Advancing private security studies: introduction to the special issue

KEYWORDS:

• Private security
• private military
• mercenaries
• PMSCs

On the 20 March 2003, George W. Bush launched Operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’. At the time, it was unlikely anyone in his administration envisaged that United States (US) troops would eventually rely on the largest force of private military contractors in recent times. Victory over Saddam Hussein and the ensuing occupation and reconstruction of Iraq would have not happened without the support of military contractors working behind the scenes to ensure that combat troops receive adequate supplies, maintain vehicles and equipment, and protect military bases and convoys. In Afghanistan, the US and the other countries participating in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) International Security Assistance Force mission relied on contractors providing logistics and armed security to an even larger extent. The NATO-trained Afghan military itself inherited US dependence on contractors, whose departure from Afghanistan alongside American soldiers was identified as one of the factors underlying Kabul armed forces’ inability to confront the Taliban’s advance.¹

Up until the launching of a global war on terrorism in 2001, public awareness of private military contractors and the role they play in warfare was scant at best. One had to think back to the 1960s and 1970s for mainstream stories about conflicts fought by hired guns. It is now nearly twenty years since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom and private military and security companies (PMSCs) are no longer the pariahs they once were. This acceptance does not mean societal criticism of their role in warfare has disappeared, but only that there is a consensus among decision-makers that defence and security policies simply can no longer be implemented without private sector involvement. As epitomized by the conflict in Syria and Ukraine, the use of PMSCs is hardly unique to NATO countries like the US or the United Kingdom (UK). In recent years, the use of Russian armed contractors in support of the Kremlin’s foreign policy, as well as the resort to PMSCs by small regional powers like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have revealed the truly global dimension of security privatization and raised urgent questions about its implications.

Besides growing in its geographic outreach, security privatization has also increased in breadth and scope. The increasingly technologically-complex nature of both warfare and peacetime national security tasks has paved the way for private sector involvement in a host of activities, ranging from the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles to the provision of cybersecurity for national critical infrastructure. While NATO countries, as well as China, have been generally wary of privatizing armed tasks, other states no longer shy away from contracting out the provision of lethal capabilities. Indeed, combat operations conducted by Russian contractors from the Wagner Group show that PMSCs may not solely serve as providers of security and support, but also engage in direct combat on behalf of revisionist powers seeking to rapidly convert wealth into military power or downplay their direct involvement in foreign conflicts. Consequently, commercial actors are now widespread across the spectrum of security tasks in their broadest sense, ranging from mundane, unarmed duties like the protection of firms’ physical premises and intellectual property in the cyberspace to offensive combat missions in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Yemen.

Today’s pervasiveness of PMSCs warrants a systematic investigation of commercial actors’ involvement in all tasks associated with the provision of coercion. Combining theoretical and empirical approaches, the studies included in this special issue offer fresh academic and policy-relevant insights into this multifaceted phenomenon. This introductory article lays the groundwork for our special issue contributors’ findings by serving a threefold purpose. First, we seek to review and take stock of the wealth of research examining the growing role of private providers of coercion. By doing so, we also aim to clear the ground of some persisting oversimplifications and identify various blind spots that remain under-researched despite private security studies’ increasing comprehensiveness and sophistication. Third, we intend to identify opportunities for dialogue and build bridges between private security studies and other disciplines and subfields, including ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary history, area and gender studies, as well as the scholarship of military technology and innovation.

The remainder of this introductory article is divided as follows. The first section presents the evolution of private security studies from their inception to the present day, identifying several ongoing debates. The second section simultaneously pinpoints the blind spots of the existing literature and outlines how the contributors to the special issue seek to address these weaknesses, thereby advancing the scholarly and policy debate. The final section presents the key concepts used throughout the special issue and briefly outlines its structure.

Private security studies in a nutshell

The scholarship on private security has undertaken a steady development since the end of the 1990s. To be sure, studies of commercial violence had not been completely absent until then. Mercenaries had long been familiar figures in the work of military historians focusing on antiquity,² medieval,³ early modern⁴ and contemporary history,⁵ as well as scholars of decolonization and Subsaharan Africa.⁶ States’ monopolization of violence, its normative underpinning, and its implications attracted the attention of philosophers like Norbert Elias,⁷ as well as prominent sociologists like Charles Tilly⁸ and Anthony Giddens.⁹ A debate surrounding the increasing involvement of commercial actors in the provision of military logistics had also started to develop in military organizations’ specialized press and defence economics journals.¹⁰

