Next to the United States, which entity controls the largest number of personnel operating, mostly with arms, in Iraq? Great Britain? Think again. Following the 150,000 American troops in that conflict-plagued “liberated” country are about 20,000 employees of more than 60 private security companies (PSCs). They come from around the world: the United States, South Africa, Fiji, Chile, Israel, and Nepal, to mention just a few. Most are former military or police officials, now under contracts issued to PSCs by the United States, Great Britain, and even the United Nations.
PSCs have emerged on the international scene in recent years as a response to increased demands for security and protection by strong and weak states, international organizations, private firms, and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs). These actors face rising problems of insurrection, transnational criminal activity, wildlife and resource poaching, assassination, terror, and systematic theft and looting. PSCs provide a number of services, including protection of assets and lives, logistical support for regular and irregular armies and militias, training, interrogation, cooking, and armed battle, all activities formerly monopolized by state-controlled armies, navies, and air forces. PSCs command a market with revenues well above $100 billion (U.S. billion) annually. They are the twenty-first century versions of the private armed forces ubiquitous in fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe. Whether they are “mercenaries” is an issue under vigorous debate.
As in most scientific enterprises confronting new social phenomena, the first scholarly stage is primarily empirical: identifying agents and actors, and locating trends. Peter Singer's Corporate Warriors (2004) did this job admirably. In the present volume, Deborah Avant launches a more theoretical inquiry. Her task is not primarily etiological—explaining origins—but examining consequences. The normative issue is control: functional, political, and sociological. In an ideal situation, hiring of or outsourcing to PSCs should simultaneously 1) increase military effectiveness, 2) sustain or enhance state control over organized violence, and 3) promote military professionalism, human rights, and adherence to the laws of war. Avant trolls through the sociological and economic institutionalist literatures for hypotheses on these dimensions of control. She then uses case studies involving both state-financed (Croatia and Sierra Leone) and privately financed operations (Royal Dutch/Shell in Nigeria, INGO relief operations in the refugee camps of Goma, and various wildlife protection INGOs operating in the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo) for answers. She also cites numerous issues raised by the “second” army of PSCs operating in Iraq.
Avant develops few generalizations that can cut across all types of PSC activities funded by different types of actors. The United States achieved a good deal that was consistent with her ideal model through its sponsorship of MPRI (Military Professional Resources Inc.) in Croatia prior to the Dayton Accords. This firm helped professionalize the Croatian military, thus reducing potential war crimes, and was arguably instrumental in getting the Serbs to Dayton. MPRI constituted an important new policy tool for achieving foreign policy goals that could not be promoted by direct American military intervention in ex-Yugoslavia. In contrast, the government in Sierra Leone, which originally hired Executive Outcomes (EOS) to train its forces, eventually used it for armed action and paid the price: EOS became embroiled in the politics of the country (loss of government control) and in effect supported a coup against the government that had hired it. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have seen American-outsourced interrogators abuse and kill detainees, thus diluting the effectiveness of international norms against torture. In most of the cases examined in this study, whether state, INGO, or privately funded, security firms came to achieve some measure of influence over state or other institutional policymaking, throwing into question those agents' control over organized violence.
The case study analysis makes for fascinating reading, but Avant is too meticulous a scholar to conclude either that PSCs have generally enhanced the various dimensions of state control and promotion of international norms of human rights and the laws of war (the “optimists”) or that they constitute a pervasive, malevolent, and noxious development in contemporary security politics (the “pessimists”). The result is that instead of firm conclusions or generalizations, we end up with “it all depends.” The text is littered with “may,” “perhaps,” “might,” “could,” “would,” “dilemmas,” and other qualifications. There are all sorts of costs, benefits, and tradeoffs to be noted (p. 251): “The fact that market mechanisms for controlling violence suggest different routes of action and the diffusion of control pulls actors in different directions has complicated the operation of existing institutions. It has exacerbated disagreement among committed multilateralists—over whether to call PSCs [illegal] mercenaries or regulate them; among governments—over the propriety of using PSCs; among … activists—over the proper behavior of INGOs in conflict zones; and among allies—over the role of PSCs in peace building. It has also generated strange bedfellows—between human rights activists and PSCs to facilitate humanitarian intervention, between TNCs [transnational corporations] and INGOs to promote development plans that avoid violent repercussions.” These dilemmas and contradictions underlie the meticulous and sensitive investigation of a highly ambiguous modern development. Given the broad range of possible outcomes of their use by both governments and private institutions, Avant's insights and nuance have to replace firm generalizations.
Avant also provides a broader theoretical bonus: early explorations into the impact of PSCs on international law and, more generally, on what this phenomenon means for the state and state authority in international relations. She concludes (p. 261) that the dramatic increase in the use of PSCs by a variety of actors and agents leads to a diffusion and fragmentation of power and authority, as well as to the development of institutions with overlapping jurisdictions, all of which constitute another step leading us toward a neomedieval international order.
This fine study—rigorous in methodology, sweeping in its empirical domain and variety of data sources, and theoretically inspired to transcend the events of the day—does what all good scholarship should do: It informs, casts into doubt sweeping generalizations and conventional wisdom, and will promote and sometimes correct the next wave of security studies and international relations theory.
