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Anna Leander
The UK and the US are well known to be commercialising security in their international military operations. Europe is not. The role of commercial security in the domestic setting in Europe is widely acknowledged. After all the biggest private security company globally â G4S Group â has its roots in Scandinavia. However, the use of commercial security contracting by European states for military purposes in international settings â such as Afghanistan, which this volume draws on for examples â is mostly held to be marginal. This is not surprising considering that most European states have regulations underscoring that they remain attached to strict state control over the use of force internationally and that when prompted, European ministers of foreign affairs, of defence, chiefs of staff and experts routinely respond that they do not rely on military contractors. However, in international operations the line between the military and the security contractor is most often blurred. Security/military contractors in international settings are therefore increasingly (including in this book) referred to as Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs). By insisting that they do no military contracting while keeping silent about their security contracting, European public officials create an impression that the controversies surrounding PMSC contracting by the US and the UK are of little relevance to them. To the extent the PMSC contracting is discussed in Europe, it is therefore as a potential, future development. As its title indicates, this volume challenges this view.
European security commercialisation for military operations has gone further than assumed outside specialist circles. The resulting gap between perceptions (that security commercialisation is insignificant in military operations) and practices (of growing reliance on PMSCs) has made Europeans singularly ill-equipped to deal the resulting political and regulatory challenges. By misrecognising that they rely on PMSCs, Europeans miss an opportunity to ensure the accountability of contractors and those contracting them and more generally they evade their responsibilities for regulation (national and international). The ambition in this volume is to diminish misrecognition by insisting on the extent to which Europeans have commercialised security in relation to their military operations; that is by taking stock of what is already going on. The book does so by focusing on European contracting in Afghanistan and its political implications. The countries we look at are three Scandinavian, three Central European and three Continental European states. The chapters follow a common logic: they focus on the national contexts that give security contracting in Afghanistan its meaning, they look at national contracting practices and they discuss the political consequences for the operation in Afghanistan. The reminder of this introduction will justify and explain this focus and the logic of the chapters to follow.
Situating of the book
The steep increase in the reliance on PMSCs since the end of the Cold War has generated a multifaceted discussion about how and why this change has taken place as well as about what its consequences are. While the debate was initially driven largely by the practical, immediate and therefore technical/specific concerns that emerged as commercial actors began to figure centrally in military affairs, it is by now extensively covered in public debate and in the relevant academic disciplines, including economics, law, sociology, philosophy, political science and international relations/international political economy. The result is a cacophony of ideas and arguments (see Krahmann 2010a, Leander 2009b, Leander 2010a). This section sketches out how this book contributes to that cacophony. It does so by shedding light on the political consequences of commercialising security for the international military operations undertaken by European countries.
A book about the political consequences of commercialising security
Questions about politics are not the only ones posed when the consequences of the growing reliance on PMSCs is discussed. On the contrary, the rapidly expanding body of academic and para-academic research on security commercialisation through reliance on PMSCs has reserved a rather minor place for questions about politics. Possibly, because the research agenda has been driven by the practical concerns of armed forces, companies and their employees, governments and human rights lawyers, the discussion has revolved around the economic and regulatory issues of most immediate concern.
The centrality of economic efficiency in the debate about the consequences of increasing reliance on PMSCs is hardly surprising considering that promises of cost saving and efficiency were motivating and justifying commercialisation (Kaldor 1998, Markusen 2003). In the critical debate the urge to show that PMSCs are not cost effective but rather a source of squandering, corruption and waste is correspondingly omnipresent. In the formulation of two US government fraud experts it leads to the âbetrayal of our troopsâ (Rasor and Bauman 2007) and ultimately to the âdestructionâ of the public good (Dickinson 2011). Inversely, the defenders of the growing reliance on PMSCs have a penchant for reiterating that quite to the contrary, the market is efficient, while public institutions are inefficient and wasteful (BENS 2001, Gansler 2010). This âmanagerialâ focus on cost-effectiveness makes the question of how to ensure a more effective administration and management of contractors the key issue in the debate about the consequences of commercialisation. âConsequencesâ are in other words discussed mainly to gain insights about how to alter (or not) the management at some level and by some actors in ways that ensure economic efficiency. This leads straight to the second issue that has played a central role in the discussion: the issue of regulation.
Any suggestion for improving the administration and management of contracting practices involving PMSCs has regulatory implications, as does the commercialisation process itself. Therefore regulatory issues occupy a close second (if not shared first) place on the agenda regarding the consequences of security commercialisation. They are raised primarily to highlight questions of accountability and responsibility (e.g. Dickinson 2005, Leander 2010b). The concern in this debate is over whether or not there are regulatory systems capable of ensuring that contractors, the companies employing them and those who rely on their services (including states as well as individuals, companies and non-state organisations such as NGOs) can be asked to respect pertinent rules and can be taken to task if they do not. The regulatory discussion has been most visible when PMSCs have been involved in gross human rights violations (as TITAN and CACI were in Abu Ghraib or Blackwater was in the Nisour Square incident,1 but it spans the full spectrum of regulatory issues emerging in relation to the growing reliance of PMSCs. This spectrum is fractured by the contradictory, overlapping and conflicting administrative, military, criminal, civic, commercial and international regulatory systems that have a bearing on contracting practices, not to mention the rapid development of soft forms of regulations including codes of conduct, various standards and best practice schemes (Teubner 2002, Leander 2009a, Leander 2012). The resulting regulatory complexity will no doubt continue to be a fertile ground for the politicians, lawyers and academics engaged in the âmad scrambleâ to bring contractors to justice (Kierpaul 2008). However, from whatever perspective âregulationâ is approached, it produces a discussion of âconsequencesâ with distinctly legal overtones; consequences are about what (if any) legal innovations and reforms are necessary for regulation to be effective.