It was only from the late-1990s onwards, however, that the direct involvement in combat of PMSCs like Executive Outcomes and Sandline International in Angola, Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea sparked new and more systematic attention onto the subject, bringing these previously separate strands of research together. In an International Institute for Security Studies (IISS) paper published in 1998, David Shearer first started to examine different instances of commercial security and military support as different facets of the same phenomenon.¹¹ A few years later, Robert Mandel wrote the first academic monograph entirely dedicated to PMSCs,¹² soon followed by Peter Singer’s academic bestseller Corporate Warriors,¹³ Deborah Avant’s The Market for Force¹⁴ and Christopher Kinsey’s Corporate Soldiers.¹⁵ This first wave of research has mainly consisted of exploratory studies, tracing the origins of today’s international market for armed protection and military support, mapping the activities provided by the industry, offering different categorizations of private security providers, and highlighting differences and similarities between PMSCs and more traditional mercenary forces. Building on this vital wealth of empirical evidence, the second wave of scholarship has introduced greater analytical sophistication into the study of PMSCs by conducting more theory-driven and policy-relevant research into the causes and implications of security privatization. Several strands of research can be identified.

Inspired by some widely publicized scandals surrounding private military and security contractors’ activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, both political scientists and lawyers have paid extensive attention to the regulation of PMSCs. To that end, legal scholars have concentrated on examining the status of contractors under international law, including whether they fulfil the conditions attached to legal definitions of mercenaries and whether they should be considered civilians or combatants.¹⁶ Relatedly, a thorough discussion ensued on contractors’ liability under host, territorial and home state law and states’ responsibility for the activities of the PMSCs they employ or are headquartered in their territory.¹⁷ Political scientists have focused on providing policy perspectives on the regulation of the industry, exploring the opportunity and pitfalls of industry self-regulation, states’ consumer demand and multi-stakeholder initiatives like the International Code of Conduct (ICoC) as more realistic alternatives to new binding legal provisions at the international and national level.¹⁸

International relations scholars have also extensively discussed the political implications of privatizing security and military support, documenting how the use of PMSCs affects control over the use of force. Deborah Avant and follow-up scholarship argued that the use of PMSCs blurs transparency,¹⁹ circumvents parliamentary constraints over the use of force,²⁰ and reduces the domestic political costs attached to deploying military personnel abroad,²¹ thereby hindering the mechanisms underlying democratic peace theory and possibly encouraging more ‘adventurous’ foreign policies.²² Some quantitative empirical research has also sought to assess the impact of PMSCs’ activities on the frequency and severity of conflict.²³

Alongside these empirical studies, several scholars have examined the broader ethical dilemmas attached to privatizing potentially lethal activities. Drawing on the normative underpinning of the state monopoly of violence, Sarah Percy have conceptualized the prohibition to use mercenaries as an international norm. Since the publication of Percy’s monograph,²⁴ a lively debate has developed on the origins, scope and robustness of this norm. Most notably, scholars have argued that the anti-mercenary norm continues to regulate the market for military services²⁵; is still standing but lost its puritanical character²⁶; has been reframed in a narrower fashion²⁷; disappeared²⁸; or never existed in the first place.²⁹ Recent research has also noted the discrepancy between rhetorical adherence to the anti-mercenary norms and states’ increasing resort to PMSCs, conceptualized as a form of organized hypocrisy.³⁰

Another sizeable strand of studies has focused on why, notwithstanding normative inhibitions as well as concerns over losing control of the use of force, states have increasingly relied on PMSCs over the last decade. Most notably, existing literature has sought to explain why military privatization varies across countries and over time by leveraging different factors, including the tightness of political constraints over the use of force,³¹ the rise of neoliberalism,³² different theories of the social contract and civil-military relations models,³³ the parochial interests of different foreign policy bureaucracies,³⁴ and military organizational cultures.³⁵ Latest studies have shifted away from mono-causal explanations, bringing together different factors in order to provide a more sophisticated account of why states vary in their propensity to rely on private security providers.³⁶

The effectiveness of security privatization has also been debated. To that end, scholars have examined to what extent the privatization of support tasks allows for cost-savings and enhances the effectiveness of military operations,³⁷ as well as the ability of small hired combat forces to change the strategic landscape in small wars.³⁸

Most of the existing scholarship has focused on states’ use of PMSCs. Some researchers, however, have also explored the resort to contractors by international organizations. Most have concentrated on the effectiveness and implications of privatizing UN peacekeeping,³⁹ but few recent works have started to examine contractor support to NATO and European Union crisis management operations as well.⁴⁰

