First off, I should point out that I've borrowed this bad, bad pun from Robert Farley. But even if he hadn't come up with it, I probably would have. In Iron Man 2, Tony Stark declares to an incredulous senator that he has "privatized world peace." The movie as a whole, however fantastic in its nature, points out an basic truth that is often eluded in movies that stereotype military contractors and private security firms as either praetorian guards or trigger-happy guns for hire. When it comes to the spectrum of force, state power alone is not the only game in town and never has been.
Feral Jundi reinforces this point by linking to an article describing the calls by some groups to bring back the premodern concept of "letters of marque and reprisal" to enable private groups go after Somali pirates. Regardless of the fitness of the concept, it illustrates what kind of conditions produce a reliance on private force.
Major states are often uneasy (or unable) to produce security in peripheral areas or advance their strategic objectives directly. This is especially true in areas that require international collective action - an area which is often more aspiration than reality. It is common sense that those who can pay for it will act on their own to deal with the problem. John Robb and others have also written persuasively about shifts in international trends that enable - for better or worse - an expansion of private entities acting in both domestic and international contexts to provide security and military advantage. Moreover, major powers wanting to act in an "indirect" sense often use private groups to act as their surrogates. In this mode, private groups are just one of several possible proxies that can be employed to do our bidding.
The point is that not that the use of privatized force is desirable. For a variety of reasons it is a drastically more limited tool than traditional state force. Anyone familiar with the 1960s and 1970s participation of mercenaries in African conflicts understands that in many cases these actors can also drastically worsen the problem as well. But privatized force can and will be employed by those with the ability to pay for it in the absence of credible alternatives. A variety of actors will operate on the lower rung of the spectrum of force. And in some cases they will be better placed to handle security problems than the United Nations.
We might as well come to terms with it, because it is most emphatically not new and will not be abolished by a supposedly more enlightened international order.
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