Concluding comments

KEYWORDS:

• Private security
• mercenaries
• PMSCs
• market for force
• monopoly of violence

This final commentary seeks to reflect on the articles comprising this special issue. As such, it does not attempt to discuss in detail any particular period, theme, or geographical area, but serves a twofold purpose. First, we leverage the evidence provided by our contributors to examine why commercial actors have been a crucial component of the security landscape from antiquity to the present day, how notions like mercenaries have been socially constructed, and how their identity and legitimacy have changed over time. Second, we seek to provide fresh insights into the role that commercial security providers are set to play in the future. Will future private providers of security and combat look like the mercenaries who served in the Congo in the 1960s? Will they resemble the PMSCs that have operated in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first two decades of the 2000s? Or will future commercial violence mainly be provided remotely through computer networks and autonomous systems by technogeeks like those working today in the Silicon Valley? To tentatively answer these questions, we will assess how today’s increasingly fragmented markets for military support, security, and direct combat will likely develop in parallel with the evolving nature of conflict and the ongoing transformation of the international system. After sketching some future trends, we conclude with a final note.

Our authors have adopted a variety of different historical, geographical, and disciplinary perspectives. Despite this pluralism, their articles flesh out and revolve around a handful of key themes and insights. These include how the market has been used as a source of military manpower, past present, and future; how technology has served as a driver of military privatization; how the use of commercial providers of violence enables plausible deniability; and how mercenaries and private security forces at large are socially constructed. This section examines each of these themes in detail.

The market as a source of military labour

The development of urban societies and large political communities is inextricably linked to the specialization of labour. Warfare too soon became an increasingly complex and specialized business. As conflict grew more sophisticated, the demand for proficiency in specialized skills like archery and cavalry increased accordingly, causing the use of paid military professionals to spread across Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean basin. The supply of military labour also widened in parallel with population growth, which magnified the number of individuals and communities willing to answer a call to arms in order to escape poverty. The intersection between the demand and the supply for military skills enabled the creation of a thriving market for military force in the Middle East and Europe since at least 2,000 BC,¹ prompting several scholars and commentators to label mercenarism as ‘the second oldest profession’.²

As illustrated by Roy in his contribution to the special issue, these dynamics were also at play in the Indian subcontinent, whose vast demographic resources pushed many towards military service. Far from being held in contempt, mercenarism was socially prestigious compared to other types of labour such as farming. Hence, serving as a mercenary was not restricted by any taboo or normative concerns. In this context, freelance military companies specialized in the provision of combat played a key role in the Indian strategic landscape, offering their services to different local political communities. Contrary to the common wisdom that India’s warfare prior to British colonialism was an incoherent patchwork of undisciplined warriors, Roy shows that mercenaries acted as effective fighting forces and crucibles of military innovation throughout Ancient and Medieval history. Although India has eventually upheld a monopoly of violence within its territory, the legacy of its mercenary past is showcased by Delhi’s armed forces’ enduring reliance on volunteers rather than conscripts and the persisting tendency for the youngest sons of peasants to serve in foreign countries’ militaries. This tradition, widespread across different regions of South Asia, has fuelled the myth of ‘martial races’ that shaped the British Empire’s military force structures and continues to influence the international private security industry to the present day.³

A widespread resort to the market as a source of military power also characterizes European Medieval and Early Modern History, where the crisis of feudalism, improving demographics, the expansion of the market economy and the specialization required by advances in military technology and tactics fuelled an extensive resort to mercenaries. Most notably, the end of the Hundred Years Wars and the flourishing of small and wealthy political organizations like free cities ensured a tight intersection between the supply and the demand for military power.⁴ In this context, as Casiraghi shows in his article, the city states and principates that flourished across Northern and Central Italy in the Middle Ages took a pragmatic approach to defening their territory and, by association, structuring their military forces. When designing their armies, ‘rulers … tried to simultaneously maximize military effectiveness, reduce the economic and political costs of waging war, and preserve sufficient control over their fighting forces and their commanders’.⁵ What guided rulers was not the idea that waging war for profit was an immoral act, but the need to simultaneously protect themselves from their rivals and retain effective control over the means of coercion. Cohesive and prosperous city states like Florence successfully managed to leverage commercial combat providers as a decisive source of military power while keeping them loyal and accountable. Mercenary captains, however, did at times leverage the internal divisions of weaker employers, overthrowing the ruling government of smaller cities fraught with internal strife like Lucca.