Research on the use of PMSCS by NGOs also remains relatively underdeveloped.⁴¹ More scholars have explored how commercial actors have increasingly tapped into the market for force, a process identified by scholars like Elke Krahmann as a commodification of security.⁴² Relatedly, Abrahamssen and Williams and Berndtsson and Stern have shown that today’s security provision belies dichotomous distinctions between public and private, and can best be conceptualized as an assemblage.⁴³ Scholars focusing on maritime security have also examined the use of PMSCs to protect merchant vessels crossing waters ridden by pirates, conceptualizing the increasing resort to armed guards aboard vessels crossing waters ridden by pirates as a form of institutional isomorphism,⁴⁴ or leveraging the unique legal status of the sea to problematize notions like the state monopoly of violence.⁴⁵

Last, political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists alike have examined the identities and cultures of PMSCs and the individual contractors operating therein. Sociologists have built surveys and databases to map the motivations and background of US private security contractors,⁴⁶ as well as the ways in which American soldiers sees them.⁴⁷ Private security contractors in the UK,⁴⁸ Israel⁴⁹ and Sweden⁵⁰ have also been studied through interviews and ethnographic research. Political scientists have mainly employed discourse analysis to examine PMSCs’ public communication and marketing strategies. Their studies have highlighted the coexistence of military, corporate and humanitarian narratives⁵¹ and noted that discourse, marketing strategies and firms’ structure perpetrate (neo)colonial logics by reproducing British imperial tropes on ‘martial races’⁵² as well as traditional gender roles.⁵³

Our contribution

Since its inception, as sketched by the review above, the scholarship described above has grown enormously in empirical scope and theoretical sophistication. However, owing to the difficulty to access data, the rapid growth of the market, as well as the lingering Eurocentric and Westphalian bias that underlies many theories and concepts in the field of international relations, some gaps remain. Specifically, we argue that, despite its many merits, the existing academic literature on private security remains hindered by four persisting blind spots: its superficial engagement with history, its nearly exclusive focus on Western democracies and subsequent lack of a truly global perspective, its insufficient examination of how categories like mercenaries are socially constructed and gendered, and its limited dialogue with military innovation studies. The articles in this special issue seek to expand the historical depth, geographical scope and analytical sophistication of the debate, thereby advancing the theoretical and policy debate on the past, present, and future of private security providers. In the remainder of this section, we simultaneously flesh out these shortcomings and present the articles in this special issue, thereby outlining how each of our contributors advances the existing debate.

Private security in historical perspective

As lamented by Grygiel, security studies scholars’ use of history remains characterized by a nearly exclusive focus on European contemporary history and a corresponding neglect of cases and evidence from pre-Westphalian periods.⁵⁴ Even if some scholars have identified today’s erosion of the state monopoly of violence as conducive to a ‘new medievalism’,⁵⁵ private security studies are no exception. Scholarship on today’s PMSCs has largely remained wary of historical analysis, failing to draw systematic and convincing parallels between past and present instances of security privatization. To be sure, book-lengthy studies of PMSCs have often provided a historical overview of mercenary activities in the past, frequently mentioning commercial private forces such as the condottieri of Italy’s Renaissance, the Hessians employed by the English Crown against the American colonies, and Western mercenary groups operating in Africa during the Cold War.⁵⁶ However, most existing scholarship departs from the assumption that mercenaries and PMSCs are analytically distinct, incomparable phenomena. Although usually correct on empirical and legal grounds, this distinction has hindered dialogue between military historians and IR scholars, hindering a comprehensive use of history as a source of insight into the commercial provision of security. While most publications on PMSCs have usually treated past instances of commercial violence as trivia, confining historical overviews to monographs’ introductory chapters, our special issue seeks to more firmly embed today’s privatization in a historical perspective by examining the use of mercenaries in pre-modern history. To be sure, as noted in the special issue article by Malte Riemann, using history to make claims about today’s market for force entails several challenges and requires caution. Private security scholars drawing on military history have often inadequately historicised and contextualized the notion of mercenary, which is inextricably tied to a Westphalian understanding of ‘foreignness’ and a modern account of ‘self-interest’, which were both absent in the periods preceding the 18th century. By raising awareness to the historicity of this seemingly universal concept and cautioning against its uncritical projection into the past, Riemann’s caveats serve as an ideal introduction to the historical section of the special issue.

