Back to the Future: Private Military Contractors and Political Theory in the Modern Democratic State

TL;DRAbstract

My theme is that while the use of private institutions to perform military and government functions for Western society is nothing new, its relative prevalence — that is, its pattern of emergence, decline, and re-emergence as a prominent feature of society — is positively aligned with certain arising international policy goals of a transformational sort combined with particular domestic agendas. These twin goals are pursued by governments via their theoretical views on the ‘proper’ management of power. Absent this reinforcing special domestic-international policy/theory nexus, private military contractors (PMCs) decline as a power management tool. PMCs are creatures of a particular circumstance. Currently, “the United States and Great Britain account for over 70% of the world market” for PMCs (SourceWatch 2006: 1), a subgroup of the broader universe of private institutions just mentioned, and so we must focus our attention particularly on current American and British domestic political

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