Deborah Avant

From Mercenary to Citizen Armies: Explaining Change in the Practice of War

Mercenary armies went out of style in the nineteenth century; it became common sense that armies should be staffed with citizens. I argue that even though realist explanations focusing on the fighting prowess of citizen armies and sociological explanations focusing on the fit between citizen armies and prevailing ideas can rationalize this change, they cannot explain it. I examine, instead, the politics behind the new reliance on citizen armies and argue that material and ideational turmoil provided important antecedent conditions for change. Beyond this, individual states were more likely to move toward citizen armies when they had been defeated militarily and when the ruling coalition was split or indifferent about the reforms tied to citizen armies. Finally, the apparent success of citizen armies in France and then Prussia made do mestic conditions for reform easier to obtain in other countries, reinforcing the likelihood that the solution would be replicated. I conclude that the interaction between domestic politics and path dependency provides a promising source of hypotheses for explaining the conditions under which new ways of war emerge and spread.

Private Security and Democracy: Lessons from the US in Iraq

Arguments about the importance of democracy for international behavior assume that states rely on military organizations rather than “hired guns.” With the growth of the private security market this assumption no longer holds true. Focusing on the United States, we use original data to compare the impacts of using private military/security forces and military forces on attributes identified as endemic to democracies: constitutionalism, transparency, and public consent. Our evidence indicates that forces raised via contract are harder to learn about and thus less transparent than military forces. Largely due to lowered transparency, Congress has a harder time exercising its constitutional role, which impedes constitutionalism. Finally, though the public is just as sensitive to the deaths of private forces as it is to military deaths, it is less likely to know about them. Thus the lack of transparency also circumvents meaningful public consent. We conclude with a consideration of the potential implications of these changes for U.S. foreign policy.

The Implications of Marketized Security for IR Theory: The Democratic Peace, Late State Building, and the Nature and Frequency of Conflict

Over the course of the last fifteen years states—along with companies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and others—have increasingly turned to markets rather than state-organized military hierarchies for security. This article puts forth hypotheses about how this marketization might affect three major literatures in international relations theory: the democratic peace, late state building, and theories of the frequency and nature of conflict. Relying on institutional logic, I argue that the marketization of security should redistribute power over the control of force. This redistribution should cause democracies to function differently—increasing the dilemmas between short-term security and long-term relations with other democracies. It should also reinforce the dilemmas pointed to by the literature on the resource curse and rentier states, thus deepening the expected difficulty of state building. Finally, as more states and non-state actors take advantage of market options for security, the oft-assumed collective monopoly of states over violence should suffer a blow. This should lead the chances for conflict to grow but also the purposes for which people and groups use violence to change. These propositions are not tested but serve as a call for further research. Deborah Avant is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University (avant@gwu.edu). The author thanks Fiona Adamson, Risa Brooks, Nora Bensahel, Alex Cooley, Rachel Epstein, Greg Gause, Jonathan Kirshner, Jack Snyder, David Lake, Jim Lebovic, and participants in the Globalization and National Security seminars at Harvards Olin Institute, as well as participants in seminars at Georgetown University; Northwestern University; and University of Texas, Austin for comments on previous drafts.

The Institutional Sources of Military Doctrine: Hegemons in Peripheral Wars

This article examines the formation of military doctrine by the United States during Vietnam and by Britain during the Boer War to test the prevailing literature on military doctrine. Finding the literature inadequate, The paper offers an institutional model of the forces shaping military doctrine. The institutional model is based on the broader literature concerning the delegation of power in organizations. The logic of the delegated power depends as much on the structure governing the superior (the civilian authorities) as that governing the specialized subordinate (the military organizations). This model proposes that the differences in adaptability demonstrated by British and American military organizations in response to similar threats can be explained by the distinct structure of civilian institutions and their effect on the development of military organizations.

