Condottieri (non) Ritornati: The Re-emergence of Private Military Contractors and the Variation in Their Employment by States

Abstract

The aim of this research is to build a typology of the PMC (private military company/contractor) from a perspective distinct from the existing literature. An absolute majority of the existing body of research focused on classifying the PMCs themselves, while largely neglecting how their most important clients, i.e. states differ in the use and employment of PMCs. There exist a few recent efforts to suggest the typology of states in security privatization, particularly concerning the use of PMCs. While these attempts were praiseworthy as a pioneer in the field, their taxonomies are less well-defined and well-organized to serve as a basis for future research. Thus, this thesis seeks to refine and improve on these typologies with a couple of additional criteria for classifying states: one is a three-tier hierarchy in place of the existing two-tier taxonomy of state capability. This enables to distinguish not only countries on the demand side from those on the supply side, but also leaders of security privatizations and those that follow

the other feature of the typology presented here is the division of demand and supply. The previous research largely fails to take into account the possibility that a state can be a provider as well as a client of PMC services at the same time. This thesis addresses this confusion by examining both the demand and the supply sides of the private military industry and thus puts the development of the industry in perspective. At the same time, the three-tier framework is expected to make it easier to demonstrate how the norms of PMC employment by states spread or trickle down from the top to the bottom of the international hierarchy, allowing PMCs (and states using them) to take advantage of legal and political loopholes in creating a win-win situation, where PMCs successfully expand their business while client states manage to enhance national security by unconventional means. The thesis suggests how the unipolar system in the post-Cold War period has turned the clearly delineated flash points in the past into the frontier with blurred, obscure borderlines, left unmanaged by the hegemon and other powers and how this has resulted in the surge of lingering low-intensity conflicts. In sum, this paper confirms that a countrys relative military strength in the region as well as on the global level, measured by a sum of its own military might and foreign military assistance arrangements, is the key determinant whether it becomes a PMC provider, a PMC customer or both. Also demonstrated in this paper is how the process of security privatization, chiefly in the form of PMC employment, differs by country group. The higher a state is on the international hierarchy, the process of security privatization begins with ideational/normative shift, which then are justified on economic grounds. On the other hand, the weaker states simply take the new norms created by the stronger states as given, and pursue security privatization mostly out of political needs, i.e. survival of the leadership or the regime.