While the Italian cities often delegated entire military campaigns to freelance companies functioning as independent fighting units, European monarchies took a different and ultimately more reliable approach, largely integrating hired foreigners into their own standing armies. French kings, for instance, leveraged the market as a force multiplier and a source of specialized military units like crossbowmen. As a result, ‘foreign mercenaries could never develop the military and economic strength that allowed their counterparts in Italy to effectively threaten the stability of cities’.⁶ France’s approach was replicated by other European monarchies including Spain, Sweden, and the Hapsburg empire. The integration of paid foreign forces into the standing armies of European monarchies, becoming the prevailing military format since at least the French Revolution.⁷ Military historians like Parrott have systematically documented how the delegation of military responsibility to networks or private enterprises was crucial to Early Modern European warfare, belying the frequent assumption that mercenaries diminish military effectiveness and reduce state power.⁸ The use of hired forces allowed sovereigns to emancipate themselves from the unruly feudal nobility that had previously constituted the bulk of their fighting force. The need to pay for mercenary armies, in turn, urged rulers to consolidate their power over their territory, establish a monopoly of violence within their borders and develop a bureaucratic apparatus in order to better extract resources from society through taxation. Hence, mercenary forces played a vital role in the formation and consolidation of the modern state. As famously argued by Tilly, ‘wars made states and vice-versa’.⁹

The use of the market to augment scarce humanpower or obtain capabilities that are missing from the ranks is not restricted to previous eras. As Krieg notes in his contribution to the special issue, the purchasing of foreign labour has become an integral part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) effort to bolster their military power. By tapping into an international market for combat and military support, the UAE have dramatically augmented their ability to both conduct kinetic operations and operate in the cyberspace. Up to now, the UAE have proven able to exert direct control over these commercial forces, which have effectively projected military force abroad according to the desiderata of the Gulf monarchy. Abu Dhabi’s resort to the market for military services as a solution to the lack of significant domestic human resources is therefore likely to constitute a future trend, serving as an example for other financially well-endowed small states. The UAE’s example is a forceful reminder that the military force structure model drawing almost exclusively on the use of own citizens that has dominated warfare since the 1793 French levee en masse is historically contingent in both time and scope. In the words of Janice Thomson, ‘The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural’.¹⁰ The ‘historical anomaly’, if any, is the state monopoly of both internal and external violence.¹¹

Yuan’s analysis of China’s hesitancy to outsource armed tasks in this special issue showcases that the state monopoly over violence is not necessarily an Eurocentric norm, nor is the concern of ensuring accountability and control over the use of violence shared by liberal democracies only. In many non-Western context, however, purchasing security from other nonstate actors is not as abnormal as it is in Western democracies. In the Middle East especially, the security sector has traditionally been fragmented by design, and the purchasing of foreign military manpower has simultaneously protected the country from external threats and consolidated the regime by safeguarding the ruling elite from coups. In such a context, military and law enforcement sectors are set to resemble security assemblages, consisting of an array of public, private, and hybrid local and global actors.¹²

The reconfiguration of the security sector into increasingly fragmented assemblages should therefore not necessarily be understood as a challenge to the state’s authority over the use of violence. On the contrary, by forging security assemblages comprising public as well as commercial actors, certain states and their ruling elites are able to draw on human resources, skills, and technologies missing from the ranks. Tapping into the market allows decision-makers to protect themselves from the risks arising from overly powerful, highly centralized armed forces and circumvent the domestic political and social constraints attached to extracting labour from society, converting labour into military power, and projecting that power abroad.¹³

Technology and the privatization of national security

As illustrated by both international relations scholars and historians, states have always been reliant on technology and specialisation to outperform the enemy on the battlefield. In the words of Kenneth Waltz, ‘contending states imitate the military innovations contrived by the country of greatest capability and ingenuity’.¹⁴ Despite investing enormous resources in research and development, procurement, and new doctrines, however, large conservative bureaucracies such as western state militaries are inclined to always prepare for fighting the last war.¹⁵ This oft-quoted prophecy is even more accurate today. While several military revolutions occurred in the past, the speed and disruptiveness of today’s innovations are such that it may take generations of officers before militaries can fully embrace and master technological change. This makes even the most advanced armed forces worldwide unable to return to the levels of self-sufficiency remotely comparable to those enjoyed during the Cold War.¹⁶

