Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies

Rita Abrahamsen, Anna Leander, Rita Abrahamsen, Anna Leander

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317914327
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Sous-sujet: Sicurezza nazionale

This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of current research on private security and military companies, comprising essays by leading scholars from around the world.

The increasing privatization of security across the globe has been the subject of much debate and controversy, inciting fears of private warfare and even the collapse of the state. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the range of issues raised by contemporary security privatization, offering both a survey of the numerous roles performed by private actors and an analysis of their implications and effects. Ranging from the mundane to the spectacular, from secretive intelligence gathering and neighbourhood surveillance to piracy control and warfare, this Handbook shows how private actors are involved in both domestic and international security provision and governance. It places this involvement in historical perspective, and demonstrates how the impact of security privatization goes well beyond the security field to influence diverse social, economic and political relationships and institutions. Finally, this volume analyses the evolving regulation of the global private security sector. Seeking to overcome the disciplinary boundaries that have plagued the study of private security, the Handbook promotes an interdisciplinary approach and contains contributions from a range of disciplines, including international relations, politics, criminology, law, sociology, geography and anthropology.

This book will be of much interest to students of private security companies, global governance, military studies, security studies and IR in general.

1 Historical perspectives on private security

1 Private Force and the Making of States, c. 1100–1500

DOI: 10.4324/9781315850986-1

Benjamin de Carvalho

Understanding the role of private force in the making of states poses quite a conundrum. The current use of the term ‘private force’ is irremediably associated with the state, and when we refer to private force, we do not mean the use of force in the private sphere – private violence, so to speak, as opposed to violence in public display. Instead the term describes force wielded by private actors as non-state actors. The concept of private force is therefore unthinkable without the concept of the state, as it is precisely the emergence of the state that is the condition of possibility of private force. To be sure, we may find examples of force used by ‘non-rulers’ before the emergence of the state. Yet, that force is not similar to private force after the emergence of states as autonomous moral universes covering the entirety of the globe. In this world, force wielded by private actors is by definition non-state, and if not condoned by it, a de facto and de jure challenge to the authority of the state.

This chapter shows how the distinction between the public and the private emerges with respect to the use of force in conjunction with the long rise of the state in Europe. As Patricia Owens has convincingly argued, there is no a priori public or private violence, as violence ‘is made public or private through political struggle and definition’ (Owens 2010: 32). Through a conceptual historical account of the organization of warfare through the five centuries of consolidation and centralization of power which crystallized in the sovereign state, I show that ‘[s]ome forms of violence are made public and others are made private through historically varying ways of organizing and justifying force’ (ibid.: 32). Echoing Peter W. Singer (2008), Owens draws attention to the fact that the distinction between private and public violence has never been ‘solidly fixed’ (Owens 2010: 18). In drawing a historical conceptual analysis of the changing organization of military power in the making of states, I show why we need to take an empirical rather than an ideological approach to the distinction between different types of force, as only then can we hope to understand why and for what purposed power was organized in specific ways, and the consequences of that organization.

The chapter takes as its starting point the late eleventh century, a period when public authorities had been decimated throughout Christendom and when kings no longer had the aura of public authority, but were (private) contestants for public authority on equal footing with their competitors. Both public and private force was private, so to speak. I proceed in five sections. The first addresses the relationship between war-making and state-making, a relationship which is central to much of the literature on state formation and to our further discussion. The next three sections address the chronology of changes in the organization of force, and move from warfare as a knightly (largely) private enterprise to the wars of mercenaries, culminating in the early attempts at holding standing permanent armies around the late fifteenth century. The claim is not that this process was linear or inevitable, and, as demonstrated in the last section, the centralization of the legitimate means of warfare in the hands of public authorities did not mean the end of private enterprise in a world of states. Rather, private enterprise continued alongside public force, albeit in a different character.

Force in the making of states

The link between states and war is well established, and there is little doubt that wars have had an important impact on state formation in Europe (see Davis and Pereira 2008; Pereira 2008). Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital and European States (1992), for example, has shown how the requirements of warfare forced states to consolidate their administrative and economic apparatus, and institutionalize the practice of war as an intrinsic part of the state. But the link between violence and the state is not just empirical. Violence is central to the state also at the conceptual level. As Max Weber put it:

If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated … Force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one … We have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

(Weber 1963: 78)

This monopoly of legitimate violence in turn rests on a specific distinction between private and public property, a separation that first emerged during the Middle Ages. It is important to keep in mind, though, that although we can trace this distinction back to the Middle Ages, private and public force operate, and have operated, differently at different times and places.

