Anna Leander

The Market for Force and Public Security: The Destabilizing Consequences of Private Military Companies*

This article explains how it is possible to arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that an increased reliance on private actors (in the guise of private military companies) could consolidate public peace and security in the weakest African states. It argues that this conclusion can only be reached if the dynamics of the market for force are neglected. The basic claim is that the market as a whole has effects that cannot be captured by focussing on single cases. The article analyses these effects, departing from the empirical functioning of supply, demand and externalities in the market for force in order to spell out the implications for public security. More specifically, the article shows that supply in the market for force tends to self-perpetuate, as PMCs turn out a new caste of security experts striving to fashion security understandings to defend and conquer market shares. The process leads to an expansion of the numbers and kinds of threats the firms provide protection against. Moreover, demand does not penalize firms that service ‘illegitimate’ clients in general. Consequently, the number of actors who can wield control over the use force is limited mainly by their ability to pay. Finally, an externality of the market is to weaken existing security institutions by draining resources and worsening the security coverage. This gives further reasons to contest the legitimacy of existing security orders. In other words, the development of a market for force increases the availability and perceived need for military services, the number of actors who have access to them and the reasons to contest existing security orders. This hardly augurs well for public security.

Drafting Community: Understanding the Fate of Conscription

Discussion about the fate of conscription has focused on whether structural trends are undermining its viability. This article takes another point of departure, arguing that the fate of conscription will be determined by its legitimacy as a social institution. This legitimacy is now under question because conventional myths legitimating the institution no longer function. The fate of conscription depends on whether the institution can be re-enchanted. With reference to the French abandoning conscription and the Swedes reforming it, the article shows that (paradoxically) the re-enchantment of conscription is less likely if the conventional myths are well articulated, central to politics, and hence in a position to overshadow discussions and capture political imagination (as in France). Inversely, conscription is more readily re-enchanted when conventional myths are less central and well articulated (as in Sweden).

Technological Agency in the Co-Constitution of Legal Expertise and the US Drone Program

On 30 September 2011, the US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen in what has become the most controversial incident of US ‘targeted killing’, or, as its critics would prefer, of the US practice of ‘extrajudicial executions’. This controversy over wording expresses a profound disagreement over the legal status of the US drone program. Target killing suggests that the drone program may be legally regulated. Extrajudicial execution suggests that it falls outside the realm of legality. This article does not seek to settle which terminology is the most appropriate. Instead it analyses the legal expertise struggling to do so and its implications. More specifically, it focuses on the processes through which drones constitute the legal expertise that constitutes the drone program as one of targeted killings and of extrajudicial executions; that is, on a process of co-constitution. Drawing theoretical inspiration from and combining new materialist approaches (especially as articulated by Bruno Latour) with the sociological approach of Pierre Bourdieu, the article shows that drones have ‘agency’ in the ‘field’ of legal expertise pertaining to the drone program. Drones are redrawing the boundaries of legal expertise both by making associations to new forms of expertise and by generating technological expert roles. They are also renegotiating what is valuable to expertise. Drones are making both transparency and secrecy core to expertise. However, and contrary to what is often claimed, this agency does not inescapably lead to the normalization of targeted killings. The article therefore concludes that acknowledging the agency of drones is important for understanding how legal expertise is formed but especially for underscoring the continued potential for controversy and politics.

Why we need multiple stories about the global political economy

ABSTRACT This comment suggests that Cohens account of the history and present approaches to IPE as divided into an American and a British school is unduly narrow. It excludes not only Europe and the rest of the world but more centrally lines of lines of theorizing that have shaped and can continue to shape IPE (also within the Anglo-Saxon world). It proceeds to argue that embracing a broader view of IPE is important. It ensures for the quality, relevance and vitality of the field. The comment concludes that although a de-coupling of Cohens version of IPE and the rest would seem tempting and logical it is unlikely to happen for reasons of politics, academic and international.

European Economic and Monetary Union and the Crisis of European Social Contracts

“Maastricht is the end of the European welfare state.” “Europe is the last chance to save our welfare state in crisis.” On the one hand, the Union in general, and the Maastricht criteria in particular, are seen as accelerating the dismantling of the welfare state. “La revolte francaise contre l’Europe” in December 1995 stood out as one of the sharpest statements of this position.2 The strikes were directed against budget cuts, mainly affecting the public sector, which were justified by the need to comply with EMU criteria. On the other hand, the EU is very often presented as the only hope for protecting some form of European welfare state. Monetary union will guarantee a financial stability which no single country can hope to attain and future common standards will ease the risk of social dumping. This line of argument is adopted by most pro-welfare, pro-European political parties in Europe. These two opposed positions on the relation between the European Union and the crisis of the welfare state constantly confront each other. We will make the seemingly paradoxical claim that both arguments are true. The EU and EMU are a part of the problems of the European welfare state as well as a necessary and probable part of its solution.

