ABSTRACT
In this chapter, students will learn about the growth of private security – security allocated through the market. The chapter explains why this development is important for the control of force and outlines a debate over its costs and benefits. It also describes the current market, compares it to other markets for violence in the past, and explains its origins. The chapter encourages students to think about how the market for force poses trade-offs to the state and non-state actors that seek to control it and how a market for force challenges some of the central assumptions in security studies.
