Handbook of Private Security Studies

by Mark Rowe

Author: Rita Abrahamsen, Anna Leander

ISBN No: 9780415729352

Review date: 29/03/2024

No of pages: 280

Publisher: Routledge

Publisher URL:
https://www.routledge.com/

Year of publication: 30/11/2015

Brief:

Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies by Rita Abrahamsen, Anna Leander

price

£130

Private security – or what the editors of a new handbook on the subject term ‘the market for force’ – has a long history, and ‘seems to be hardwired into contemporary patterns and structures of governance’, they say.

While welcome in a relatively bare field, the Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies comes up against Prof Martin Gill’s Handbook of Private Security, now in its second edition. How do they compare? The Routledge one is more to do with private military security, and has more to say and gives chapters over to subjects that Martin Gill’s book doesn’t, such as ‘military migrants’, regulation of those ‘private armies’, and private security’s role against piracy, and in shaping US foreign policy. If any of those are your interest or your day job, the Routledge book is more for you. While anyone’s opinion of the worth of the contents is just that – a matter of opinion – there is no denying that you get far more pages for your money from Martin Gill’s book.

Inevitably in a book that is so wide-ranging, over two dozen or more chapters, the quality and relevance of the contents varies. A chapter on ‘security fairs’ for instance is potentially interesting, as a look at what goes on at such events; who is buying and selling what, why do people go. Yet while the chapter author attended events including IFSEC and the Counter-Terror Expo in the UK, she shows no signs of having spoken to any visitor or exhibitor. The tone is disapproving; that such fairs are promoting ‘the utopian vision of maximum security’, and blurring the line between security and war. If you have visited either event, perhaps such thoughts escaped you. At least worth considering is that private security is simply filling the shell of a venue for a few days of the year, in between other shows about skiing, weddings, do-it-yourself and so on. In other words, it’s just a literal marketplace to do business; all the slogans and booths are mere marketing. Likewise, the chapter on ‘privatising military logistics’ makes the point that governments are looking to go private with their military supply chain because governments view the market as more efficient – that is, the market in general, rather than the (few) firms that bid for the outsourced work.

Other chapters fall less into that academic trap of loading too much theory with too big words onto a subject. At least Amanda Chisholm, a UK academic, put her boots on the ground to do fieldwork with Gurkhas working in Kabul, as a base for her argument that military and private security service is ‘racial, gendered work’, taking labour from the ‘global South’. She concludes: “… postcolonial analysis of the security industry has the potential to reveal much more about the security industry,” although like other authors in this collection, by security she may mean the military, high-risk end of the spectrum, the guarding of embassies and tankers crossing the Indian Ocean, rather than the less glamorous but more representative warehouses, offices and data centres of UK shires.

On the origins of policing, the Canadian criminologist Michael Kempa drags out of the historical dark the Thames Valley Police – not the police force based near Oxford, but a Napoleonic era body of men policing the river to prevent thieving of cargo. He argues that policing has come full circle back to those days. Sean McFate, an American who has gone from the US paratroops to a private military security company (PMSC) to academia, writes a chapter on PMSCs doing security sector reform in countries such as Liberia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s not gone well. Is that the fault of PMSCs as a concept, the ones that got the contracts, or the generals or UN bureaucrats that gave out the contracts for lacking focus? As McFate says, ‘outsourcing is more than a simple cost-benefit analysis’. He warns of a thin line between ‘military enterpriser and mercenary’, which can destabilise a place that’s already troubled.

Security, including militarised security, is a two-way street; it has a buyer-client besides the provider of the service, and Elke Krahmann in her chapter on ‘regulation through procurement policies’ shows that while the potential for such regulation is considerable, the United States government (the biggest buyer of such services) shows little appetite for truly setting standards; the US continues to contract the ‘same few, largely national companies’. Is the US not penalising PMSCs despite misconduct because it’s happy with what they’re doing, or because it’s not interested – because if it was, it’d be doing the work with directly-employed labour? Again, that question applies in any number of fields, when governments turn to the market to supply outsourced labour, not just security.

Contents

Introduction, Anna Leander and Rita Abrahamsen PART I: Historical Perspectives on Private Security 1. Private Force and State-building, c. 1100-1500, Benjamin de Carvalho 2. The ‘Private’ Origin of Modern ‘Public’ Policing, Michael Kempa 3. Private Force and the Emergence of the International System, Halvard Leira 4. Company Sovereigns, Private Violence and Colonialism, Andrew Phillips

PART II: The Place of the Private in Contemporary Security 5. Private Security Guards: Authority, Control and Governance?, Maria Stern and Joakim Berndtsson 6. PMSCs in Maritime Security and Anti-Piracy Control, Carolin Liss 7. Privatizing Military Logistics, Mark Erbel and Chris Kinsey 8. Privatizing Intelligence, Hamilton Bean 9. Cyber-Security and Private Actors, Myriam Dunn Cavelty 10. Private Eyes: Private Policing and Surveillance, Kevin Haggerty and Ajay Sandhu 11. Enduring Challenges of Security Privatization in the Humanitarian Space, Christopher Spearin 12. PMSCs in International Security Sector Reform.

PART III: Debates about Private Security 13. Global Security Assemblages, Michael C. Williams 14. The Privatization of Security: Implications for Democracy, Clifford Shearing and Philip Stenning 15. Military Migrants and Mercenary Markets, Vron Ware 16. PMSCs and Gender, Maya Eichler 17. Private Security’s Role in Shaping US Foreign Policy, Renee de Nevers 18. Postcoloniality and Race in Global Private Security Markets, Amanda Chrisholm 19. Security Fairs, Leila Stockmarr 20. The Privatization of Punishment in the United States, Shannon Wheatley Hartman and Roxanne Doty 21. The Migration Control Industry, Thomas Gammeltoft Hansen.

PART IV: The Regulation of Private Security 22. Norms and Regulation, Sarah Percy 23. The Extension of International Human Rights Law to Private Military and Security Companies, Anton Katz and Margaret Maffai 24. The Legal Framework for the Armed Forces and the Regulation of Private Security, Mirko Sossai 25. Regulation through Procurement Policies, Elke Krahmann 26. Transnational Businnes Governance through Standards and Codes of Conduct, Rebecca DeWinter-Schmitt.

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