Security governance and the private military industry in Europe and North America

Even before Iraq, the grow ing use of private military contractors has been widely discussed in the academic and public literature. However, the reasons for the proliferation of private military companies and its implications are frequently generalized due to a lack of suitable theoretical approaches for the analysis of private means of violence in contemporary security. Consequently, this article contends, the analysis of the growth of the private military industry typically conflates two separate developments: the failure of some developing states to provide for their national security and the privatization of military services in industrialized nations in Europe and North America. This article focuses on the latter and argues that the concept of security governance can be used as a theoretical framework for understanding the distinct development, problems and solutions for the governance of the private military industry in developed countries.     

The Privatization of Security: Lessons from Iraq

Images of private forces in Iraq—killed and mutilated in Fallujah, implicated in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and shooting up civilian vehicles—have provided a dramatic illustration of the role private security companies (pscs) now play in U.S. military operations. Though the United States’ use of contractors on the battlefield is not entirely new, the increased number of contractors deployed and the use of private security forces to perform an escalating number of tasks has created a new environment that poses important trade-offs for U.S. policy and military effectiveness and for U.S. relations with other states. This article outlines the history of U.S. contractors on the battlefield, compares that with the use of private security in Iraq, discusses the benefits and risks associated with their use, and proposes some trade-offs that decision-makers in the United States should consider while contemplating their use in the future.     

Challenging international law: a dilemma of private security companies

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a marked increase in the sale of military services by private security companies (PSCs).1 ?1. The term private security company is used throughout the article instead of private military companies or private military firms. View all notes These companies sell anything from combat support for government military operations to military training and assistance, logistical support and more conventional security protection services. They have undertaken operations in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Croatia, and Columbia and now Iraq and Afghanistan. The presence of these companies on the international stage raises fundamental questions about the way war is now being fought. Unfortunately, the legal issues raised by their presence in conflicts have not yet been properly addressed. This article sets out to examine the suitability of international law in defining and controlling the activities of PSCs on the battlefield. It then goes on to discuss the problems associated with national regulation. Here the focus is on the attempts by the United States (US), South Africa, and United Kingdom (UK) governments to introduce effective legislation to control the industry.     

Buyer Beware: How Market Structure Affects Contracting and Company Performance in the Private Military Industry

Private military and security companies are integral components of the defense and intelligence operations of some of the world's most powerful states. Despite the increasingly pivotal role of contractors, analysts have yet to develop theories explaining when governments should outsource national security responsibilities or what conditions cause private defense markets to function efficiently. This inquiry addresses this gap in the literature by demonstrating that varying market structures—that is, the quantity of firms providing similar services and the number and purchasing power of those buying these services—have significant effects on costs, oversight, and company performance in the private defense industry. A principal–agent framework is developed to explain variation in the performance of firms in different markets across the industry. Evaluation of three private defense markets yields the surprising conclusion that monopsony, rather than a competitive market, is the ideal structure for governments outsourcing aspects of national defense.     

The Political Cost-Effectiveness of Private Vessel Protection: The Italian Case

Italy has traditionally been wary of private providers of security. Still, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have recently started to play an important role in protecting Italian merchant vessels, eventually replacing the military vessel protection detachment units (VPDs) provided by the Italian Navy. Drawing on neoclassical realism, the increasing involvement of PMSCs in protecting Italian merchant ships is presented as an attempt to reduce the political costs associated with the use of military personnel abroad, epitomised by the arrest of two Italian Navy fusiliers by Indian authorities in February 2012.     

Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency

Following its encounter with insurgent violence in Iraq, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has sought to improve the U.S. military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. This effort suggests a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military, which has traditionally devoted its attention and resources to “high-intensity” or “conventional” combat. Given this institutional culture, what are now the prospects of the U.S. military ‘learning counterinsurgency’? In many ways, the ongoing reorientation is promising and targeted, informed directly by the U.S. campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Pentagon priorities still reveal a remarkable resistance to change, and this in spite of the radically altered strategic environment of the War on Terror. Given this intransigence - and the eventual fall-out from the troubled Iraq campaign - the ongoing learning of counterinsurgency might very well fail to produce the type of deep-rooted change needed to truly transform the U.S. military.     

美国构建后冷战东亚安全模式

冷战结束以来，美国的东亚安全战略经过近20年的发展与调整，已初步形成和正在努力打造后冷战时期的安全网络模式，即：以保持前沿军事存在和海外基地为基石，以双边军事同盟与准同盟为轴心，以地区多边安全合作机制为辅助模式，以与区域内非同盟、准同盟国家和区域组织进行高层对话为补充形式，在美国的主导下交叉运用。     

All for one and one in all: private military security companies as soldiers,business managers and humanitarians

With governments increasingly contracting private military and security companies (PMSCs) to perform military and police-related tasks, international relations scholars have made attempts to better understand PMSCs and to investigate the reasons for the boom of private security. Rather than focusing on the services these companies offer, which has been a common approach, we offer an identity-based explanation for their surge. We show that PMSCs eclectically assume identities related to the military, business managers and humanitarians, independent of the services they perform, their market segment or their location on the battlefield. This finding points to an important yet little-noted dimension in the private security industry. Although companies are heterogeneous, they also appear increasingly homogeneous because they incorporate a similar set of identities. On the one hand, this enables PMSCs to adapt to any context, client or employee, and, on the other hand, it has constitutive qualities, contributing to an important source of power for the respective companies. These multiple identities contribute to a norm of what a superior security provider should look like.     