Even if economic and regulatory issues have dominated the discussion about the consequences of the increased PMSCs presence, a third issue keeps appearing in the debate and has increasingly come to occupy a space of its own: politics. It has sneaked in as a necessary real-world anchor in the other discussions. Participants in the debates about efficiency and regulation are acutely aware that proposing changes without reference to the political context is as useful as prescribing medicine that is either unaffordable or unavailable. Legal and economic arguments are therefore frequently couched in explicitly (and surprisingly strong) political terms (e.g. Minow 2003, Tiefer 2007, Martin 2007). In addition to this, politics has also become a focus in its own right. Scholars have placed it at the centre of their investigations, implicitly or explicitly treating politics as logically prior to managerial and regulatory issues. Peter Singer's (2003) discussion of the consequences of privatisation in five key areas has since been followed by numerous studies going into depth while looking at the consequence of privatisation for some specific area of politics such as sovereignty (Verkuil 2007, Leander 2009c), the state monopoly on the legitimate use of force (Leander 2006b), state control over the use of force (Avant 2005, Berndtsson 2009), democratic institutions (Krahmann 2010b) or the global governance of security (Abrahamsen and Williams 2010). This book builds on this growing body of literature focusing on political consequences. Its ambition is to deepen under-standing of one specific political consequence of commercialisation: the consequence for the politics of international military operations (IMO).
A book about the politics of international military operations
This book is not the first to ask questions about the political implications of commercialisation through the increasing presence of PMSCs for international military operations (IMO) in the context of multilateral operations such as that in Afghanistan, which is the focus of this volume. The recurring proposals to solve the difficulties of finding adequate troops for multilateral missions by relying on market actors (Brooks 2000, Ghebali 2006) have generated considerable debate focused also on the political consequences of the growing reliance on PMSCs for IMO. The distinct contribution of this book is that it brings together three aspects of politics that are usually dealt with in separation when the consequences of PMSCs for the politics of IMO are discussed: the politics of formulating strategies for IMO, the politics of implementing IMO and the politics surrounding the imprint left by IMO. This move we would argue is not only desirable because it gives a more âcompleteâ or âcomplexâ picture of the political consequences for IMO, it is necessary because the politics at the three levels is intertwined as professional networks of practice span across the three levels. Hence, bringing them together is the prerequisite of a realistic account.
The idea that commercialisation through the increased presence of PMSCs has strong implications for the politics surrounding the formulation of IMO strategies has received considerable attention. One line of inquiry has been to look at the extent to which the reliance on PMSCs reshuffles policy priorities as companies engage in lobbying, agenda setting from within or reframe security under-standings by their presence in the field (e.g. Leander 2005b). This in turn brings forth questions regarding the implications for the political democratic and social processes underlying foreign policy strategies (Krahmann 2010b, Leander 2007, Leander 2010b). IMO strategies have figured prominently in this discussion. It has been suggested that commercialisation skews priorities and hence tends to alter what kind of projects are pursued in multilateral operations, often in ways that bias them towards the priorities of security professionals generally and not only towards the PMSCs (Whyte 2007, Leander and van Munster 2007, Olsson 2007).
Analogous conclusions have been reached by rather different routes in the debate about the effect of commercialisation through the reliance on PMSCs on IMO as articulated when focus is placed on how these are implemented in practice. The emphasis in these studies has therefore been on how commercialisation alters the way IMO are implemented not so much by shifting formal authority over these strategies but by altering the form and fashion of their implementation; the how of implementing IMO (Singer 2007, Leander 2010a). From this perspective, the way contractors carry out a strategy becomes central, as demonstrated by their role in the occupation of Iraq (Isenberg 2008, Young Pelton 2006). Along these lines it can for example be expected that the focus on conventional, military values among contractors shapes how the IMO in which they are involved are carried out, even if these values can be expected to vary with e.g. the nationality of the contractors or the company culture in which they are embedded (Higate 2012). Analogously, the presence of contractors implies a change in the rules governing IMOs. De facto, the pivotal role of PMSCs in practice often gives these considerable sway over the rules governing IMO; the âbig boys rulesâ as Triple Canopy employees in Baghdad dubbed the self-made rules governing their activities (Fainaru 2008). By setting rules and fashioning processes, commercialisation demonstrably (re-)shapes the landscape of IMO and the links between actors on the ground where the intervention is taking place. PMSCs refashion the actions of other actors including of public armed forces (Singer 2007, McCallion 2005, Zamparelli 1999) and NGOs (Cockayne 2006, Spearin 2008). The extent to which PMSCs are reshaping the implementation of IMO is best visible in the surge in initiatives to replace the present muddle-through handling of PMSC, to a clearer regulatory framing; whether formal (as e.g. the Montreux Document, see Gomez del Prado 2010) or informal (as e.g. the development of codes of conduct by companies, organisations and governm...
