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The two decades of war in Afghanistan left a mark on the American armed forces and redefined the American ways of war-making. One of this war's legacies is the reimagining of the role of private military and security contractors in contemporary warfare. Due to the massive involvement of the private sector in the American war machine, this industry transformed from a marginal participant into a central partner. The privatization of military and security functions became a norm, an integral part of security architecture and military operation. In this study, I provide a brief review of this development and its implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International organisations (IOs) have increasingly resorted to private military and security companies (PMSCs) as providers of armed protection, training, intelligence, and logistics. In this article, we argue that IOs, seeking to reconcile conflicting international norms and member states' growing unwillingness to provide the manpower required for effective crisis management, have decoupled their official policy on and actual use of PMSCs, thereby engaging in organised hypocrisy. Due to its stricter interpretation of norms like the state monopoly of violence, the United Nations (UN) has showcased a more glaring gap between talk and action than the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which display a more pragmatic, but not entirely consistent, approach to the use of PMSCs. By examining the decoupling between UN, EU, and NATO official contractor support doctrines and operational records, this article advances the debate on both security privatisation and organised hypocrisy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article focuses on the accountability challenges raised by the increased involvement of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC) in migration control. I argue that migration control activities outsourced to PMSC can be classified as high-risk operations for the purposes of the application of relevant business and human rights standards. This reclassification of migration control activities as high-risk business operations, in turn, has two significant implications in terms of establishing accountability for PMSC's wrongful conduct. First, it acknowledges that the privatization of migration control, especially within the context of continued containment and deterrence trends, entails a high risk of human rights abuses to which PMSC may contribute, both directly and indirectly. Second, this reclassification enables us to identify heightened obligations vested upon the home state of a PMSC, as well as the heightened responsibility of PMSC themselves. The article also examines what these heightened obligations and responsibilities entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the privatisation of military support is increasingly widespread, advanced military organisations have not relied on Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) to the same degree. The existing scholarship on PMSCs cannot explain why countries sharing similar material incentives and similar market and political ideologies like the United States and the United Kingdom have not outsourced the same operational tasks. This article contends that introducing military role conceptions as a factor enabling or inhibiting the outsourcing of certain functions provides important insights into the scope of military privatisation, explaining why the US military has systematically privatised armed security and foreign military training, while the UK military has not [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present analysis is to investigate whether the law of collective security could play a normative function in the determination of which services may or may not be outsourced in the context of UN peacekeeping operations. The key question is whether PMSCS should only perform those activities instrumental to the life of the UN, or should also cover those functions that are a direct expression of the competences attributed to it for the maintenance of international peace and security. The point is made that since peacekeeping is aimed at preserving fundamental values of the international community, peace and increasingly human rights, PMSCS might play a part in it, but only in a secondary way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) have gained increasingly in importance over the course of the past two decades. Yet, given the intransparency of the industry and the heterogeneity of the companies that comprise it, we thus far know little about the actors involved. In this article, we offer preliminary insights into the self-representation of PMSCs, based on a gender-discourse analysis of the homepages of select companies and their main professional associations. We argue that survival in an increasingly competitive industry not only hinges on size, market share or effectiveness, but is also inherently gendered. PMSCs and their associations draw on the one hand on civilized and accepted forms of masculinity and femininity, presenting themselves as ‘highly skilled professional’ military strategists and ordinary businesses akin to banks or insurance companies. At the same time, however, PMSCs also engage in strategies of (hyper)masculinization and pathologization to set themselves apart from mercenaries, their private competitors and state security forces. In this respect, companies appear to view themselves as ‘ethical hero warriors’. Whether intended or not, their strategies have political consequences. Within the security industry, they contribute to the creation and maintenance of a norm regarding what constitutes a legitimate PMSC, to which more or less all companies strive to adhere. Vis-à-vis other security actors, these strategies seek to establish PMSCs as being superior because, unlike these actors, such companies are super-masculine and able to live up to the growing and sometimes contradictory demands of changing security contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares the trend toward privatizing security to state-building efforts as of September 2011. The state monopoly is challenged and undermined by privatizing large parts of military and security services, although in order to safeguard peace and enable sustainable development, the security sector must undergo reform. Meanwhile, the concept of state-building must guarantee security to its citizens, enforce the rule of law, and manage economic development, among others. Available options for controlling the unregulated activities of private military companies (PMC) and private security companies (PSC) include self-regulation and further development of the 1949 Geneva Convention and its 1977 additional protocols.

Se trata el derecho internacional humanitario en el contexto del uso de la fuerza por entidades privadas. Se afirma que la forma cambiante de los conflictos armados y la privatización de fuerzas de seguridad presentan desafíos para el derecho internacional humanitario. En particular, se examinan las implicaciones de los actores armados no estatales, los conflictos asimétricos y de baja intensidad y la privatización a nivel internacional de actividades antes consideradas como proprias del estado.

The article examines the privatization of state security functions within countries where conflicts are displacing large numbers of people. It is attested that, whereas these functions were once performed by national armies or police forces, they are increasingly being outsourced to private military and security companies (PMSC). The author urges that the activities of these private sector organisations create an arena of armed enforcement wherein there is neither accountability nor regulation. Within humanitarian operations, the use of these companies has allegedly blurred the distinction between non-profit organisations and for-profit organisations.