What is central to Weber’s ideal type of the state, is that its central characteristic is the legitimate monopoly of the use of force. The key impetus behind this monopolization came during the Middle Ages, which saw an increasing tendency of states to monitor, control, and monopolize the effective means of violence in (what was to become) their territory. Illustrating this process is the fact that nobles lost their right to wage private war (Tilly 1992: 68–9). In fact, as Norbert Elias has noted:

The society of what we call the modern age is characterized, above all in the West, by a certain degree of monopolization. Free use of military weapons is denied the individual and reserved to a central authority of whatever kind … The financial means thus flowing into this central authority maintain its monopoly of military force, while this in turns maintains the monopoly of taxation.

(Elias 1996: 345–6)

While this is a fairly obvious state of affairs to the contemporary commentator, this was not the case in early medieval Europe. In fact, at the beginning of the twelfth century, the disintegration of the Roman Empire had resulted in a mosaic of fragments counting ‘hundreds of principalities, bishoprics, city-states, and other authorities [exercising] overlapping control in the small hinterlands of their capitals’ (Tilly 1992: 40). The story of the formation of the modern state is the story of how this process was reverted; how the pieces of the European mosaic increased in size and decreased in number.

By the end of the eleventh century, this transformation was far from completed. Great autonomy was exerted by the feudal lords, and ‘each castle in the country had become a center of rule independent of the [ruler’s] castle’ (Poggi 1978: 26). The kings of twelfth-century Europe were primus inter pares; they were the most powerful of the princes, but not strong enough to hold all their rivals in check. In twelfth-century Europe, heavily armoured knights were exercising direct lordship over nucleated peasant villages, and, final authority lay not with the king, but with the feudal lord, duke, count or baron (Stacey 1994: 29; Strayer 1973: 49–50). The inherent trend of feudalism towards fragmentation of power to the advantage of the vassal fief holders had led to the erosion of the landed patrimony of the kings, who by the twelfth century’ had learned to conceive of the territories they ruled as their own [family] patrimonies’ (Poggi 1978: 35). In short, the starting point for the political centralization of the state was the private estates of rulers, in fierce competition with feudal rivals.

Thus, in order to maintain their fragile position as primus inter pares, the king engaged in ‘private wars’ against the other seigneurs of the country. The resulting trend towards the creation of a criss-crossing pattern of competing power networks, where rival lords and kings claimed sovereignty over the same territories had created a situation often referred to as ‘feudal anarchy’ (ibid.: 27, 31), where even the smallest knights ‘retained the rights and functions of rule within their estates; here they continued to hold sway like little kings’ (Elias 1996: 317). In these early times of state-building, the basis for the king’s power, as well as the resources he could draw on in order to fight the neighbouring barons or princes and assert his power, were his private family possessions (ibid.: 281).

I will concentrate on the period between approximately 1100 and 1500, as this period marks the beginning of the era of the supremacy in combat of the mounted knight, while 1477 saw the collapse of the duchy of Burgundy, the last feudal alternative to the state. The end of the fifteenth century also witnessed a change in the political atmosphere in Europe: the economic situation was improving after the end of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), and the frequency of warfare was declining. In so doing, I will account from how war changed from being a largely private matter to increasingly becoming the sole prerogative of the ruler. By successfully reforming the ways wars were fought, centralizing rulers were able to win the power contest against their feudal rivals, and reform a conduct that counteracted political centralization (see Avant 2000).

Social order and the medieval knight, c. 1100–1300

While the early medieval period saw attempts at political centralization frustrated by private war making, it simultaneously marks the beginning of a number of processes that came to curtail the war-making rights of private knights. In fact, the early Middle Ages experienced important changes in the ideas about war. Between the year 1000 and the beginning of the twelfth century, Europe witnessed what amounted to a large-scale ‘peace programme’: repression of pillage, the birth of chivalry, the formation of the idea of the crusade and modification of the relationship between the powerful and the poor. In large part, the drivers behind these reforms were a ruling class, which now identified more closely with the need for order than their rights to wage war. Ecclesiastical efforts also ran in parallel with this, leading to the emerging chivalric code of conduct. Where knighthood had appeared from the early 1100s as an amalgam of military profession and social rank prescribing the behaviour of its adherents in both peace and war, the bearing of arms was increasingly ‘seen as a noble dignity connected with a code of conduct, the violation of which might cost a man his status as a warrior’ (Stacey 1994: 29–30).

