Introduction

This book describes and assesses an emerging threat to states’ territorial control and sovereignty: the hostile control of companies that carry out privatized aspects of sovereign authority. The threat arises from the massive worldwide shift of state activities to the private sector since the end of the 1970s in conjunction with two other modern trends – the globalization of business and the liberalization of international capital flows. Using the privatization movement as a starting point, the book demonstrates how the three trends interact to create new options for seizing territorial control.