Most historians of mercenaries in the antiquity have focused on the Mediterranean basis in the Greco-Roman period. In our special issue, by contrast, we have decided to provide a study of private security providers in Ancient and Early Medieval South Asia. In his piece, Kaushik Roy shows that from the emergence of empires in circa 300 BCE till the rise of British power in the eighteenth century, mercenaries and private security organisations dominated the Indian politico-military landscape. The existing literature has often blamed mercenaries in India and elsewhere for providing inadequate military services and hindering the rise of strong, centralized state authorities. Roy, by contrast, takes a different perspective, showing that mercenaries were effective combat providers and served as crucial sources of military innovation, contributing to the diffusion of new military technologies and practices across South Asia.

The mercenary forces operating in Italy between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern age have suffered especially heated criticism. The dismissal of these companies and their captains, the condottieri, has been widely influenced by the legacy of Niccolò Machiavelli’s contempt for mercenaries, whom he stigmatized as the main cause of Italian cities’ failure to preserve independence from foreign powers. Machiavelli famously poured scorn on mercenaries by labelling them as ‘useless and dangerous’ because of their lack of military effectiveness and their propensity to turn against their employers.⁵⁷ This argument, however, obscures the much more complex role played by commercial warriors in European battlefields and state-making processes. Indeed, Machiavelli’s own assessment was biased by his republican ideology, which urged him to see citizen militias as both capable fighting forces and beacons of civic virtue. As demonstrated in the special issue article by Matteo Casiraghi, hired soldiers had a more diverse and nuanced strategic impact than Machiavelli acknowledged. When effectively held accountable and regularly paid by both wealthy, well-governed city-states like Florence and European monarchies like France, mercenaries served as both capable and reliable fighting forces.

The transition from mercenary armies to citizen armies has been conventionally identified as the main strategic innovation in early contemporary history, triggered by the French Revolution and then diffused across Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. According to several scholars, French revolutionary ideals played a crucial role in the consolidation and diffusion of the anti-mercenary norm.⁵⁸ The need to summarize long timespans and complex historical processes, however, has prompted scholars working on states’ monopolization of violence to rely on somewhat sweeping distinctions between hirelings and citizen soldiers, neglecting the fact that – as noted by Riemann – mercenaries are hardly a ahistorical category that exists irrespective of the context and the subjectivity of the observer. Mercenarism, like beauty, is often in the eyes of the beholder. The article by Helene Olsen neatly illustrates the elusiveness of this notion, relying on British parliamentary debates to illustrate how the mercenary label is often used inconsistently and brandished as a rhetorical weapon for parochial political purposes. Accordingly, the German hirelings employed by the British crown to fight against the French were hardly stigmatized as mercenaries. The mercenary label and the stigma attached thereto, by contrast, were frequently evoked by members of parliament to censure the use of German soldiers against Britain’s own subjects during the American Revolution.

The term ‘mercenary’ and the strong derogatory charge it carries have continued to be rhetorically weaponized for parochial political gain until the present day. The wars fought in the wake of the decolonization of the African continent exacerbated the stigma surrounding these actors, consolidating their reputation as proxies of Western colonial powers and corporate interests, sources of instability and perpetrators of widespread atrocities. Rookes and Bruyere-Ostells, however, examine the role played by mercenaries in Katanga (1960–1963), in the Congo as a whole (1964–1967), and in Biafra (1967–1970) to show that this reputation is not entirely deserved. While surely problematic at times, mercenaries often carried the blame for African states’ dysfunctions and served as smokescreens for local power politics.

Beyond Western countries: the need for a global outlook

The second part of our special issue focuses on contemporary perspectives, seeking to contribute to literature on private military and security companies (PMSCs) from both an empirical and theoretical standpoint. Existing scholarship has acknowledged the Anglo-American bias of today’s private security scholars,⁵⁹ stressed the existence of many different ‘markets for force’ worldwide,⁶⁰ and started examining non-NATO or non-Western countries like Russia,⁶¹ China⁶² and the Gulf monarchies.⁶³ Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of private security scholarship remains focused on countries in the Euro-Atlantic community. Most studies of commercial security and military support, including our own previous research, have concentrated on the United States and the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent other European and NATO countries like Germany, Italy, or Canada.⁶⁴

