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This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credi...
The Trillion Dollar Silencer investigates the astounding lack of popular protest at the death and destruction that the military industrial complex is inflicting on people, nations, and the environment, and its budget-draining costs. Where is the antiwar protest by progressives, libertarians, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, academics, clergy, community volunteers, artists, et al? This book will focus on how military largesse infests such public sectors’ interests. Contractors and bases serve as the economic hubs of their regions. State and local governments are intertwined with the DoD; some states have Military Departments. National Guard annual subsidies are large. Joint projec...
Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies provides a comprehensive survey and guide to the mercenary forces, entrepreneurs, and corporations that are a major component of warfare today. Security, military advice, training, logistics support, policing, technological expertise, intelligence, transportation—all are outsourced to a greater or lesser degree in the U.S. military—while countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia and Australia rely on privatization in one form or another. This comprehensive one-volume work covers the full range of mercenaries active on the international military scene today, including a concise history of mercenaries and private armies on la...
This book’s primary concern is the application of International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law in addressing the business conduct of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) during armed conflicts, as well as state responsibility for human rights violations and current attempts at international regulation. The book discusses four interconnected themes. First, it differentiates private contractors from mercenaries, presenting an historical overview of private violence. Second, it situates PMSCs’ employees under the legal status of civilian or combatant in accordance with the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949. It then investigates the existing law on state responsibility and what sort of responsibility companies and their employees can face. Finally, the book explores current developments on regulation within the industry, on national, regional and international levels. These themes are connected by the argument that, in order to find gaps in the existing laws, it is necessary to establish what they are, what law is applicable and what further developments are needed.
The Markets for Force examines and compares the markets for private military and security contractors in twelve nations: Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Russia, Afghanistan, China, Canada, and the United States. Editors Molly Dunigan and Ulrich Petersohn argue that the global market for force is actually a conglomeration of many types of markets that vary according to local politics and geostrategic context. Each case study investigates the particular characteristics of the region's market, how each market evolved into its current form, and what consequence the privatized market may have for state military force and the provision of publi...
Over the past twenty years, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) have become significant elements of national security arrangements, assuming many of the functions that have traditionally been undertaken by state armies. Given the centrality of control over the use of coercive force to the functioning and identity of the modern state, and to international order, these developments clearly are of great practical and conceptual interest. This edited volume provides an interdisciplinary overview of PMSCs: what they are, why they have emerged in their current form, how they operate, their current and likely future military, political, social and economic impact, and the moral and lega...
This timely book describes the services that are now delivered by private contractors and the threat this trend poses to core public values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency. --