How significant are private military companies (PMCs)? How do they influence our understanding of security? This article from Millennium: Journal of International Studies examines the power of PMCs to shape the security agenda and influence understandings of international security. It argues that the full significance of PMCs for international security is often overlooked due to a narrow conception of power. PMCs’ capacity to shape understandings of security has shifted power in security issues from the public and civil to the private and military spheres.
Analyses of the power of PMCs often have a narrow conception of power as the formal capacity to make decisions over the use of force. A more comprehensive conception of power reveals that PMCs have gained considerable power over security understandings and discourses. Firstly, PMCs have the ability to shape the security agenda through their implementation of decisions and by providing intelligence analyses which define security threats. Secondly, they have the power to shape the interests, preferences and identities of key actors through lobbying and consultancy activities. Thirdly, PMCs have affected the field of security expertise, empowering a military-technical understanding of security which promotes PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts.
PMCs have the power to inform and set agendas both by directly defining security concerns and by shaping actors’ preferences and identities. PMCs:
- provide and analyse intelligence and assess threats and risks – this enables them to produce security discourses around issues where security concerns may not have existed previously;
- lobby decision-makers to adopt positions favourable to the interests of PMCs – while lobbying is mainly about PMCs’ contracts, it still shapes security discourses by altering the way interests, threats and responses are understood; and
- provide training and consultancy services for the state and armed forces – while specialised courses are explicitly designed to shape understandings of security, technical training also encourages trainees to interpret threats in a certain way.
Lobbying, training and consultancy do not make it possible for PMCs to define authoritatively the security discourses of other actors. They do, however, give them influence over how decision-makers understand security. This raises questions about the weight different actors carry in defining legitimate expertise in the field of security. PMCs are part of a general process in which security expertise is increasingly defined in technical and military ways:
- Increasing reliance on PMCs moves the security debate out of the public realm. This diminishes the presence in the discourse on security of governmental and civil society voices which might challenge the militarisation of security issues.
- The privatisation of security has led to the emergence of private security ‘experts’ enjoying a privileged position in security discourse and practices. These experts are increasingly involved in formulating strategies, policies and evaluation criteria.
- The emergence of private security experts is facilitated by and reinforces the valuing of private experts over the public sector. PMCs are seen as uniquely competent and efficient, in contrast to an incompetent and inefficient public sector.
- The privileging of private security experts emphasises security issues as technical and managerial matters. This reinforces security as a military rather than a civil issue.
