Michael de Laine

By Michael de Laine, The Copenhagen Voice, 2 April 2009

The use of private security companies in armed conflicts has increased and there are charges that they operate under insufficient government control.

“Letting private businesses that are run for profit supply power and security related services is a clear challenge to the idea of a state monopoly of power,” says Joakim Berndtsson, a doctoral student at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, involved in peace and development research at the university’s School of Global Studies.

In the thesis he will defend on 3 April 2009, Berndtsson looks at the privatisation of security, that is, the increasing use of private security companies (PSCs) to perform security and military related tasks traditionally associated with the state and institutions such as the police or the military.

In more concrete terms, the study investigates security privatisation in the context of violent conflict and in relation to the problem of state control of force.

Berndtsson says the point of departure is that the privatisation of security calls for a theoretical and historical reassessment of the ideal of a state monopoly of violence and of assumptions about the primacy of states vis-à-vis issues of security and conflict.

He argues that the level of state control of force is shifting across time and space and that the use of non-state forms of violence and protection is a recurrent theme in the history of state formation and change.

Berndtsson aims at putting the post-Cold War expansion of the market for privatised security in a historical perspective and to investigate empirically how security privatisation transpires in the conflict in Iraq and how this use of PSCs connects to changes and challenges to state control.

Analysing issues of control from the perspective of civil-military relations, his study focuses on the functional, political and social dimensions of state control of force.

Berndtsson investigates the use of PSCs in Iraq in 2003-2007, documenting in particular how security privatisation is realised in terms of the production, financing and regulation of services by drawing on different sources, including official documents and a series of semi-structured interviews with people in the private security industry.

The study finds that the privatisation of security can be seen as a re-emergence of non-state, commercial forms of violence and protection, in turn indicating a shift in state control over the instruments and use of force. This is in line with arguments about the increasing ‘marketization’ of the state in the globalised period.

However, the study also finds that there is no simple correlation between security privatisation and increasing or decreasing state control of force.

“Under some circumstances, privatisation has increased aspects of state control, but has also resulted in serious problems that challenge conventional thinking on the sovereign state and the ideal of state or democratic control of force,” Berndtsson says. “The case of Iraq provides several important insights into the logic and potential outcome of security privatisation in the context of armed conflict, but also points to a number of issues that merit further investigation, for instance concerning the oversight of PSCs and their activities in conflict and post-conflict environments and the difficulties of holding companies accountable.”

Since the start in 2003 of the Iraq war - sometimes called the ‘first privatised war’ - there have been a number of violent incidents involving private security companies, which have as many as 50,000 staff. The international debate about the role of private security companies in armed conflicts has intensified at the same time.

The private businesses often carry out tasks that are traditionally solved by military forces. Many commentators claim that the businesses are insufficiently regulated and that the state supervision does not work well if at all.

“Privatisation contributes to erasing the boundary between the private and public sectors, which complicates the question of state control,” says Berndtsson. “With such a large number of private players in the conflict area, including many carrying out commissions requiring arms, it is reasonable to expect that the state control over the use of force and the means used should change. But in a longer time perspective, the privatisation of security that we see now is really a return of private players than something completely new.”

While he sees the privatisation of security under certain circumstances leading to greater flexibility and functionality for countries such as the US and the UK, Berndtsson believes the lack of regulation and the problematic relationship between the security companies and other military and civilian personnel has led to increased insecurity and an undermined state control of the use of power in Iraq.