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Private Military and Security Companies and States pp 1–22Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Introduction

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Part of the book series: New Security Challenges ((NSECH))

Abstract

Chapter 1 highlights a puzzle. On the one hand, the range of private military and security services is ostensibly boundless for a number of reasons. On the other hand, it is evident that in practice, there are divisions between states and Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) in terms of what they do and what they own and operate. This is clear on land, on the waves, and in the air. Firms do not enjoy a tabula rasa. Thus, because of the significance of these matters – the ownership, direction, and application of violence – this chapter spells out the book’s primary objectives: to develop an understanding of what has changed, what has not, why this is so, and what the future might bring. It stresses that achieving these objectives is in large part anchored in identifying and explaining the functional and ideational boundaries regarding what states and PMSCs both do and possess in regards to violence. This chapter identifies that to complete these tasks, one must focus on two related elements. The first element is the conventional forces norm, one that has global acceptance in terms of the standardization of the organizational form for militaries and the weighting on sophisticated military technology – i.e., machines – over labour or manpower. Functional and symbolic rationales support this norm. The second element is the state proclivity towards the offensive. Taken together, states very much form what the PMSC industry looks like and offers: predominantly labour-based services oriented towards the defensive.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The generic word “policy” speaks to objectives that are political, military, economic, and commercial. The related “objectives” may be sought by states or by other bodies and organizations.

  2. 2.

    In this regard, the word “privatization” may be a misnomer because of active state involvement in privatizing (Leander 2010).

  3. 3.

    When considering international relations theory then, realism’s long-standing logics of states either aligning with other states to benefit from security in numbers and/or developing military capabilities independently in order to handle an adversary have reduced currency.

  4. 4.

    The objective here is not to test whether the norm exists, as this has been done implicitly or explicitly elsewhere (Kaldor 1982; Eyre and Suchman 1996; Farrell and Terriff 2002; Farrell 2005). It is the sort of norm, using Finnemore’s and Sikkink’s language, that is “so widely accepted…[that it has] a ‘taken-for-granted’ quality that makes conformance with the norm almost automatic” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, p. 904). The desire here, instead, is to explain the norm and employ it as a heuristic device.

  5. 5.

    Some citations already offered in this chapter use different terminology.

  6. 6.

    For some, this cottage industry has not been overly productive. Dominick Donald, for instance, asserts that the various definitions are often employed “in opposition to each other, as rival conceptual grab-alls for the sector as whole, and as loose synonyms or analogues, often with no clear sense of where one begins and another ends” (Donald 2008, p. 132).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Defence Studies, Royal Military College of Canada/Canadian Forces College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Christopher Spearin

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Spearin, C. (2017). Introduction. In: Private Military and Security Companies and States . New Security Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54903-3_1

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