ABSTRACT
It has long been common sense in security studies that the control, sanctioning and use of violence fall to states. Private security activity in the last two decades, though, lays waste to this conventional wisdom. More than one half of the people the US has deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been contractors working for private military and security companies (PMSCs): companies that, under contract, perform services that might otherwise be provided by military or police forces . As lawlessness followed the fall of the Iraqi government and
coalition forces were stretched thin an ‘army’ of private personnel flooded into the country. Some were hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to train the Iraqi police force, the Iraqi army, and a private Iraqi force to guard government facilities and oil fields. Other PMSCs worked for the US Army translating and interrogating prisoners, or for a company called Parsons, providing security for employees rebuilding Iraq’s oil fields. The role of PMSCs in the Iraqi occupation was thrust into the public eye when four private security personnel working for the US PMSC, Blackwater, were killed and mutilated on 31 March 2004 and when contracted interrogators working for CACI and Titan were among those implicated in the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. A similarly wide range of services have been provided to the US government in Afghanistan and with comparable controversy. The US government is not the only consumer of military and security services, though. NGOs, oil companies, the United Nations (UN), and many other countries join the US as customers of PMSCs.