As succinctly put by Calcara in this special issue, ‘contemporary warfare is increasingly shaped by complex relationships between the privatisation of security and technologically driven automation’.¹⁷ For centuries, military innovation has encouraged a resort to the market. This trend has accelerated after the end of the Cold War, when equipment procurement has been increasingly predicated on the premise that contractor support will be available ‘from the factory to the foxhole’.¹⁸ As a consequence, military acquisitions have transformed from the mere purchasing of an asset to be manned by uniformed personnel into the provision of complex systems to be maintained and sometimes directly operated by contractors. New types of procurement policies based on the criterion of through-life support pushed contractors maintaining and military assets closer to the operational frontline, making them vital to achieve mission objectives. Automation, in parallel with the growing prominence of the cyberspace alongside conventional military domains, has enormously accelerated this trend, maximizing militaries, police forces and intelligence agencies’ dependence on new and old industries.

Although the growing prominence of the private sector in national security may not necessarily lead to a decline of the state, public authorities face major challenges in controlling the commercial actors whose expertise is vital to harness these new technologies. As explained above, rulers have struggled for centuries to reconcile the military advantages promised by the market with the risks of delegating and losing control over the provision of violence. The increasing deployment of contractors on the battlefield in the wake of the global war on terror already brought a number of regulatory issues to the fore.¹⁹ The challenges of holding accountable new firms like cybersecurity providers are further exacerbated by the opaque nature of the worldwide web and the far greater epistemic advantage of commercial actors, whose expertise in computer science and new technologies is often far greater than state regulators’. Moreover, unlike mercenaries and private military contractors, those providing cybersecurity or remotely programming and operating unmanned and automatic systems do not even share soldiers’ training, organizational culture, ethos, and physical proximity to the battlefield. Indeed, as noted by Weiss in his article for the special issue, many information and communication technology industries also operating in civilian markets show some unease in establishing structured collaborations with military organizations, as they feel that such ties could damage their reputation. As a result, governments and cybersecurity providers have developed a largely informal, networked relationship.

The diverse and fragmented nature of the market, the information asymmetries that such private actors enjoy, and the problems of collective action hindering effective international cooperation across states all increase the risk of either lone wolf cybermercenaries or rogue cybercompanies selling their services to the highest bidder or engaging in criminal activities. These risks add to and intersect with other challenges that are inherently linked to the cyberdomain, namely the difficulty to attribute attacks. Hence, the possibility to operate in the use computer networks as a platform for hostile activities maximizes the opportunities for state and non-state actors to enjoy the shield of plausible deniability that operating through commercial proxies may entail. It is to these incentives that we now turn.

Private security forces and plausible deniability

Throughout history, state officials have often turned to mercenaries, privateers, or other types of non-state actors as proxies. The possibility to downplay or completely deny their involvement in the activities carried out by foreign proxies is often used by governments to escape both the domestic outcry and the diplomatic repercussions of military activities. Hence, plausible denial ensures that “no covert operation can be traced back to ‘[the sponsoring government] … It means that an operation, even if exposed, can be denied as an [official] … act without the [sponsoring government] being caught in a barefaced lie’.²⁰

Plausible deniability through the use of proxies has been especially frequent during the Cold War. CIA involvement in the Congo between 1965 and 1967, for instance, is a good example of the extent a state agency is prepared to go to protect the national interest as well as their organizational autonomy, while at the same time denying any involvement in clandestine, black operations.²¹ The use of armed non-state actors as proxies in Congo and elsewhere during the Cold War was hardly unique to the two superpowers. For instance, Rookes and Bruyere-Ostells note that “French Minister of Armies Pierre Messmer authorised French mercenaries Roger Trinquier and Roger Faulques to serve under Tshombe in order that France enhance its claims to the Congo and defend what it termed its ‘pre carré’, or sphere of influence.²² Declining great powers like France and Britain found in the use of mercenaries as foreign proxies the opportunity to regain some room of manoeuvre in an international system dominated by two superpowers, but also evade the scrutiny of increasingly vocal domestic and international public opinions. It was in the context of Cold War proxy wars that Colonel David Stirling, the founder of British Special Air Service (SAS), developed the idea of creating Watchguard International – the first modern PMSC – soon followed by other firms like Keenie Menie Services, Saladin Security, and Defence Services Limited (DSL). After being unofficially used in Yemen, Stirling and his comrades realized that commercial fighting forces could freely operate where no official British intervention could take place. The rationale underlying these companies was therefore that of providing UK decision-makers with the possibility to enjoy plausible denial by hiring commercial private combat providers.²³