Although partly justified by the intrinsic importance of the extensive privatization of military support carried out by NATO militaries after the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, this narrow focus has not only created an empirical gap. Indeed, a focus on Western democracies may have also led to biased theoretical conclusions about the present and future of commercial providers of security. Most notably, the focus on the privatization of military support by NATO militaries has caused most scholarship to consider the private provision of combat as an exceptional deviation from overarching norms like the state monopoly of violence and the prohibition to use mercenaries. The outsourcing of combat has therefore been dismissed as a weapon of last resort by fragile states in the Global South like Angola, Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea, which signed combat support contracts with those few now defunct companies providing offensive services like Executive Outcomes and Sandline International during the early 1990s.⁶⁵ As epitomized by the latest conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Nigeria, however, the presence of commercial actors on the frontline can no longer be dismissed as an anomaly. In order to redress existing scholars’ near-exclusive focus on the relatively limited role played by PMSCs in liberal democracies, our special issue focuses on less-examined and yet crucial private security markets, such as China, Russia and the Middle East.

Specifically, the article by Yuan shows the increasing prominence of private security companies in supporting China’s economic interests abroad. The fact that many of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative projects have taken place in countries fraught with conflict, political unrest, and crime has endangered a growing number of Chinese citizens working abroad, increasing the demand for commercial protective services. Despite its enormous margins for growth, the Chinese private security market remains hindered by Beijing’s reluctance to fragment the monopoly of violence by authorizing its national private security contractors to carry arms. China’s wariness of providing private security actors with the ability to use lethal force, however, is hardly shared by other rising and revisionist powers.

Russia’s use of PMSCs, examined in the special issue article by Bukkvoll and Østensen, is a case in point. Specifically, Russian PMSCs had served different purposes in the Kremlin’s foreign policy agenda, acting as war-fighting proxies, providers of plausible deniability in hybrid, grey-zone scenarios, and bargaining chips offered to foreign countries in exchange for mining rights and other concessions to Russian businesses and elites. While PMSCs could help countries like Russia to maintain great power status on the cheap, their use comes at a price. Indeed, the Kremlin itself has become increasingly aware that the use of PMSCs in a combat capacity could erode their political control over the projection of military power abroad, as epitomized by the clash between Wagner group contractors and US Special Operations Forces that occurred in Syria in February 2017.

Given Moscow’s large military capabilities, their use of PMSCs is motivated primarily by the attempt to obtain plausible deniability or at least reduce the visibility of Russia’s involvement in conflict abroad. Small, oil-rich monarchies like the United Arab Emirates, on the other hand, have tapped into the market for force to an even larger degree to obtain capabilities that their military is unable or unwilling to keep in-house owing to their limited population. As illustrated by Krieg, this tendency to convert wealth into power by purchasing foreign military labour is hardly new or exceptional. In regions like the Middle East, many countries have developed a patrimonial civil-military relations model based on fragmenting the security sector and building ties between military and law enforcement units and individual rulers rather than the state at large. Hence, the examination of non-Western cases provides new, vital insights into often taken-for-granted norms and military force structures models that confine commercial security providers to non-combat support roles.

The social construction of mercenaries and contractors

Even if most scholarship on private security has focused on security privatization in the Euro-Atlantic region, studies of PMSCs headquartered in Western liberal democracies continues to suffer from some meaningful blind spots as well.

As noted above, a historical and global examination provides the opportunity to investigate how categories like mercenaries are not universal, but have developed in parallel with ideas and institutions that lie at the heart of contemporary politics, such as nation and citizenship. Accordingly, the notion of mercenaries has been socially constructed in accordance with both prevailing social norms as well as parochial political agendas.⁶⁶ Literature on today’s PMSCs has examined the discursive struggle surrounding the construction and regulation of today’s private security providers.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, research on how PMSCs portray themselves, compete with one another, and sell security and support in the marketplace remains limited. The special issue article by Joachim and Schneider adds to the study of how private security firms market their services and (re)construct their identities in two ways: first, they examine a large number of private security companies’ websites; second, they employ a gender studies perspective, highlighting how hegemonic masculinities are not only constitutive of PMSCs’ corporate identity, but also structure the relations that companies develop with their employees, their clients and competitors.

