Private military organizations are a new and important feature of the international landscape. They offer control of potential massive violence to the highest bidder with very limited accountability. This book offers critical insights into both the phenomenon and the challenges of and potential for regulation.

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in armed conflicts around the world, with PMSCs participating in, for example, offensive combat, prisoner interrogation and the provision of advice and training. The extensive outsourcing of military and security activities has challenged conventional conceptions of the state as the primary holder of coercive power and raised concerns about the reduction in state control over the use of violence. Hannah Tonkin critically analyses the international obligations on three key states - the hiring state, the home state and the host state of a PMSC - and identifies the circumstances in which PMSC misconduct may give rise to state responsibility. This analysis will facilitate the assessment of state responsibility in cases of PMSC misconduct and set standards to guide states in developing their domestic laws and policies on private security.

This work examines the ability of existing and evolving PMC regulation to adequately control private force, and it challenges the capacity of international law to deliver accountability in the event of private military company (PMC) misconduct. From medieval to early modern history, private soldiers dominated the military realm and were fundamental to the waging of wars until the rise of a national citizen army. Today, PMCs are again a significant force, performing various security, logistics, and strategy functions across the world. Unlike mercenaries or any other form of irregular force, PMCs acquired a corporate legal personality, a legitimising status that alters the governance model of today. Drawing on historical examples of different forms of governance, the relationship between neoliberal states and private military companies is conceptualised here as a form of a 'shared governance'. It reflects states' reliance on PMCs relinquishing a degree of their power and transferring certain functions to the private sector. As non-state actors grow in authority, wielding power, and making claims to legitimacy through self-regulation, other sources of law also become imaginable and relevant to enact regulation and invoke responsibility.

This work examines the ability of existing and evolving PMC regulation to adequately control private force, and it challenges the capacity of international law to deliver accountability in the event of private military company (PMC) misconduct. From medieval to early modern history, private soldiers dominated the military realm and were fundamental to the waging of wars until the rise of a national citizen army. Today, PMCs are again a significant force, performing various security, logistics, and strategy functions across the world. Unlike mercenaries or any other form of irregular force, PMCs acquired a corporate legal personality, a legitimising status that alters the governance model of today. Drawing on historical examples of different forms of governance, the relationship between neoliberal states and private military companies is conceptualised here as a form of a ‘shared governance'. It reflects states’ reliance on PMCs relinquishing a degree of their power and transferring certain functions to the private sector. As non-state actors grow in authority, wielding power, and making claims to legitimacy through self-regulation, other sources of law also become imaginable and relevant to enact regulation and invoke responsibility.

A multinational team of scholars and experts address the issue of controlling the use of privatized forces by states. They address the role of contract employees, their acceptance by military personnel, and possible tensions between them.

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.

Over the past twenty years, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have become significant elements of national security arrangements, assuming many of the functions that have traditionally been undertaken by state armies. Given the centrality of control over the use of coercive force to the functioning and identity of the modern state, and to international order, these developments clearly are of great practical and conceptual interest. This edited volume provides an interdisciplinary overview of PMSCs: what they are, why they have emerged in their current form, how they operate, their current and likely future military, political, social and economic impact, and the moral and legal constraints that do and should apply to their operation. The book focuses firstly upon normative issues raised by the development of PMSCs, and then upon state regulation and policy towards PMSCs, examining finally the impact of PMSCs on civil-military relations. It takes an innovative approach, bringing theory and empirical research into mutually illuminating contact. Includes contributions from experts in IR, political theory, international and corporate law, and economics, and also breaks important new ground by including philosophical discussions of PMSCs.