While Britain proved reluctant to use its PMSCs as proxies, the incentive to use commercial non-state actors as sources of plausible deniability has not declined with the end of the Cold War. On the contrary, the increasing multipolarity and instability of the international system have magnified proxy warfare in a host of regional theatres including Ukraine, Syria, and Libya. The case of Libya, where private military contractors from Russia’s Wagner Group and the UAE have repeatedly confronted the Syrian fighters deployed by Turkey, showcases the growing role played by different types of proxies in today’s conflicts.²⁴ The Kremlin’s indulgent attitude towards the Wagner Group operations, described as ‘let them join this thing … If it works out well, we can use it to our advantage; if it turns out badly, then we had nothing to do with it’²⁵ perfectly illustrates Russia’s use of private military contractors as a source of plausible deniability. In some cases, as noted by Bukkvoll and Ostensen in their article for the special issue, mercenaries and PMSCS may be used to advance the interests of some political, economic and military elites, rather than the central government itself. Indeed, the Wagner Group has progressively increased its autonomy from the Kremlin by securing contracts with own Russian and foreign customers. In the Central African Republic, Sudan, and Mozambique, for instance, Wagner Group contractors have seemingly been deployed to support the agenda of Russian businesses with an interest in the extraction of gold and other natural resources.²⁶ Such behaviour, however, carries considerable political and military risks to both PMSCs and their sponsors, as Wagner found out to its detriment when entering into a contract with Syrian sponsors to capture a Conoco gas plant occupied by a Kurdish militia force and US military advisors. The military advisors promptly called in US air support to repel the attack, which is believed to have left 300 of the 600 Russians dead or wounded. This ill-advised move prompted Moscow to distance itself from the Wagner Group and tighten their control over PMSCs, showing that the political damage arising from mercenaries’ independent initiatives may outweigh the strategic and economic gains attached to their use.

While controlling proxies waging conventional military operations already entails challenges, deterring the use of cyber proxies and holding them accountable is going to be even more complex. As briefly mentioned in the previous section, activities pursued exclusively through the use of information and communication technology are much easier to conceal, unlikely to draw significant internal criticism, relatively inexpensive to carry out in terms of manpower and materials, and even harder to trace back to government agencies. As noted by several scholars, the cyberspace should not be seen as entirely unregulated environment, nor should the difficulty to attribute cyberattacks be overestimated.²⁷ In his special issue article, Weiss argues that – despite many challenges – governments remain able to at least partly steer the development of such new security markets by leveraging binding regulatory instruments and their purchasing power. As already showcased by the regulation of armed private security companies, the fact that some governments are among the biggest purchasers of certain types of services gives them considerable influence over prospective customers through consumer demand. Moreover, states keep enjoying control over the physical premises where these firms are headquartered, as well as the critical infrastructure that is vital for today’s information and communication technology such as servers and cables. This suggests that reputable firms with an interest in their long-term business prospects still have powerful incentives to develop a symbiotic relationship with powerful state actors in an attempt to shape public policy and obtain competitive advantages.

Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that the cyberspace may serve as an ideal terrain for governments and non-state actors in search for plausible deniability as well as the commercial actors seeking to serve as instruments for covert action in exchange for profit. As documented by Maurer, states have already turned to ‘cyber-mercenaries’ as proxies and may increasingly do so in the future.²⁸

The social construction of private warriors

Building on the work of previous scholars criticizing the analytical utility of such a vague and value-laden category,²⁹ Riemann’s contribution to this special issue stresses that mercenaries are not a ahistorical concept that predates the rise of the modern state, but a notion that owes its existence to it. Relatedly, Olsen’s contribution to this special issue sees mercenaries as ‘a social construction, entirely dependent on the historical and socio-political context’³⁰ within which they are found. This suggests that the act of labelling a person a mercenary is often socially and politically motivated. To put it differently, these labelling exercises are meant to serve the interests of the person, organisation or community performing such a speech at. Notably, the mercenary label and the stigma attached thereto have been instrumentally employed by nation states and their advocates. Denigrating the idea of fighting for money made it easier for militaries to enlist conscripts for their cause and provided new opportunities for governments to centralize the means of coercion in their hands and stigmatize foreign and domestic opponents.

