With a blend of narrative and analysis, this book explores the extent to which mercenaries have been used, from Sumer to Rome, and the reasons governments hired them when they could conscript native citizens.

Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire examines the role of mercenary figures in negotiating relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Mercenaries are often treated as historical footnotes, yet their encounters with the Ottoman world contributed to US culture and the impressions they left behind continue to influence US approaches to Africa and the Middle East. The book's analysis of these mercenary encounters and their legacies begins with the Battle of Derna in 1805-in which the US flag was raised above a battlefield for the first time outside of North America with the help of a mercenary army-and concludes with the British occupation of Egypt in 1882-which was witnessed and criticized by many of the US Civil War veterans who worked for the Egyptian government in the 1870s and 1880s. By focusing these mercenary encounters through the lenses of memory, sovereignty, literature, geography, and diplomacy, Americans at War in the Ottoman Empire reveals the ways in which mercenary force, while marginal in terms of its frequency and scope, produced important knowledge about the Ottoman world and helped to establish the complicated relationship of intimacy and mastery that exists between Americans in the United States and people in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, South Sudan, and Turkey.

This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater's military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp's personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.

This book combines multi-disciplinary ethnographic and theoretical approaches to examine piracy in Southeast Asia and the regional and international responses to this threat. During the piracy boom of the early to mid-2000s, the issue of piracy in Southeast Asia received substantial academic attention. Recent scholarship, however, has shifted the focus to Somali piracy and the resurgence of piracy in Southeast Asia has largely been neglected in the academic community. This volume seeks to remedy this gap in the current literature. The primary aim is to examine how piracy has evolved in Southeast Asia over the past ten years, to address why piracy has re-emerged as a security threat, to evaluate efforts at maintaining security in regional waters, and to offer an analysis of what might be expected in the next decade. The contributions are drawn from academics, policy makers, and military officers, covering a range of disciplines including international relations, socio-cultural anthropology, security studies, history, law, and Asian studies. Taken together, the contributions in this volume provide a better understanding of contemporary piracy in Southeast Asia and suggest avenues to successfully combat piracy in this region. This book will be of much interest to students of maritime security, Asian politics, security studies, and international relations in general.

France, Spain and Italy were the scene of almost constant warfare during the second half of the fourteenth century. By that time the armies of the kings, princes and city republics were raised by contract and paid. With the cessation of hostilities between England and France in 1360, many captains maintained their retinues to serve other employers, failing which they combined together to make war on their own account.

This first volume deals with the activities, mainly in France and Spain, of a large number of the soldiers who were demobilized after the conclusion of peace, and who came together to form the 'Great Companies'. The author places their activities in the political and diplomatic framework of the times, highlighting their ambitions and those of the rulers who employed them.

Across Africa, growing economic inequality, instability and urbanization have led to the rapid spread of private security providers. While these PSPs have already had a significant impact on African societies, their impact has so far received little in the way of comprehensive analysis. Drawing on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, and encompassing anthropology, sociology and political science, Private Security in Africa offers unique insight into the lives and experiences of security providers and those affected by them, as well as into the fragile state context which has allowed them to thrive. Featuring original empirical research and case studies ranging from private policing in South Africa to the recruitment of Sierra Leoneans for private security work in Iraq, the book considers the full implications of PSPs for security and the state, not only for Africa but for the world as a whole.

This book assesses the use of 'mercenaries' by states, and their integration into the national armed forces as part of a new hybridisation trend of contemporary armies. Governments, especially in the West, are undertaking an unprecedented wave of demilitarisation and military budget cuts. Simultaneously, these same governments are increasingly opening their armies up to foreign nationals and outsourcing military operations to private companies. This book explores the impact of this hybridisation on the values, cohesion and effectiveness of the armed forces by comparing and contrasting the experiences of the French Foreign Legion, private military companies in Angola, and the merging of private contractors and American troops in Iraq. Examining the employment of foreign citizens and private security companies as military forces and tools of foreign policy, and their subsequent impact on the national armed forces, the book investigates whether the difficulties of coordinating soldiers of various nationalities and allegiances within public-private joint military operations undermines the legitimacy of the state. Furthermore, the author questions whether this trend for outsourcing security can realistically provide a long term and positive contribution to national security. This book will be of much interest to students of private military companies, strategic studies, international security and IR in general.

Recent investigation into the activities of Sandline International in Sierra Leone has rekindled interest in the role of private armies in African conflicts. Sensational references in newspaper articles, however, run the risk of emphasizing the military aspect of security at the expense of a holistic approach to an emergent security conundrum.This fascinating book is a critique of mercenary involvement in post-Cold War African conflicts. It seeks to achieve a greater understanding of the mercenary-instability complex by examining the links between the rise in internal conflicts and the proliferation of mercenary activities in the 1990s. The distinction in the methods adopted by Cold War mercenaries and their contemporary counterparts, the convoluted network between private armies, business interests, sustained poverty in Africa's poorest countries as well as the connection between mercenary activities and arms proliferation. In exploring solutions to the upsurge of mercenaries on the continent, the book seeks a political and legal redefinition of the term "mercenaries," and calls for new international legislation.The book argues that unless there are complete solutions to the root causes of conflict in a region where poverty represents the greatest threat to democracy and development, legislation will provide only temporary, rather than permanent, mechanisms for stemming this disturbing trend.