Bargaining,Fear, and Denial: Explaining Violence Against Civilians in Iraq 2004–2007

From mid-2004 to mid-2007, the Iraq war was distinguished from other comparable insurgencies by its high rates of civilian victimization. This has been attributed to a number of different factors, including the role of Islamic fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as the regional ambitions of Iran and Syria. Using an unpublished dataset of violence in Iraq from 2003–2008 from the Iraq Body Count (IBC), this paper argues that the violence against civilians is best understood as a combination of three interacting logics—bargaining, fear, and denial—that are predominantly local in character. First, armed Iraqi actors bargained through violence both across and within sectarian communities, and were driven by mechanisms of outbidding and outflanking to escalate their attacks on civilians. Second, the pervasive fear about the future of the Iraqi state encouraged the “localization” of violence in Iraq, particularly in the emergence of a security dilemma and the proliferation of criminal and tribal actors. Finally, Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq played the spoiler in Iraq, using mass-casualty attacks to generate fear among the population and deny U.S. efforts to build a functioning state. Only by addressing each of these three logics as part of its counter-insurgency strategy can the U.S. put an end to violence against civilians and develop the Iraqi state into a credible competitor for the loyalties of the population.     

U.S. Military Fatalities in Iraq: A Perspective on Year 5

President Bush's surge strategy intends to use the might of the U.S. military to establish secure conditions in Iraq under which the promise of political progress will be realized. The U.S. military used this approach in the past when the U.S. Fallujah Offensive of late 2004 established security for the Iraqi Election Cycle in 2005. But the promise of political progress for insurgents was not fulfilled in 2006 upon formation of the Maliki government, and they resorted to extreme levels of violence in response, killing 1,080 U.S. troops during the 12 months ending September 2007, more than in any other comparable period. In the second half of Year 5, from September 2007 through the fifth anniversary of the war on March 19, 2008, U.S. forces in cooperation with Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias helped improve security conditions once again. But unless the surge's promise of political progress is fulfilled, the patience of the insurgents and militias is likely to dissipate and violence will increase once again in Year 6.     

Sacred Time and Conflict Initiation

This article examines the manner in which rituals and symbols associated with sacred time have influenced conflict initiation. Leaders will time their attacks with sacred dates in the religious calendar if the force multiplying effects of sacred time, motivation, and vulnerability, outweigh its force dividing effects, constraint, and outrage. This is most likely to occur under three conditions: When conflict occurs across religious divides, when the sacred day is unambiguous in significance and meaning, and when rituals connected to that day will undermine an opponents’ military effectiveness. I illustrate these effects with twentieth century examples, including the timing of insurgent attacks in Iraq and the launching of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. By exploring the pervasive effects of religious calendars on modern combat, I hope to redirect the focus of the study of religion and violence away from the narrow preoccupation with fundamentalism and terrorism and onto the much broader range of cases in which religion shapes secular conflict in multiple—and often unexpected—ways.     

(Self) Regulating War?: Voluntary Regulation and the Private Security Industry

Private security companies' growing participation in U.S. and international military missions has raised concern about whether the private security industry is subject to sufficient controls. Industry self-regulation is often proposed as part of a multilayered framework of regulations to govern PSCs. But what can self-regulation contribute to regulation of the private security industry? This matters because privatization in the security realm has moved beyond understandings of the proper breakdown of public and private functions concerning the use of force. This article assesses what self-regulation can contribute to the control of this industry and whether the private security industry lends itself to effective self-regulation. It concludes that the private security industry does not exhibit the capacity to adopt and implement effective self-regulation on its own. If self-regulation is to complement state and international regulation, participation in the design and oversight of self-regulation must be broadened beyond private security companies alone.     

‘I'm glad I'm not a Saudi woman’: the First Gulf War and US encounters with Saudi gender relations

On 6 November 1990, nearly 50 Saudi women staged a protest against the ban on women operating motor vehicles in Saudi Arabia. Occurring in the midst of the First Gulf War, the women's protest was a political statement about the harsh restrictions placed on women in the Middle Eastern country which both reflected and influenced Saudi society’s encounter with their American allies during the war. When United States (US) military personnel flooded into Saudi Arabia during the war, they were shocked at the way American servicewomen were treated by their Saudi allies and the second-class status of Saudi women throughout the country. This article explores Americans' reactions to their encounter with Saudi gender relations during the war and argues that the poor treatment of women in Saudi Arabia—which Americans dubbed ‘gender apartheid’—caused many Americans to question the longstanding US alliance with the conservative Muslim country. In doing so, US journalists, military personnel, scholars and the general public began to demand that concern about women's rights should be integrated seriously into US foreign policy towards the Muslim world.     