Of course, successful speech acts require that those performing them possess symbolic capital (i.e. accumulated prestige and honour) that they then exercise in the form of power through symbolic instruments of dominance.³¹ International organizations like UN General Assembly and the Organization of African Unity (OAU) may enjoy such power. Indeed, Rookes and Bruyere-Ostells in this special issue argue that the OAU weaponized the mercenary label against Europeans countries and colonists, who have sometimes served as convenient scapegoats for African elites to shift onto foreigners their own responsibility for the continent’s woes. Investigating how the mercenary label has been constantly renegotiated, stretched and weaponized for political purposes is not solely valuable for theoretical purposes. The ongoing political struggle surrounding the definition of mercenaries also provides policy-relevant insights, helping explain many states’ enduring reluctance to adhere to regulatory instruments like the 2001 UN United Nation Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.

To be sure, the discourses (de)legitimizing the commercial provision of military services are not unidirectional. Indeed, PMSCs themselves have leveraged their ‘epistemic power’³² in the attempt to actively steer the global security discourses in support of their activities and distance themselves from mercenaries in order to escape the stigma attached to them. As Joachim and Schneiker’s article in this special issue shows, PMSCs use gendered representations to legitimize themselves as hero warriors and professional security experts. By hiring former military officers, PMSCs draw on veterans’ legitimacy to legitimize themselves and to leverage hegemonic masculine traits to establish themselves as distinct from and superior to the ‘other’ security actors, be they state militaries or other private security providers.

As illustrated in the article by Rich, the stigma surrounding mercenaries has informed European and American movies’ cinematic discourses, which have played an important role in diffusing into popular culture idea of what a stereotypical mercenary should look and act like. Films have long indirectly perpetrated societies’ normative preference for the citizen-soldier by solely portraying mercenaries as villains or anti-heroes. Recent movies, however, have departed from such conventional scripts. This tendency is visible both in Hollywood movies like 13 Hours – which portrays the heroic resistence of US American security contractors trying to protect the US consulate in Benghazi – as well as in the Russian movie Solntsepyok, allegedly sponsored directly by the Wagner group patron Prigozhin to celebrate Russian PMSCs’ combat operations in Eastern Ukraine.³³ Recent films show an increasing fascination with guns for hire, who have increasingly become the repository of positive characteristics and no longer merely seen as an aberration. Hence, movies resonates with written discourses in suggesting that private providers of combat and armed security have become increasingly accepted and legitimate actors.

To conclude, this section has built on the articles written for this special issue to draw out some enduring themes associated with the private provision of violence. These include the key role played by the market as a source of military power; the role of technology as a driver of military and security privatization; the political and strategic incentives attached to using market actors as proxies in order to enjoy a shield of plausible deniability; and the contentious social construction of the mercenary label, often discursively weaponized for political purposes. Section three will expand on these themes by exploring how they might shape future warfare.

Private military forces and the future of war

No special issue on private military providers would be complete without discussing their potential impact on the international security landscape of the next decades. As epitomized by egregious failures at predicting momentuous transformations like the collapse of the Soviet Union, social scientists’ forecasting abilities are inherently limited. This is even more so when predicting the timing, location, magnitude, and nature of future conflict and the actors involved therein. In Clausewitz’s famous words, war is a ‘true chameleon’ which perpetually adapts to social and political transformations.³⁴ In more recent scientific jargon, war may be best understood as a non-linear phenomenon, and therefore as something inherently unpredictable by analytical means.³⁵ While the elusiveness and non-linearity of conflict inevitably bely forecasting exercises, this section will briefly survey both the special issue contributions and the wider debate on the changing character of war to sketch some future trends on the future of commercial providers of coercion.

The existing literature is replete with grim predictions of how the rise of armed non-state actors and the decline of the state will undermine the foundations of the liberal international order, triggering widespread instability. According to Sean McFate, who served in the US military and worked for the private security industry before becoming a scholar, the future is ‘mired in perpetual chaos, with no way to contain it … making conflict the motif of our time’. In the ‘durable disorder’ of the coming decades, ‘we will see wars without states … [and] wars will be fought mostly in the shadows by covert means, and plausible deniability will prove more effective than firepower in the information age’.³⁶ In this context, mercenaries ‘will return, not slinging AK-47s [though some will still be needed] but flying drone gunships and auctioning special operation forces teams to the highest bidder’.³⁷