Risk and the fabrication of apolitical, unaccountable military markets: the case of the CIA ‘Killing Program’

This article argues that risk is central in (re)producing the unaccountable commercial military/security markets that are a normal part of our political reality. The argument is twofold: first it is suggested that risk rationalities and the associated ‘preventive imperative’ has a depoliticising effect – accentuated by the impersonal spread of risk rationalities and the strategies of risk professionals – which lowers the eagerness to seek accountability. However, and second, depoliticisation is significant above all as a serious obstacle to the innovative thinking that is the sine qua non of effective accountability. The enmeshed, ‘hybrid’, nature of the market places it in the ‘blind spot’ of law and is as such fundamental to the current lack of accountability. Consequently, moving beyond established regulatory frameworks and technical understandings of accountability (that is, politicising the market) is a precondition for more effective accountability. Failing to do so, will leave the current rapid legal innovation impotent while reinforcing impunity as the focus on and confidence in established regulatory frameworks grows. The failure to politicise creates an ‘accountability paradox’ where the pursuit of accountability diminishes it. The article develops this argument with reference to Blackwaters (now Xe) role in the so called CIA ‘Killing Program’.

Securing Sovereignty by Governing Security through Markets

On September 16, 2007 the employees of the US security firm Blackwater became involved in a shooting incidence in the Nisour Square in Baghdad. They were escorting a US State Department delegation, which according to the firm, came under attack. According to bystanders, the Blackwater employees opened fire unprovoked, shooting in all directions and seemingly at anyone moving, including those trying to flee or help those wounded. Seventeen Iraqi civilians died in the incidence and at least twice as many were wounded. President Al-Maliki immediately came out to “revoke Blackwater’s license” for operating in Iraq and Iraqi authorities engaged the process of ending contractor impunity in their country. However, it soon became clear that there was no license to revoke and that the Iraqi government may not have the authority to deny Blackwater the right to operate in Iraq, let alone decide the fate of private contractors more generally. On their part, the US authorities promised to open their own investigation and expressed regret at the civilian casualties but did not end their contracts with Blackwater in Iraq or elsewhere.1

Digital/commercial (in)visibility: The politics of DAESH recruitment videos

This article explores one aspect of digital politics, the politics of videos and more specifically of DAESH recruitment videos. It proposes a practice theoretical approach to the politics of DAESH recruitment videos focused on the re-production of regimes of (in)visibility. The article develops an argument demonstrating specifically how digital and commercial logics characterize the aesthetic, circulatory, and infrastructuring practices re-producing the regime of (in)visibility. It shows that digital/commercial logics are at the heart of the combinatorial marketing of multiple, contradictory images of the DAESH polity in the videos; that they are core to the participatory, entrepreneurial, individualized and affective processes of contagion determining whom the videos reach and involve; and that they shape the sorting, linking, flagging and censoring of the videos that define their accessibility on the internet. The theoretical and political cost of overlooking these digital and commercial characteristics of DAESH visibility practices are high. It perpetuates misconceptions of how the videos work and what their politics are and it reinforces the digital Orientalism/Occidentalism in which these misconceptions are anchored.

Foreword: “Widening the Debate” and Raising Questions

This book widens the current debate on security privatization by examining how and why an increasing number of private actors beyond private military and security companies (PMSCs) have come to perform various security related functions. While PMSCs provide security for profit, most other private sector stakeholders make a profit by selling goods and services that were not originally connected with security in the traditional sense. However, due to the continuous introduction of new legal and technical regulations by public authorities, many non-security-related private businesses now have to perform at least some security functions. This volume offers new insights into security practices of non-security-related private businesses and their impact on security governance. The contributions extend beyond the conceptual and theoretical arguments in the existing body of literature to offer a range of original case studies on the specific roles of non-security-related private companies of all sizes, from all areas of business and from different geographic regions.

Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding World Politics

World order writing is a genre in demand, and writing world order is a difficult task not always well managed. In this context, George Sørensen’s strong and nuanced article What Kind of World Order? is a welcome contribution. Its central claim is that we need to look at the many facets of world order and that doing so leads us to conclude that we are in an interregnum. This idea of an interregnum indicates that politics in an Arendtian sense of creating something new is now both possible and likely. Yet, reading through Sørensen’s well-formulated article I found much less about world politics (or politics tout court) than I had hoped. The article left me with a contrasting and somewhat puzzling impression. On the one hand, Sørensen has produced an impressively broad account of an open ‘interregnum’ world order. Yet, on the other hand, the article does not delve much into the politics of this order. In what follows I explain why I think this is the case. My discussion here therefore centres on the moves that seem to me to have led Sørensen’s discussion of world order away from a discussion of world politics. In ‘What Kind of World Order?’, Sørensen offers a reading of world order from the perspective of the four dominant schools in International Relations (IR), with the intention to ‘cut through the [indeed considerable] confusion’ surrounding world order. In doing this, he successfully highlights the different facets of world order. Yet, politics does not make it to the centre of the article for at least three reasons: (1) The emphasis placed on the demand and supply of world order unwittingly distracts attention from the struggle over what kind of world order should be supplied. (2) The emphasis on the international system leads to a tendency to neglect the shifting nature of contemporary world politics where non-state actors are increasingly central. (3) The juxtaposition of the four schools confined to one area of world politics each (security, institutions, ideas and economics, respectively) eschews the degree of conflict (and the political stakes) that arise as the schools overlap. It seems clear to me that Sørensen’s juxtaposition of