Private Military Contractors in the 21st Century

A multidisciplinary scholarship has scrutinized the privatization of tasks that used to be the preserve of states’ armed forces, ranging fromcombat to armed protection and logistics. Early, exploratory research concentrated on who private military contractors are and what they do, how they have evolved, and whether they still amount to mercenaries. Studies of who hires military contractors show a shifting interest from African countries’ sporadic outsourcing of combat in the 1990s to advanced democracies’ extensive outsourcing of security and military support in Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by a growing focus on international organizations, non-state actors and non-Western revisionist powers. Explanatory studies have investigated the causes of contractor support, focusing on functionalist considerations shaped by the supply and demand of military services, ideational factors enabling or inhibiting security privatization, and the political expediency of circumventing institutional and diplomatic constraints over the use of force. Although the private military industry’s elusive nature, rapid evolution, and wide array of activities put any sweeping generalization at risk of conceptual stretch, the literature widely concurs on its problematic implications. Accordingly, scholars have warned that the growing use of contracts may destabilize the international system by exacerbating the frequency and duration of con icts, documented its mixed impact on the effectiveness of different types of military operations, discussed the appropriate legal frameworks required to close accountability gaps, dissected its repercussions on political control over the use of force, and debated the ethical appropriateness of employing commercial actors in military and peace operations.