Such gloomy prophecies are not new. In 1991, military historian Martin Van Creveld already warned that ‘The spread of sporadic small-scale war will cause regular armed forces themselves to change form, shrink in size, and wither away. As they do, much of the day-to-day burden of defending society against the threat of low-intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security business; and indeed the time may come when the organizations that comprise that business will, like the condottieri of old, take over the state’.³⁸ In the following years, several social scientists followed suit. Mary Kaldor and Herfried Munkler, for instance, documented the emergence of new wars characterized by the erosion of a functioning state monopoly of violence, where coercion is perpetrated by networks of state and non-state actors, battles are rare, the distinctions between combatant and non-combatant, legitimate violence and criminality all breaking down and violence is mainly directed against civilians. Unlike the conflicts that occurred in Early Modern Europe, new wars are funded through pillage, illegal trade, and other war-generated revenues rather than taxation. Consequently, new warfare are likely to undermine rather than strengthen state authority.³⁹ While this novel context has certainly fuelled the use of commercial actors in warfare, the time for mercenary organizations to take over increasingly weak and hollow state organizations evoked by Van Creveld 30 years ago has not yet come, nor seems likely in the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, there are reason to believe that the warning formulated today by McFate may not be as far-fetched as Van Creveld’s. Such reasons are manifold, encompassing both the disruptiveness of technological innovation and the transformation of the international system. As mentioned earlier, technology may indeed facilitate commercial actors’ involvement in covert or overt offensive operations due to the emergence of domains where attribution is difficult like the cyberspace, the potential use of untraceable platforms in the dark web and newforms of payment-like cryptocurrencies, and the availability of unmanned and autonomous systems that can serve as easily deployable surrogates for military humanpower. The increasingly multipolar nature of the international system may further loosen the restraints on the use of military force on a small-scale. Indeed, the sobering conclusion of NATO’s longest war – operation ISAF in Afghanistan – is likely to discourage the launching of stabilization operations and inhibit the United States from actively policing the global commons or actively intervening against state failure and civil wars.

It is no coincidence that security studies’ scholars have recently coined terms like ‘proxy warfare’,⁴⁰ ‘surrogate warfare’,⁴¹ hybrid war,⁴² shadow war,⁴³ or war in the ‘grey zone’.⁴⁴ All these notions capture different facets of the same phenomenon, the frequency of small-scale military confrontations that fail to meet – or are deliberately kept below – the threshold of interstate war between official state military organizations. The day of the aircraft carrier, fighter plane and tank are not completely over. Conventional and nuclear capabilities are likely to continue playing an important role in deterring major interstate conflict, but they alone are unlikely to decide the outcome of regional powers’ competition in the first half of the 21^st Century. This shift will not necessarily mean a larger resort to private contractors in quantitative terms. On the contrary, the likely absence of large-scale occupation and state-building operations like those in Iraq and Afghanistan will also reduce the need for commercial providers of unarmed support functions, which accounted for the large majority of the private military workforce contracted over the last two decades. The scope of private sector involvement in the provision of support to military operations, security, and combat, however, is set to deepen.

Technology will have disruptive effects on the provision of military logistics, revolutionarizing the provision of menial support tasks like transportation, catering and static security. As autonomous devices will replace drivers, cleaners, and guards on static security duties, armed forces will probably reduce their resort to unspecialized contracted labour in absolute numbers, but will also become increasingly dependent on the highly skilled private personnel tasked with maintaining these unmanned systems. When UAVs were first used, even the most advanced military organizations had to rely on private sector support to maintain and sometimes even operate the drones conducting reconnaissance and bombing missions. While contractors were eventually replaced by military pilots, private sector support remains needed for the maintenance of unmanned systems. The same is true for cybersecurity capabilities. Even if most NATO militaries have now established Cyber commands, revised their doctrine, and started to train their personnel accordingly, they cannot relinquish private sector support to design their computer systems and protect themn from intrusions. Dependence on commercial actors for niche, high-tech support capabilities is therefore set to continue increasing in parallel with the growing speed and disruptiveness of technological innovations.