Moreover, knighthood, with all its prescriptions of conduct, became a way of life for the medieval warriors. War in the Middle Ages was thus waged between members of the same class, who regarded each other as equals. This entitled them to certain privileges, for example the right to be ransomed – and not killed – if captured in war, but also bound them by obligations towards humane conduct towards prisoners of similar social rank. During war, these warriors gained honour and reputation on the battlefields, and during peaceful times tournaments gave them the opportunity to show their prowess in combat. But although the norms and ideals of chivalry emerged in the early Middle Ages, few attempts were made to record them systematically before the end of the thirteenth century. At this time, didactic treatises on warfare, military discipline and the organization of armies began to appear (Contamine 1984: 119). Examples of these are Enseignements et ordenances pour un seigneur qui a des guerres et grans gouvernements a faire (1327) by Theodore Paleologus, L’arbre des batailles (c. 1387) by Honoré Bovet, Le livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie (1410) by Christine de Pisan and Le Jouvencel (c. 1470) by Jean de Bueil. Advocating honourable and virtuous conduct, these treatises also set forth to reform the role of the knight, turning the emphasis away from virtuous conduct in battle per se, to the virtuous qualities of ‘public service’. In Book of Order and Chivalry (c. 1310) Raymon Lull makes the case that force must be put in public service: ‘To a knyght appereyneth that he be lover of the comyn wele. For by the comynalte of the people was the chyvalrye founded and establysshed. And the comyn wele is gretter and more necessary than propre good and specyall’ (cited in Vale 1981: 22–3). These treaties, in turn, were closely linked to the emerging state rulers. In fact, many were initiated by the rulers themselves, as their authors were either at the service of the kings, or eager to receive or retain their protection.

In addition an emergent body of military regulations and ordinances sought to regulate the relationship between private force and public service. Based on the treatises, ordinances were sent to the captains of most armies throughout Europe. Estatuz, ordenances et cusutmes a tenir en l’ost was issued by Richard II in 1385, and Statutes and Ordinaunces to be keped in time of Werre was published by Henry V in 1419; in Italy Orso degli Orsini drew up the Governo et exercitio de la militia for Alfonso I the Magnanimous of Aragon in 1447 (Contamine 1984: 119–21), and towards the mid-fifteenth century, the tract on The Way Soldiers Dress in the Kingdom of France Both on Foot and on Horseback was issued. During the same period, it also became common to issue a general edict announcing the disciplinary orders to each army at the moment it assembled. In these ways, private force was increasingly tied to public loyalty and institutionalized in uniforms and insignia borne in battle, symbolizing loyalty to the king. By the same token, private force was legitimized through its public utility. As Strayer (1973: 56) put it, ‘loyalty to the state became more than a necessity and a convenience; it was now a virtue’.

Institutionalizing these new rules and regulations was not a straightforward process, and attempts at reforming the ideals of chivalry were often met with resistance from a warring class which had the chevalier errant (or roving knight), whose vocation was the pursuit of just quarrels, as its ideal. However, this aspect should not be overemphasized, as a large part of it is a fiction cast upon it by later writers. In fact, one should not leave from sight the fact that throughout the medieval period, money was the almost obligatory link between soldiers and authority, and that this is precisely what plunged Europe into a vicious circle of violence. From about 1250 to 1450, private armies of mercenaries, who made a living by plunder when they were not employed, ravaged most of Europe. The Great Companies spread terror in France and Spain, the Free Companies pillaged Italy and the Ecorcheurs (‘skinners’) ravaged France and the Western part of Germany. As one medieval commentator complained: ‘I see all Holy Christendom so tormented by wars and divisions, robberies and dissensions that one can scarcely name a petty province, be it a duchy or county, which enjoys peace’ (Contamine 1984: 90, 123–5).

The wars of the mercenaries, c. 1250–1450

The two last centuries of the Middle Ages saw little peace, as the professional soldier of the period was far from responsive to arguments concerned with public duty and common good. No matter if they fought because of feudal duty or wages, ransom and booty provided a major incentive for the medieval knight to wage war. The emphasis on private economic gain in warfare can be traced back to the law of arms, as knightly customs revolved around two fundamental propositions. Firstly, as Maurice Keen underlines, ‘soldiering in the age of chivalry was regarded as a Christian profession, not a public service. Though he took up arms in a public quarrel, a soldier still fought as an individual, and rights were acquired by and against him personally, and not against the side for which he fought’ (cited in Stacey 1994:31). Every knight participated in wars with his own horse and equipment at his own risk. Thus, the medieval knight fought on his own, and not as a servant of the state. Secondly, the law of arms was of a contractual character, stipulating that serving in a war gave a right to a share of its profit. This right was legally enforceable and was judged by special courts, such as the Court of Chivalry in England and the Parliament of Paris in France. These profits were gain...