hybrid’ security networks.

The neoliberal transformations of the last three decades have seen notonly a substantial outsourcing of public security functions, but also an in-creasing acceptance of PSCs’ status as market actors who provide a ‘service’

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that can be bought and sold on a free market. As part of this process, theprovision of security has become less tightly identified with the direct andexclusive authority of state officials, and reconfigured as a market in whichthe public is composed of consumers rather than clients – a realm of indi-viduals actively engaged in making choices about their security provisionwithin a marketplace where public authorities are only one (albeit an im-portant and in many ways still privileged) provider.1 Belief in the modelsof the commercial enterprise as the most efficient form of service deliv-ery, of the public as consumers, and of a security market comprised ofboth public and private providers have become important elements in theconceptualization and delivery of security. Security has now become to asignificant extent a technique and a form of expert knowledge that, whilespecialized, is by no means the sole purview of public authorities and thatmay in fact be more effectively exercised by private providers. These trendshave facilitated a specific form of depoliticization, a de-linking of securityfrom public authority that is related to the growth of private security, aswell as to its legitimation and the authority it wields.

But while there is increasing evidence to suggest that the strict public/private distinction is losing its relevance both empirically and conceptu-ally, the rise of private security cannot automatically be interpreted as anindication of declining state power. Rather than clearly delineated spheresof private or public power, the governance of various realms in the con-temporary era emerges instead from the combination and cooperation ofpublic and private actors. Strategies and practices of New Public Manage-ment and public–private partnerships, for example, are pervasive in bothdomestic and international governance, and link public and private actorsin complex webs of collaboration, negotiation and confrontation.

In the field of domestic security, the development of hybrid public–private structures has become increasingly widespread (Johnston, 1992).In many ways, public policing has undergone a process of transformationin accordance with neoliberal reforms and pressures. New Public Manage-ment strategies, outsourcing, marketization, and consumer-driven logicshave resulted in structures of ‘plural policing’ where the public policeare only one among many security actors. As a number of the most inci-sive analysts of security privatization have stressed, private security todaycannot be grasped simply by contrasting it to public authority. Instead,the distinctions between private and public security are being blurred andreconfigured, fusing into networks of institutions and practices. In IanLoader’s words, ‘Security must now be taken to refer to a whole rangeof technologies and practices provided, not only by public bodies such asthe police or local authorities, but also by commercial concerns competingin the marketplace. We have unfolding . . . an uneven, patchwork of secu-rity hardware and services, provision increasingly determined by people’swillingness and ability to pay’ (Loader, 1997b: 147).

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This does not mean that traditional distinctions are irrelevant: the con-cepts of public and private and their different forms of authority remainimportant. In particular, public security authorities retain legislative autho-rization and a breadth of jurisdiction that no other actors possess (Jones andNewburn, 1998), and private security usually operates within a regulatoryframework of some kind. In this way, although states are not always theinstigator of such hybrid forms of governance, nor necessarily the dom-inant ‘partner’, they lend them further strength and legitimacy throughofficial recognition and/or incorporation into domestic/international law.States can also frequently be seen to benefit from the more widespreaduse of private governance mechanisms, and may, as Robert Falkner (2003)argues in the case of environmental governance, choose to let private actorsestablish systems of self-regulation and thus be relieved of the arduousburden of negotiation, implementation and enforcement. State power isthus reconfigured through such governance networks, but not necessarilyweakened.