Joachim and Schneiker look at the ways in which PMSCs portray themselves. The article by Rich examines how commercial military providers are framed in popular culture, and specifically in movies. Although international relations scholars have dedicated increasing attention to popular culture and the role played by the movie industry in shaping it, the portrayal of mercenaries remained unexplored. By examining how American and European movies portray hirelings, the article by Rich identifies three recurring tropes: the mercenary as an anti-hero, the mercenary as screen villain, and the mercenary as universal soldier. The fact that mercenaries are often portrayed as villains and rarely play traditional heroic roles reveals the persistence of some lingering stigma attached to fighting for profit. On the other hand, Hollywood scripts also reveal an enduring fascination and lingering romanticization of guns for hire, sometimes portrayed as anti-heroes. The analysis of these visual narratives complements Olsen’s study of parliamentary debates and Joachim and Schneiker’s analysis of PMSCs’ websites in shedding new light on the social construction of mercenaries and private security providers at large.

Privatization and technological change: a symbiotic relationship?

The last two articles in the special issue seek to build a bridge between two strands of research that have not yet engaged in a systematic dialogue despite their complementarity: private security and military innovation studies. By doing so, the last part of the collection lays the ground for sketching some future trajectories in the evolution of commercial security providers by focusing on the two trends that are most likely to revolutionize the international security landscape in future decades, namely automation and the growing importance of the cyberspace. By examining states’ outsourcing of cyber-security services, the article by Weiss focuses on a new and still largely unexplored facet of commercial security provision, mapping the structure of this new industry, its players, and the challenges attached to its regulation. Partly deliberately, partly necessarily, the intersection between states’ demand for cybersecurity and the supply of such services by private firms has prompted the emergence of networked rather than hierarchical relationships between governments and commercial actors. These horizontal and largely informal relationships entail several challenges for controlling cybersecurity providers, including that of governments’ regulatory capture.

Weiss focuses on computer networks, while Calcara’s article mainly examines the impact of new technologies on physical, conventional domains, analysing the complex interplay between automation and the privatization of military support. Technological innovation has long been understood as conducive to a greater involvement on contractors on the battlefield by making military organizations increasingly dependent on niche capabilities that can no longer be kept within the ranks. Because of progress in robotics and artificial intelligence, however, future technology also allows for automatizing many of the repetitive, menial support tasks that are currently provided by contractors, potentially setting the market against itself. By providing decision-makers with the possibility to wage less manpower-intensive military operations and reduce casualties among military personnel, thereby decreasing the political costs of military intervention, privatization and automation alike entail both new promises for military effectiveness as well as new perils for democratic control over the use of force.

Concepts and structure

The academic debate on the re-emergence of private providers of combat in the 1990s offers various attempts to define and classify the commercial actors operating in the market for force. The authors involved in such a debate have come up with several labels and acronyms, such as private military company (PMC) or firm (PMF),⁶⁸ private security company (PSC),⁶⁹ and private military and security company (PMSC).⁷⁰ While the proliferation of such new labels has sometimes created more confusion than empirical accuracy, overemphasizing the novelty of a phenomenon that has taken place in various forms throughout history, an analysis of different facets of the commercial security phenomenon like that carried out in this special issue inevitably requires the use of specific concepts.

Singer has argued that private military companies differ from mercenaries on at least five grounds: their organization, since they are permanent, legally established organizations rather than loosely assembled patchworks of individual soldiers; their motives, since they are driven by corporate rather than individual profit; their markets, comprising a wide variety of public and private entities; their services, which are much broader than those provided by traditional mercenaries, and largely involve support functions rather than direct combat; their patterns of recruitment, which are open and public rather than clandestine.⁷¹ Following this distinction, contributors in this volume use the label of mercenary – broadly used to refer to any soldier fighting for profit in a foreign army – only for those past or present commercial actors that do not meet the criteria above.

Depending on their nature and activities, the contemporary commercial entities examined by the contributors to the second and third parts of our volume are indicated as private military (PMCs), private security (PSCs) or private military and security companies (PMSCs). Those who discuss about firms that engage in the direct provision of combat services abroad, like Bukkvoll and Ostensen, use the corresponding label PMC; those who only examine direct providers of armed or unarmed security like Yuan, on the other hand, have opted for the notion of PSCs; those who engage in a general discussion about the firms providing both types of services, like Joachim and Schneiker and Calcara, use the broader label of PMSCs. Likewise, individuals working for those firms are referred to as private military and private security contractors. In accordance with the existing literature, all contributors employ the notion of security privatization when referring to states’ use of PMSCs; by contrast, the contracting out of security tasks by private actors like transnational corporations is referred to as an instance of outsourcing.

