ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the Private Security Companies (PSCs) that provide risk analysis and management in zones of conflict. It argues that the international private security industry is a beneficiary of the growing demand for risk management, and plays a central role in creating and perpetuating such demand. The chapter focuses on Beckian and Foucauldian analyses of risk management by investigating the rationale, logics and practices of PSCs in relation to risk. It shows that profit generation as the fundamental rationale of PSCs facilitates logics and practices of risk management which serve to increase and continue demand for commercial security services through individualisation, responsibilisation, vulnerability, risk minimisation and the management of consequences. The chapter illustrates how PSCs have been able to benefit from the turn to risk by developing logics and practices of risk identification, assessment and mitigation which create, inflate and sustain demand for private security services.
