This book addresses the ambiguities of the growing use of private security contractors and provides guidance as to how our expectations about regulating this expanding ‘service’ industry will have to be adjusted. In the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan many of those who carry weapons are not legally combatants, nor are they protected civilians. They are contracted by governments, businesses, and NGOs to provide armed security. Often mistaken as members of armed forces, they are instead part of a new protean proxy force that works alongside the military in a multitude of shifting roles, and overseen by a matrix of contracts and regulations. This book analyzes the growing industry of these private military and security companies (PMSCs) used in warzones and other high risk areas. PMSCs are the result of a unique combination of circumstances, including a change in the idea of soldiering, insurance industry analyses that require security contractors, and a need for governments to distance themselves from potentially criminal conduct. The book argues that PMSCs are a unique type of organization, combining attributes from worlds of the military, business, and humanitarian organizations. This makes them particularly resistant to oversight. The legal status of these companies and those they employ is also hard to ascertain, which weakens the multiple regulatory tools available. PMSCs also fall between the cracks in ethical debates about their use, seeming to be both justifiable and objectionable. This transformation in military operations is a seemingly irreversible product of more general changes in the relationship between the individual citizen and the state. This book will be of much interest to students of private security companies, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general. Kateri Carmola is the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College in Vermont. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

This book addresses the ambiguities of the growing use of private security contractors and provides guidance as to how our expectations about regulating this expanding ‘service’ industry will have to be adjusted. In the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan many of those who carry weapons are not legally combatants, nor are they protected civilians. They are contracted by governments, businesses, and NGOs to provide armed security. Often mistaken as members of armed forces, they are instead part of a new protean proxy force that works alongside the military in a multitude of shifting roles, and overseen by a matrix of contracts and regulations. This book analyzes the growing industry of these private military and security companies (PMSCs) used in warzones and other high risk areas. PMSCs are the result of a unique combination of circumstances, including a change in the idea of soldiering, insurance industry analyses that require security contractors, and a need for governments to distance themselves from potentially criminal conduct. The book argues that PMSCs are a unique type of organization, combining attributes from worlds of the military, business, and humanitarian organizations. This makes them particularly resistant to oversight. The legal status of these companies and those they employ is also hard to ascertain, which weakens the multiple regulatory tools available. PMSCs also fall between the cracks in ethical debates about their use, seeming to be both justifiable and objectionable. This transformation in military operations is a seemingly irreversible product of more general changes in the relationship between the individual citizen and the state. This book will be of much interest to students of private security companies, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general. Kateri Carmola is the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College in Vermont. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sean McFate lays bare the opaque world of private military contractors, explaining the economic structure of the industry and showing in detail how firms operate on the ground. As a former paratrooper and private military contractor, McFate provides an unparalleled perspective into the nuts and bolts of the industry, as well as a sobering prognosis for the future of war.

Since the 1990s, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have intervened in civil wars around the globe. International, legally registered corporate actors have assisted governments with a myriad of tasks including combat support, logistics, army and police training, intelligence analysis, and guard services. However, reports that such contractors have been responsible for human rights abuses have spurred the need to evaluate the industry's impact on conflicts. Are these contractors effective in curbing violence or does emphasis on profit and lack of accountability get in the way? And how can governments improve PMSCs' commitment to contractual obligations, including adherence to international humanitarian laws? This book identifies two market forces that impact PMSCs' military effectiveness: local or conflict-level competition and global or industry-level competition. Specifically, Seden Akcinaroglu and Elizabeth Radziszewski challenge the assumption that interventions by profit-driven coporations are likely to destabilize areas engaged in war, and provide data that private contractors do contribute to conflict termination under certain circumstances. They argue that competitive market pressure creates a strong monitoring system and that the company's corporate structure and external competitive environment in a given conflict help to explain the variance in accountability to clients. Including an analysis of data on international PMSCs' interventions in civil wars from 1990-2008, Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski show the impact of competition on companies' contribution to the termination of different types of civil wars.

This book’s primary concern is the application of International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law in addressing the business conduct of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) during armed conflicts, as well as state responsibility for human rights violations and current attempts at international regulation. The book discusses four interconnected themes. First, it differentiates private contractors from mercenaries, presenting an historical overview of private violence. Second, it situates PMSCs’ employees under the legal status of civilian or combatant in accordance with the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949. It then investigates the existing law on state responsibility and what sort of responsibility companies and their employees can face. Finally, the book explores current developments on regulation within the industry, on national, regional and international levels. These themes are connected by the argument that, in order to find gaps in the existing laws, it is necessary to establish what they are, what law is applicable and what further developments are needed.

Mercenaries are more powerful than experts realize, a grave oversight. Those who assume they are cheap imitations of national armed forces invite disaster because for-profit warriors are a wholly different genus and species of fighter. Private military companies such as the Wagner Group are more like heavily armed multinational corporations than the Marine Corps. Their employees are recruited from different countries, and profitability is everything. Patriotism is unimportant, and sometimes a liability. Unsurprisingly, mercenaries do not fight conventionally, and traditional war strategies used against them may backfire.

A growing number of states use private military and security companies (PMSCs) for a variety of tasks, which were traditionally fulfilled by soldiers. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the law that applies to PMSCs active in situations of armed conflict, focusing on international humanitarian law. It examines the limits in international law on how states may use private actors, taking the debate beyond the question of whether PMSCs are mercenaries. The authors delve into issues such as how PMSCs are bound by humanitarian law, whether their staff are civilians or combatants, and how the use of force in self-defence relates to direct participation in hostilities, a key issue for an industry that operates by exploiting the right to use force in self-defence. Throughout, the authors identify how existing legal obligations, including under state and individual criminal responsibility should play a role in the regulation of the industry.

The private military industry has been growing rapidly since the end of the Cold War. The Morality of Private War uses normative political theory to assess the leading moral arguments for and against the use of private military and security companies.

The U.S. military is no longer based on a Cold War self-sufficient model. Today's armed forces are a third smaller than they were during the Cold War, and yet are expected to do as much if not more than they did during those years. As a result, a transformation is occurring in the way the U.S. government expects the military to conduct operations—with much of that transformation contingent on the use of contractors to deliver support to the armed forces during military campaigns and afterwards. Contractors and War explains the reasons behind this transformation and evaluates how the private sector will shape and be shaped by future operations. The authors are drawn from a range of policy, legislative, military, legal, and academic backgrounds. They lay out the philosophical arguments supporting the use of contractors in combat and stabilization operations and present a spectrum of arguments that support and criticize emergent private sector roles. The book provides fresh policy guidance to those who will research, direct, and carry out future deployments.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Law - Miscellaneous, grade: A, , course: LLM INTERNATIONAL LAW, language: English, abstract: The monopoly of the use of force granted to modern States by its citizens is a relatively new phenomenon. Private armies have been operating in European States till the XIX century. The use of mercenaries has been historically a constant phenomenon till almost the end of the XX century, when their activities were criminalized by the international community. Parallel to that phenomenon during the European colonial expansion over all continents, governments had authorized two other forms of similar violence by non-state actors: the corsairs and the colonial merchant companies.