Broadly following the objectives set out in the previous sections, this special issue is divided as follows. The first part – which provides a historical examination of commercial providers of combat – includes the articles by Riemann, Roy, Casiraghi, Olsen and Rookes and Bruyere-Ostells, which tackle the challenges attached to doing research on an elusive, inherently modern category like mercenaries by investigating the commercial provision of coercion in Ancient, Medieval, Modern and contemporary history. The second part – which providers contemporary perspectives – includes Bukkvoll and Ostensen, Krieg, and Yuan’s examinations of security privatization outside the Euro-Atlantic region, and specifically of Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and China, as well as Joachim and Schneiker’s analysis of Western PMSCs through a gender studies approach and Rich’s study of mercenaries’ portrayal in movies. The last part – focusing on future trends – sheds light onto the role that commercial actors are set to play in tomorrow’s strategic landscape by focusing on the relationship between security privatization and technological innovation. To that end, the article by Weiss provides an analysis of private providers of cyber-security, while the piece by Calcara focuses on the complex relationship between privatization and automation in defence policies. The concluding article by Cusumano and Kinsey summarizes the key themes identified throughout the special issue and sketches some future trends on the role that commercial providers of security and military support are set to play in the next decades.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eugenio Cusumano

Dr Eugenio Cusumano is assistant professor of international relations at Leiden University and Marie Curie Global Fellow at the university of Venice. His research, focusing on non-state actors involvement in crisis management on land and at sea, has appeared in 24 impact factor articles in journals including Security Dialogue and The Journal of Strategic Studies, as well as books by Oxford and Stanford University Press. Together with Stefano Ruzza, he wrote the monograph Piracy and the Privatization of Maritime Security, published in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan. He has collaborated with the International Organization of Migration, the NATO Centre of Excellence on Civil-Military Cooperation, and the EU Centre of Excellence on Hybrid Threats. His research been funded through fellowships and grants obtained from the European Commission, the Fulbright program, the European University Institute, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Christopher Kinsey

Dr Christopher Kinsey is a Reader in Business and International Security with Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. His research examines the role of the market in war. Dr Kinsey has published widely on the subject from books, book chapters and articles in leading academic journals. He has also presented papers to the UN, NATO and the EU. Dr Kinsey’s present work looks at the impact of contracted logistical support to military expeditionary operations, and mercenary operations in Africa.

Notes

1. Detsch, “Departure of Private Contractors Was a Turning Point in Afghan Military’s Collapse.”

2. Griffith, The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World.

3. Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.

4. Mallett and Hale, The Military Organisation of a Renaissance State.

5. Mockler, The Mercenaries; Mockler, The New Mercenaries.

6. Himmelstrand et al., African Perspectives on Development.

7. Elias, The Civilizing Process.

8. Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe; Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992.

9. Giddens, Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism.

10. Dibble et al., Army Contractors and Civilian Maintenance, Supply, and Transportation Support During Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm; Kinsey, Private Contractors and the Reconstruction of Iraq: Transforming military logistics.

11. Shearer, Private Armies and Military Interventions.

12. Mandel, Armies Without States: The Privatization of Security.

13. Singer, Corporate Warriors.

14. Avant, The Market for Force.

15. Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security. The Rise of Private Military Companies.

16. See for instance Mancini et al., Old Concepts and New Challenges: Are Private Contractors the Mercenaries of the 21st Century?; Doswald-Beck, Private military companies under International Humanitarian Law.

17. Bakker and Sossai, Multilevel Regulation Multilevel Regulation of Private Military and Security Contractors; and Cameron and Chetail, Privatizing War.

18. Prem, “The False Promise of Multi-stakeholder Governance: Depoliticising Private Military and Security Companies”; Krahmann, Choice, voice, and exit: Consumer power and the self-regulation of the private security industry; Leander, “What do Codes of Conduct Do? Hybrid Constitutionalization and Militarization in Military Markets”; Cusumano, “Policy Prospects on the Regulation of PMSCs.”

19. Avant and Sigelman, “Private Security and Democracy: Lessons from the US in Iraq, 265.”

20. Cusumano, “Bridging the Gap.”

21. Cusumano and Ruzza, “The Political Cost-Effectiveness of Private Vessel Protection”; and Schooner and Swan, Contractors and the Ultimate Sacrifice.

22. Avant, “The Implications of Marketized Security for IR Theory.”

23. Petersoh, “Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), Military Effectiveness, and Conflict Severity in Weak States, 1990–2007”; and Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski, “Private Military Companies, Opportunities, and Termination of Civil Wars in Africa.”