A fuller understanding of contemporary dynamics of security privati-zation requires a more global focus and an emphasis on its relationshipboth to global capital and to shifting state forms where public and private,domestic and international, are being rearticulated. To date, however, mostanalyses of hybrid security networks have been focused on domestic se-curity, and there is a striking need for further theoretical developmentand concrete research into the operation of these networks at the transna-tional level (Wood and Dupont, 2006). Here, there is great potential forsynergies between the analyses of security privatization and studies ofglobalization and shifting forms of authority that have emerged withinIPE and international relations (Cutler, 2003; Hall and Bierstecker, 2002;Higgot et al., 2000). What is emerging in setting such as the oil-rich NigerDelta, for example, is best understood as new structures and networksof security governance, and cannot be adequately captured through thelens of the public/private opposition (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2005).Instead, the provision of security in the Delta is characterized by a com-plex and often tense relationship between various global and local, publicand private actors, whose authority arises from a combination of differentsources, including neoliberal ideology, private expertise and public autho-rization. Similarly, post-conflict Sierra Leone is characterized by the riseof extensive global–local, public–private security networks (Abrahamsenand Williams, 2006), a point that also emerges in Avant’s nuanced studyof how transnational corporations and non-governmental organizationsin conflict zones use private security, while simultaneously relating topublic forces and various international agencies. As such, private secu-rity companies can be seen as an important illustration of the expandingrole of private authority in global governance (Abrahamsen and Williams,2007).

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A recasting of the study of security privatization in terms of new struc-tures and networks of governance may also cast fresh light on the debatesregarding morality and legitimacy, which so often emerge in the contextof private force. The ‘business of war’ seems inevitably to cause a certainunease, expressed in various ways by the four authors. For Drohan, the is-sue is fairly straightforward as she describes corporate use of armed forceas ‘perfectly legal, perfectly immoral’ (320). But while Drohan alerts us tothe exploitive potential of private force, this judgment is certainly too easyonce one moves away from a schema of public/private in which privateforce is almost by definition equated with illegitimate mercenary activi-ties. In fact, a recognition of the dynamics of shifting state structures andthe interpenetration of state and private coercive capacities across a widerange of activities makes the question of moral and political evaluationever more complex.

The other three studies acknowledge this complexity, and stress thatprivate military firms have both positive and negative potentials. Nev-ertheless, they remain in many ways wary of the impact of security pri-vatization and stress how its rapid development has come before carefulconsideration of its implications and has often outrun effective public pol-icy responses. The issues here are diverse, ranging from questions of legaland political responsibility for the actions of private military contractors –who should be held responsible if something goes wrong? (Singer, 2003:221) – to the fear that once the profit motive is introduced into the businessof war, there is always the possibility that the ‘respectable’ firms (morecostly, and potentially less willing to undertake dubious operations) willlose out to more ‘shady’ operators as market dynamics come to play a morepowerful role. In this light, all of these authors support moves toward theregulation of the private military industry, as, by the way, do many ofthe industry’s own participants. There is, however, considerable debateover the form that this regulation should take – self-regulation, customercodes, formal oversight by states of origin, etc. – and the relative effective-ness of the different options (for a discussion in the UK, see Kinsey, 2002;2005).

Underlying many of these concerns is the more basic point that the pri-vatization of security seems to challenge many of the most fundamentalbeliefs about the nature of modern politics. The marketization of force isa source of discomfort, as Singer notes, in part because ‘considerationsof the commonweal are matters of morality, whereas the bottom line isfundamentally amoral’ (228). More broadly, modern political life has beenstructured around the idea that security is an essentially public good. Thefact that this has always varied, both in terms of provision and equality todifferent individuals or groups at different times and in different places,does not obviate this point. The deeply ingrained sense that security is anintrinsically ‘public’ good, and that once privately supplied it erodes social

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cohesion, encourages social cleavages and exploitation, appears difficultto escape. Studies of how the current transformations in global securitygovernance impact on such key political issues are thus of crucial impor-tance, and these books together provide valuable insights and significantlyexpand our understanding of a sector whose role in international politicsis likely to continue to grow.

NOTE

1 For extensive and detailed analyses of these processes, see Garland (2003), John-ston (1992); Jones and Newburn (1998); Loader (1997a; 1997b); O’Malley andPalmer (1996); and Johnston and Shearing (2003).

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Abrahamsen, R. and Williams, M. C. (2007) ‘Securing the City: Private SecurityCompanies and Non-State Authority in Global Governance’, International Re-lations (Special Issue on ‘The Privatisation and Globalisation of Security inAfrica’), 21(2): 237–53.

Arnold, G. (1999) Mercenaries, London: St. Martin’s Press.Brooks, D. (2000) ‘Messiahs or Mercenaries?’, International Peacekeeping, 7(4): 129–

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