Private security companies

Although it was once assumed to be solely the province of the state, the private sector is increasingly involved in the use of force. Consider the recent experience in Iraq. When the Iraqi Army was defeated in 2003, it is estimated that one out of every ten people the United States deployed to the theatre were civilians working for private security companies (PSCs) performing the work that used to be done by soldiers. As lawlessness followed the fall of Saddam Hussein and coalition forces were stretched thin, an ‘army’ of private security forces was hired—to train the Iraqi police force and the Iraqi army, as well as a private Iraqi force to guard government facilities and oil fields, and to protect expatriates working in the country. In May 2004 US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld estimated that in excess of 20,000 private security personnel from countries as varied as Fiji, Israel, Nepal, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States itself, employed by some 25 different PSCs, worked for the US government, the British government, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), private firms and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in Iraq. This feature of the Iraqi occupation was thrust into the public eye when four private security personnel working for the US PSC, Blackwater USA, were killed and mutilated on 31 March 2004 and amplified when contracted interrogators were implicated in the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Analysts disagree about the consequences of this trend. Some are optimistic about the added capacities the private sector can provide for defence or peace missions. Others are pessimistic about the consequences of privatisation for the cost and aims of defence, respect for international law and attention to human rights or other international norms. The Iraqi conflict provides evidence that supports each of these perspectives. The Iraqi experience also attests, however, to important changes in the control of force that privatisation introduces. The privatisation of security has created a global market for force that is shifting power within states, between states, and between states and non-state actors, In this analysis, I describe the market—playing particular attention to its recent manifestations New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 1, March 2005

NGOs, Corporations and Security Transformation in Africa

Transnational non-state actors interested in maintaining a presence in parts of the world where the state is weak are an important part of the privatization of security that has not been well analyzed. In this article I lay out propositions about how an increasing role for non-state actors in security may transform the conceptualization of security and the use of violence more generally. I argue that international NGOs and transnational corporations conceptualize security and how to achieve it differently than states have traditionally done and that these differences have potential consequences for which problems are addressed, as well as for whether and how violence is used in the communities where they operate.

Conflicting Indicators of "Crisis" in American Civil-Military Relations

The indicators of the crisis in American civil-military relations can be disaggregated into three categories: (1) the level of military influence on policy; (2) the degree to which the military is representative of society; and (3) the level of civil-military tension. Behind each indicator is a different implicit theory about civil-military relations. These theories offer contradictory assessments about what we should want civil-military relations to be. Therefore, holding the current American civil-military relationship to all three standards is logically untenable. Reviewing the crisis literature and the various theories of civil-military relations underlying the different arguments suggests the need for a more nuanced research program examining the balance between efficiency and accountability inherent in the civil-military relationship.

Transnational organisations and security

The fields of international relations and criminology analyse security from different directions, but both have had a dominant focus on states and state agencies until recently. Even as they looked at a wider range of actors as security providers, an important category of security actors has not been analysed so far – ‘non-violent’ transnational organisations. Transnational non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and transnational corporations (TNCs) are not security organisations per se, but the strategies these transnational non-state actors pursue in response to violence affect security for both themselves and the societies in which they operate. We argue here that security at the local level is an outcome of interactions among diverse actors including transnational organisations and call for a research agenda focused on how transnational actors choose their response to insecurity and how those choices affect security governance.

Contracting for Services in U.S. Military Operations

When the United States deploys its forces around the world, an increasingly important part of its operations falls to personnel outside the uniformed U.S. military per se. Increasingly, the U.S. military has been using what some call contractors, others call private military and security companies, and still others call mercenaries. In this chapter, I will briefly describe the private security industry and the larger global market for force of which it is a part; then I will discuss some of the benefits and risks the United States faces with its increasing use of private forces.

Selling Security: Trade-Offs in State Regulation of the Private Security Industry

A hallmark of the modern era has been the state and its monopoly control of force — not just within its territory, but also abroad. States have exercised control over the force that emanates from their territory by marshalling the violent services of their citizens in citizen armies (restricting their use on behalf of other states or non-state actors) and regulating trade in weapons and other instruments of violence (Thomson 1994; Avant 2000; Krause 1992). Increasingly, however, citizens have begun to market their violent services along side weapons systems. In the 1990s private security companies (PSCs), touting themselves as legitimate, law-abiding corporations, sold military and security services to states and non-state actors all over the world. How does the thriving market for force affect states’ ability to control force?