24. Percy, Mercenaries: The History of a Norm in International Relations.

25. Brewis and ìGodfrey, ‘Never Call Me a Mercenary’: Identity Work, Stigma Management and the Private Security Contractor; White, Mercenarism, Norms and Market Exchange: Reassembling the Private Military Labour Market.

26. Bures and Meyer, The anti-mercenary norm and United Nations’ use of private military and security companies.

27. Petersohn, “Reframing the Anti-mercenary Norm”; and Krahmann, “The United States, PMSCs and the State Monopoly on Violence.”

28. Casiraghi, Weak, Politicized, Absent: The Anti-Mercenary Norm in Italy and the United Kingdom, 1805–2017; Panke and Petersohn, “Why International Norms Disappear Sometimes.”

29. Liu and Kinsey, “Challenging the Strength of the Antimercenary Norm.”

30. Cusumano and Bures, “Varieties of Organized Hypocrisy.”

31. Cusumano, Bridging the Gap.

32. Leander and van Munster, “Private Security Contractors in the Debate about Darfur.”

33. Krahmann, States, Citizens and the Privatization of Security.

34. Cusumano and Kinsey, “Bureaucratic Interests and the Outsourcing of Security.”

35. Cusumano, The Scope of Military Privatisation: Military Role Conceptions and Contractor Support in the United States and the United Kingdom.

36. Cusumano and Ruzza, Piracy and the Privatization of Maritime Security. Vessel Protection Policies Compared; Kruck, Theorising the Use of Private Military and Security Companies: A synthetic perspective.

37. Dunigan, Victory for Hire: Private Security Companies’ Impact on Military Effectiveness.

38. Fitzimmons, Mercenaries in Asymmetric Conflicts.

39. Cameron, The Privatization of Peacekeeping; Patterson, Privatizing Peace; Østensen, In the Business of Peace;

40. Cusumano and Bures, “Varieties of Organized Hypocrisy”; Krahmann, “NATO Contracting in Afghanistan”; Giumelli and Cusumano, Normative Power Under Contract?

41. Spearin, Private, Armed and Humanitarian.

42. Krahmann, Security: Collective Good or Commodity?

43. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics; Berndtsson and Stern, “Private security and the public–private divide: Contested lines of distinction and modes of governance in the Stockholm-Arlanda security assemblage.”

44. Cusumano and Ruzza, Piracy and the privatization of maritime security.

45. Berube and Cullen, Maritime Private Security.

46. Swed and Burland, Contractors in Iraq: Exploited Class or Exclusive Club?; Schaub and Kelty, Private Military and Security Contractors: Controlling the Corporate Warrior.

47. Schaub, Civilian Combatants, Military Professionals? American Officer Judgments.

48. Brewis and Godfrey, Never Call me a Mercenary; Higate, The Private Militarized and Security Contractor as Geocorporeal.

49. Grassiani, “Between security and Military Identities.”

50. Strand and Berndtsson, “Recruiting the ‘enterprising soldier’.”

51. Joachim and Schneiker, “All for one and one in all.”

52. Chisholm, Marketing the Gurkha security package: Colonial histories and neoliberal economies of private security.

53. Eichler, Gender and Private Security in Global Politics; Joachim and Schneiker. Of ‘true professionals’ and ‘ethical hero warriors’: A gender-discourse analysis of private military and security companies.

54. Grygiel, The Primacy of Premodern History.

55. Friedrichs, The meaning of new medievalism.

56. See Singer, Corporate Warriors.

57. Machiavelli, Il Principe, 41–2.

58. Percy, Mercenaries; Avant, “From Mercenary to Citizen Armies.”

59. van Meegdenburg, “What the Research on PMSCs Discovered and Neglected.”

60. Dunigan and Petersohn. The Markets for Force. Privatization of Security Across World Regions.

61. Bukkvoll and Østensen, “The Emergence of Russian Private Military Companies”; and Marten, “Russia’s use of Semi-State Security Forces.”

62. Arduino, China’s Private Army Protecting the New Silk Road.

63. Krieg, Socio-Political Order and Security in the Arab World.

64. Leander, Commercialising Security in Europe.

65. See note 14 above.

66. Ettinger, The Mercenary Moniker: Condemnations, Contradictions and the Politics of Definition.

67. Krahmann, “From ‘Mercenaries’ to ‘Private Security Contractors’.”

68. See note 13 above.

69. Avant, The Market for Force; Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers.

70. Francioni and Ronzitti, War by Contract; Avant and Sigelman, “Private Security and Democracy.”

71. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 47.