Force Size for the Post-Westphalian World

The quality of the U.S. military has improved steadily since the end of the Cold War, but technological and managerial advancements cannot compensate for the inadequate size of the American armed forces. The post–Cold War years saw a shift from the Westphalian, state-ordered world to one where Western states are at war with transnational, substate terrorist groups. This requires adjustments in the American military establishment. Improvements in quality must be matched by an increase in quantity in order to meet U.S. security needs. As interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven, a minimalist force may be sufficient to win a war, but where nation-building is required, it will find it difficult to win the peace.     

Beheading the Hydra: Counterinsurgent Violence and Insurgent Attacks in Iraq

We evaluate the effectiveness of anti-insurgent violence as a means to suppress insurgency with micro-level data from the Iraq War. Our findings suggest that while violence against insurgents increases the incidence of future insurgent attacks, the intensity of this violence can significantly influence the outcome. Rather than shifting monotonically, the effect is actually curvilinear, first rising, and then contracting. We argue that at low to moderate levels, violence against insurgents creates opportunities for these groups to signal strength and resolve, which enables them to build momentum, heighten civilian cooperation, and diminish political support for counterinsurgency efforts in these forces’ home countries. The result is an escalation in insurgent attacks. However, at higher levels, this effect should plateau and taper off as insurgent attrition rises, and as civilian fears over personal safety displace grievances that might otherwise provoke counter-mobilization. Our empirical tests on data from the Iraq War, 2004–2009, demonstrate robust support for this argument.     

Political Violence: Switzerland,A Special Case?

When we speak of political violence during the second half of the twentieth century in Western Europe, we tend to think of events that took place in Germany, involving the Red Army Faction, and in Italy, with the Red Brigades. Such political violence does not apply in the case of Switzerland, which is perceived as a haven of peace, security, democracy, and economic affluence. However, cursory analysis of the contemporary press undermines this stereotypical vision: indeed, between 1968 and 1995 there were a number of violent acts of protest. Switzerland may not have experienced the phenomenon of organized armed struggle in the same way as Germany and Italy—in fact, the intensity of the violence was far from being the same—but political acts against the government did occur, acts involving either damage to property or, more rarely, injury to people. A rough typology identifies three different political tendencies: separatists and anti-separatists pertaining to Canton Jura, the far-Left, and the far-Right. The aim of this article is to pinpoint and analyze the different features of the violent repertoire that unfolded in Switzerland between 1968 and 1995.     

The Clash of Historical Analogies and Their Influence on Decision-Making: The Case of Iraqi Reconstruction Under George W. Bush

Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the literature on United States foreign policy, there was no consensus within the George W. Bush Administration on the parallel between the reconstruction of Iraq and that of post-Second World War Germany and Japan. Systematic analysis of available sources shows that the decision-makers drew a large number of different historical analogies—73 in all. This analysis takes a fresh look at the use of analogies regarding Iraqi reconstruction. We divide the period of April 2003 to June 2008 into four phases, in each of which a different analogy predominates—Afghanistan, Germany and Japan, the Cold War, and Vietnam. Analysis of the analogies embraced by five distinct groups within the Administration’s decision-making team—nationalist hawks, neoconservatives, administrators of Iraq, realist internationalists and the president—clarifies the affinities and tensions amongst them.     

Thinking about terrorism and just war

Since 2001 a new urge to moralize the use of violence as an instrument of state policy has appeared in liberal democracies. The American idea of a War against Terror, and the European notion of confronting a global terrorist threat, have together merged with a discourse on humanitarian military action: the political/moral ‘responsibility to protect’ is no longer to be confined to one's own citizens. Renewed interest among academics in ‘just war’ theory, the tradition that seeks to humanize war through law, reflects this development. This article questions the assumption that there is an essential difference between war (civilized violence) and terrorism (barbaric violence). It argues that their similarity appears more clearly if we set intentions aside—such as the deliberate or accidental killing of ‘innocents’—and focus instead on three main facts: (a) modern war strategies and technologies are uniquely destructive, (b) armed hostilities increasingly occupy a single space of violence in which war and peace are not clearly demarcated, and (c) the law of war does not provide a set of ‘civilizing’ rules but a language for legal/moral argument in which the use of punitive violence is itself a central semantic element.     

The perils of outsourcing post-conflict reconstruction: donor countries,international NGOs and private military and security companies

During the last few years, some donor countries (especially the US and the UK) have been increasingly outsourcing services in post-conflict operations to international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and private military and security companies (PMSCs). These states have also adopted ‘integrated approaches’ to their policy interventions, contributing to the emergence of an ‘aid and security market’. The article uses ideas from both development and defence studies and re-problematises the contracting states' relationship with PMSCs and INGOs. It argues that although INGOs and PMSCs are very different types of non-state actors, there are striking similarities in outsourcing practices. Moreover, it demonstrates that the leading contracting states have poorly managed their contracts with both INGOs and PMSCs, and have not seriously reflected on the unintended consequences of their contracting practices on the recovery of war-affected countries.