ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the strands of research against the empirical evidence offered by the outsourcing of diplomatic protection. It provides an overview of the increasing privatisation of diplomatic security. It then analyses functionalist, ideational, political-instrumentalist and organisational explanations. The chapter summarises the heuristic power of each of these lines of argument, making the case for a multicausal explanation of security privatisation that combines different research paradigms in order to provide a more sophisticated understanding of the drivers and future trajectories of security privatisation. The privatisation of security has been one of the most hotly debated subjects in international politics in the last few years, challenging some of the unquestioned assumptions of international politics such as the state monopoly of coercion. The growing demand for security and the transformation of warfare at the end of the Cold War have provided new opportunities for commercial providers of armed security to government agencies.