At the soft end of the security spectrum, Western private security companies will continue to provide low-profile protective services for embassies, NGOs and transnational corporations operating in unsafe terrains, as well as shipping companies crossing pirate-ridden maritime regions. A similar trend is likely in China, fuelled by the expansion of Beijing’s infrastructure and economic interests along the Belt and Road described by Arduino⁴⁵ and Yuan in this special issue. Indeed, China’s willingness to operate in Afghanistan and other highly unstable areas may have already loosened Beijing’s wariness of PMSCs as providers of armed security and capacity-building.⁴⁶ Alongside static and personal security, tomorrow’s PMSCs will continue to provide activities like consultancy, business intelligence, and hostile environment training. Familiar tasks like guardining industrial and extractive sites or facilitating the release of hostages may however take new forms, such as drone surveillance and negotiations with ransomware hackers and other cyber-criminals.⁴⁷

Alongside the growth of defensive security markets populated by reputable and tightly regulated firms, a growing number of commercial and hybrid actors will increasingly engage in the provision of direct combat services for regional powers in search for niche capabilities, additional boots on the ground, and plausible deniability. As described by Krieg and Bukkvoll and Ostensen in this special issue, several regional powers no longer see or may have never seen the use of mercenaries and the outsourcing of combat as a taboo. Nevertheless, some restraints on the use of private forces in offensive roles will remain, suggesting that overly apocalyptic prophecies on unshackled mercenary armies fuelling perpetual instability should be handled with care.

Rather than on normative concerns, these constraints are likely to be mainly associated with pragmatic considerations. Specifically, a large use of private combat forces will be mainly inhibited by the limited long-term strategic effectiveness of guns for hire, their costs, and the difficulty to control them. First, while commercial forces may provide a decisive advantage on the battlefield, these alone are likely to remain unable to conduct large-scale combat operations, let alone territorial occupation. Their role will arguably remain that of serving as force multipliers boosting the effectiveness of local militaries and rebel groups. Moreover, as illustrated by Russia’s firm reaction to Wagner Group operations in Syria, even assertive revisionist powers are concerned by the risks that the private combat providers serving as their proxies may develop independent agendas. However, any efforts to control commercial combat providers through formal institutional arrangements or informal personal ties may reduce the utility of mercenary opearations as a source of plausible deniability, thereby hindering the most crucial political rationale underlying their use. State rulers as well as non-state actors’ appetite for using commercial providers of combat will therefore continue to be limited by the inescapable trade-offs between effectiveness, deniability, and control.

The risks of instability attached to the proliferation of proxies and private combat forces has already been identified as one of the causes underlying the decline of armed non-state actors in European modern history. Increasingly unable to control commercial non-state actors creating widespread instability, the most powerful states agreed on binding policy instruments like the 1856 Paris Convention banning privateering and introduced neutrality laws restricting their citizens’ freedom to serve as mercenaries in foreign armies.⁴⁸ A new proliferation of commercial non-state actors will once again heighten the call for regulation.

Regrettably, the failure of past international treaties like the 2001 UN Mercenary Convention, only ratified by 35 states and no Security Council permanent member, cast doubts over the success of future regulatory initiatives. The drafting of binding international regulations banning private combat providers will continue to be hindered by collective action problems, monitoring difficulties, and diverging state interests. In the recent past, regulatory success has come in the form of pragmatic, bottom-up efforts to create a business case for only providing tightly regulated defensive services. Governments have effectively encouraged industry self-regulation by making public contracts conditional on being signatories to the independently monitored International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC) and certification by standardization agencies.⁴⁹ While these efforts helped regulate private security services in the US, the UK, and other Western countries, other, more informal markets have emerged where unregulated PMSCs and ad hoc mercenary groups may agree to meet public and private customers’ demand for combat, targeted assassinations, and other lethal or criminal activities. As indicated by early evidence from the murder of Haiti’s president in July 2021, allegedly perpetrated by former Colombian soldiers hired through the Miami-based private security firm Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) Security, this trend may also involve sketchy and less reputable Western companies.⁵⁰ Semi-clandestine markets for combat capabilities and criminal services will continue to expand short of any binding international regulation that are genuinely supported and enforced by most states.

While previous attempts to effectively ban mercenaries stagnated, future regulatory initiatives may leverage states’ growing interest in preserving control over combat tasks that the increasing involvement of commercial actors in offensive roles is likely to prompt. This interest is likely to be shared by both the United States and major rising powers. China’s persisting wariness of arming its own PMSCs suggest that Beijing is well aware of the risks attached to the proliferation of armed non-state actors. The fact that China, the United States and European capitals are equally wary of the risks associated with the spread of private combat providers gives a modicum of hope on the possibility for future regulation. While such regulatory efforts will not suffice in eradicating the commercial provision of combat services in some regions, they would at least reduce the size of this market and its most problematic implications.