On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad's Nisour Square, leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide. This is the explosive story of a company that rose a decade ago from Moyock, North Carolina, to become one of the most powerful players in the War on Terror." In his gripping bestseller, award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill takes us from the bloodied streets of Iraq to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans to the chambers of power in Washington, to expose Blackwater as the frightening new face of the U.S. war machine.

In 1964/1965, Colonel Mike Hoare led 300 ‘Wild Geese’ across the Congo to crush a communist rebellion, rescue 2000 nuns and priests from barbarity, beat Che Guevara … and become a legend.

Of Irish blood, Mike was schooled in England and, during World War 2, was the ‘best bloody soldier in the British Army’. He demobbed as major, qualified in London as a chartered accountant and emigrated to South Africa. Going rogue, he started living dangerously to get more out of life, including trans-Africa motorbike trips, bluewater sailing, exploring remote areas, and leading safaris in the Kalahari Desert. Here Mike got to know the CIA agent who was to change his life … and Nelson Mandela’s. Later Mike was technical advisor to the film The Wild Geese, which starred Richard Burton playing the Mike Hoare character.

In 1981 Mike led 50 ‘Frothblowers’ in a bid to depose the socialist government of the Seychelles. Things went wrong and soon Mike was to spend three years in jail for hijacking a Boeing 707.

Here for the first time, in this story behind the story, Chris Hoare separates the man from the myth in a way only a son can, and concludes his ‘mad dad’ was an officer and a gentleman with a bit of pirate thrown in.

"Suzanne Simons is a masterful storyteller. But make no mistake-Master of War is not a work of fiction...A powerful and true account." -Wolf Blitzer, anchor, CNN's The Situation Room Master of War is the riveting true story of Eric Prince, the ex-Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater and built the world's largest military contractor, privatizing war for client nations around the world. A CNN producer and anchor, Suzanne Simons is the first journalist to get deep inside Blackwater-and, as a result of her unprecedented access, Master of War provides the most complete and revelatory account of the rise of this powerful corporate army and the remarkable entrepreneur who brought it into being, while offering an eye-opening, behind-the-scenes look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, mercenaries - professional soldiers who fought for money or other rewards - played violent, colourful, international roles in warfare, but they have received relatively little scholarly attention. In this book a large number of brief impressionistic vignettes portray their activities in Western Europe over a period of nearly 900 years, from the Merovingian mercenaries of 752 through the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648. Intended as an introduction to the subject and drawing heavily on contemporary first-person accounts, this book creates a vivid but balanced mosaic of the many thousands of mercenaries who were hired to fight for various employers.

Meet Blackwater USA, the private army that the US government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. Its contacts run from military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House; it has a military base, a fleet of aircraft and 20,000 troops, but since September 2007 the firm has been hit by a series of scandals that, far from damaging the company, have led to an unprecedented period of expansion. This revised and updated edition includes Scahill's continued investigative work into one of the outrages of our time: the privatisation of war.

Peter McAleese needs little introduction... His classic book ""No Mean Soldier"" was an immediate bestseller and set the bar for the modern military memoir. Few have since met its match. This completely revised and expanded edition sees a philosophical McAleese revisiting his time with Britain's Parachute Regiment, the SAS, Rhodesia's SAS and the South African Defence Force's 44 Para Brigade. Oh, and a few other adventures in and between - Colombia, private military companies and near fatal skydiving accidents; mercenary, soldier of fortune or flawed ideologist? Now's your time to consider this and more - as has McAleese himself. It's a compelling read - and with the addition of previously unpublished photos from McAleese's private collection, there's no other way to describe it. ""Beyond No Mean Soldier""does exactly that, going deep and further beyond the experience of ""No Mean Soldier"". Over many months and into the early hours, McAleese reflected on his wide and expansive experiences - the men he's served with and the operations he'd conducted. Here in startling detail are the Aden insurgency, covert operations with the Rhodesian SAS and one of the first ever operational HALO inserts in British military history. Heart pumping assaults on SWAPO positions with 44 Para's Pathfinder Company and the sheer terror of flawed mercenary operations in Angola with the likes of 'Colonel Callan'; near death in Colombia when an assassination attempt went terribly wrong. McAleese recounts all of this with amazing clarity and even more humility. 'I'm just an ordinary person who happened to find himself doing extraordinary things' he says. Yes, perhaps that's true to a point, but what rides through all of McAleese's narrative is his total commitment to the profession of arms - soldiering. His attention to detail, his consummate knowledge of military skills from field craft to skill at arms; airborne operations to the tactics of small unit SAS operations.... All of this echoed by the commentary of the numerous individuals that served with McAleese. From around the world, dozens have contributed perspective, commentary and reflection. ""Pete does not take fools gladly and this is based upon his comprehensive combat experience where idiots will cause casualties"" Alistair Mackenzie - Former 22 SAS Officer. ""I managed to get myself into some very nasty but also exciting scraps while latching on to the Pathfinders to see how they were shaping up as the so-called 'Philistines'. They did excellently while under fire, proof that Peter's selection and training regime paid high dividends"" Colonel Jan Breytenbach - Former Commander 44 Para Brigade Pathfinder Company, Founder 32 Battalion. These are just two of the contributions featured in ""Beyond No Mean Soldier"". In an age where we debate courage and leadership, it's all here. Go Beyond No Mean Soldier, it will certainly change the way you see soldiering.

