Reliance on the private military industry and the privatization of public functions has left our government less able to govern effectively. When decisions that should have been taken by government officials are delegated (wholly or in part) to private contractors without appropriate oversight, the public interest is jeopardized. Books on private military have described the problem well, but they have not offered prescriptions or solutions this book does.

This timely book describes the services that are now delivered by private contractors and the threat this trend poses to core public values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency. --

How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world’s first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states—not sovereign states—drove European expansion, building the world’s first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism. In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers’ expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.

This edited volume provides critical reflections on the interplay between politics and law in an increasingly transnationalized global political economy. It focuses specifically on the emergence and operation of new forms of governance that are developing through a variety of transnational contractual practices, institutions, and laws in multiple sectors and areas of economic activity. Interdisciplinary in nature, the volume includes contributions from law, political science, sociology, and international politics, with the focus on the political foundations of transnational contract being both original and path-breaking. Placing power at the center of the analysis, the volume reveals the heterogeneous landscape of contemporary law-making and the different kinds of politics giving rise to this form of global ordering. As the contributors note, this new form of governance requires a different type of political theory and legal theory, with the volume advancing understanding of the analytical, theoretical and normative dimensions of private transnational governance by contract, making a valuable contribution to new theory in law and politics. It will be of great interest to students and academics in law, political science, international relations, international political economy and sociology, as well as international commercial arbitration lawyers, trade and investment lawyers, and legal firms.

This provocative and important text offers a new way of thinking about sovereignty, both past and present. Distinguished geographer John Agnew boldly challenges the widely popular story that state sovereignty is in worldwide eclipse in the face of the overwhelming processes of globalization. He argues that this perception relies on ideas about sovereignty and globalization that are both overstated and misleading. Agnew contends that sovereignty-state control and authority over space is not necessarily neatly contained in state-by-state territories, nor has it ever been so. Yet the dominant image of globalization is the replacement of a territorialized world by one of networks and flows that know no borders other than those that define the Earth itself. In challenging this image, Agnew first traces the ways in which it has become commonplace. He then develops a new way of thinking about the geography of effective sovereignty and the various geographical forms in which sovereignty actually operates in the world, offering an exciting intellectual framework that breaks with the either/or thinking of state sovereignty versus globalization.

Allison Stanger examines the American government's approach to outsourcing, discussing the evolution of military outsourcing, the privatization of diplomacy, and homeland security; and offering an alternative approach.

The idea of 'hybrid sovereignty' describes overlapping relations between public and private actors in important areas of global power, such as contractors fighting international wars, corporations regulating global markets, or governments collaborating with nongovernmental entities to influence foreign elections. This innovative study shows that these connections – sometimes hidden and often poorly understood – underpin the global order, in which power flows without regard to public and private boundaries. Drawing on extensive original archival research, Swati Srivastava reveals the little-known stories of how this hybrid power operated at some of the most important turning points in world history: spreading the British empire, founding the United States, establishing free trade, realizing transnational human rights, and conducting twenty-first century wars. In order to sustain meaningful dialogues about the future of global power and political authority, it is crucial that we begin to understand how hybrid sovereignty emerged and continues to shape international relations.