Conclusion

Like war itself, mercenaries and commercial providers of security and military support have behaved as chamaleons, perpetually adapting to political, social, and technological changes. The fact that the role played by such actors is set to increase in the future serves as a forceful reminder of the need to study security privatization in all its different forms and manifestations.

The complexity of the subject far exceeds the space available for this collection and the expertise of its contributors and editors, warranting additional research. As notions like the state monopoly of violence and the mercenary taboo increasingly reveal their Euro-Centric and historically contingent foundations, more comprehensive and rigorous attempts to expand both the historical depth and the geographical scope of private security studies are vital to understand today’s increasingly fragmented market for force. Understanding how this market is likely to evolve also requires a thorough engagement with military innovation studies, most notably research exploring the impact of the disruptive technologies enabling the automation of warfare and the creation of new domains like the cyberspace.

Studying the different ways in which violence was, is, and will form part of a commercial transaction, however, is not solely important due to its far-reaching policy-relevant implications for international security. The shifting legitimacy and identity of soldiers of fortune, their portrayal in public discourse and their representation in art and popular culture all provide important insights into the changing relationship between individuals, societies, and the political communities they are embedded in. After all, as several contributors to this special issue have explained, mercenaries are what we make of them.

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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. Yalichev, Mercenaries of the Ancient World.

2. Spearin, Private Military and Security Companies and States, 57–88.

3. Chisholm, “Marketing the Gurkha Security package,” 349–72.

4. Singer, Corporate Warriors.

5. See Casiraghi’s article in this special issue.

6. Ibid.

7. Parrott, The Business of War; Black, Kings, Nobles and Commoners.

8. Parrott, The Business of War.

9. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States.

10. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, 3.

11. Singer, Corporate Warriors, 39.

12. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security Beyond the State, 8, 15.

13. Cusumano, “Bridging the Gap,” 94–119.

14. Waltz, Theory of International Politics.

15. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine.

16. Kinsey and Patterson, Contractors & War.

17. See Calcara’s article in this special issue.

18. Orsini and Bublitz, “Contractors on the Battlefield,” 131; and Gansler and Luchshyn, “Contractors Supporting Military Operations.”

19. Tonkin, State Control over Private Military and Security Companies in Armed Conflict; Francioni & Ronzitti, War by Contract.

20. Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations.

21. Villafaña, Cold War in the Congo; Hawes and Koenig, Cold War Navy Seal.

22. See Rookes and Bruyere-Ostells article in this special issue.

23. Kinsey, Corporate Soldiers and International Security; and Hoe, David Stirling, 354–416.

24. Al-Hawari, “How Sirte Became a Hotbed of the Libyan Conflict.”

25. Barabanov & Ibrahim, “Wagner: Scale of Russian mercenary mission in Libya exposed.”

26. Losh, “In Central Africa, Russia Won the War.”

27. Egloff and Smeets, “Publicaly attributing cyber attacks”; and Rid & Buchanan, “Attributing Cyber Attacks.”

28. Maurer, Cyber Mercenaries. The State, Hackers, and Power.

29. Ettinger, “The mercenary moniker.”

30. See Olson’s aticle in this special issue.

31. Bourdieu, Language & Symbolic Power, 14, 165.

32. Leander, “The Power to construct International Security.”

33. RFE/RL, “Prigozhin Propaganda?”

34. Clausewitz Carl von, On War, Michael Howard and Peter Paret (eds.)

35. Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinerity, and the Unpredicability of War.”

36. McFate, The New Rules of War, 8.

37. Ibid., 9.

38. Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, 197.

^39. Kaldor, New and Old Wars; Munkler, The New Wars.

40. Phillips and Valbjørn, “What is in a Name?”; Mumford, Proxy Warfare.

41. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare.

42. Cusumano and Corbe, eds. A Civil-Military Response to Hybrid Threats; Lasconjarias and Larsen, eds. NATO’s Response to Hybrid Threats; Murray and Mansoor, Hybrid Warfare.

43. Sciutto, The Shadow War.

44. Hughes, “War in the Grey Zone.”

45. Arduino, China’s Private Army.

46. Goble, Beijing Expanding Size and Role of Its ‘Private’ Military Companies in Central Asia.

47. Monroe, How to Negotiate with Ransomware Hackers.

48. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns.

49. ICoC, “International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers”.

50. Pazzanese, “Haiti assassination revives concerns over ‘private armies.”