This book assesses the use of mercenaries by states, and their integration into the national armed forces as part of a new hybridisation trend of contemporary armies.

Governments, especially in the West, are undertaking an unprecedented wave of demilitarisation and military budget cuts. Simultaneously, these same governments are increasingly opening their armies up to foreign nationals and outsourcing military operations to private companies. This book explores the impact of this hybridisation on the values, cohesion and effectiveness of the armed forces by comparing and contrasting the experiences of the French Foreign Legion, private military companies in Angola, and the merging of private contractors and American troops in Iraq.

Examining the employment of foreign citizens and private security companies as military forces and tools of foreign policy, and their subsequent impact on the national armed forces, the book investigates whether the difficulties of coordinating soldiers of various nationalities and allegiances within public-private joint military operations undermines the legitimacy of the state. Furthermore, the author questions whether this trend for outsourcing security can realistically provide a long term and positive contribution to national security.

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

In "The War Machines," Danny Hoffman considers how young men are made available for violent labor both on the battlefields and in the diamond mines, rubber plantations, and other unregulated industries of West Africa. Based on his ethnographic research with militia groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia during those countries' recent civil wars, Hoffman traces the path of young fighters who moved from grassroots community-defense organizations in Sierra Leone during the mid-1990s into a large pool of mercenary labor.

Hoffman argues that in contemporary West Africa, space, sociality, and life itself are organized around making young men available for all manner of dangerous work. Drawing on his ethnographic research over the past nine years, as well as the anthropology of violence, interdisciplinary security studies, and contemporary critical theory, he maintains that the mobilization of West African men exemplifies a global trend in the outsourcing of warfare and security operations. A similar dynamic underlies the political economy of violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a growing number of postcolonial spaces. An experienced photojournalist, Hoffman integrates more than fifty of his photographs of young West Africans into "The War Machines."

Privatization of America's Public Institutions describes the transformation of the military, K-12 public schools, public universities and colleges, and prisons into enterprises focused on generating profits for a select few. In many cases, privatization has limited accessibility, promoted segregation, fueled declining standards, increased costs, and reduced quality.

This book explores the use of deadly force by private security companies during the Iraq War. The work focuses on and compares the activities of the US companies Blackwater and Dyncorp. Despite sharing several important characteristics, such as working for the same client (the US State Department) during the same time period, the employees of Blackwater fired their weapons far more often, and killed and seriously injured far more people in Iraq than their counterparts in DynCorp. In order to explain this disparity, the book undertakes the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted on the use of violence by the employees of these firms. Based on extensive empirical research, it offers a credible explanation for this difference: Blackwater maintained a relatively bellicose military culture that placed strong emphasis on norms encouraging its personnel to exercise personal initiative, proactive use of force, and an exclusive approach to security, which, together, motivated its personnel to use violence quite freely against anyone they suspected of posing a threat. Specifically, Blackwater's military culture motivated its personnel to fire upon suspected threats more quickly, at greater distances, and with a greater quantity of bullets, and to more readily abandon the people they shot at when compared to DynCorp's personnel, who maintained a military culture that encouraged far less violent behaviour. Utilizing the Private Security Company Violent Incident Dataset (PSCVID), created by the author in 2012, the book draws upon data on hundreds of violent incidents involving private security personnel in Iraq to identify trends in the behaviour exhibited by the employees of different firms. Based on this rich and original empirical data, the book provides the definitive study of contemporary private security personnel in the Iraq War. This book will be of much interest to students of the Iraq War, Private Security Companies, Military Studies, War and Conflict Studies and IR in general.

Privatization of America's Public Institutions describes the transformation of the military, K-12 public schools, public universities and colleges, and prisons into enterprises focused on generating profits for a select few. In many cases, privatization has limited accessibility, promoted segregation, fueled declining standards, increased costs, and reduced quality.

There has been a shift in the way that we understand the forces behind imperialism. In this book, Andrew Thomson re-evaluates the history of US imperialism, from the Cold War to today, by looking at the influence of paramilitary actors. Thomson reveals how these agents are central to US imperialism - from the Guatemalan coup to the Bay of Pigs, from Syrian rebel factions to the Soviet-Afghan War, bringing these narratives together to reveal the evolution of paramilitary insurgencies across the globe. Militias, mercenaries, and private companies (PMCs) have formed a central part of the strategies designed to influence political and economic conditions abroad, oriented towards the US's Empire. Drawing on declassified documents including US training manuals, CIA communiques and the National Security Archive, Outsourced Empire reveals new evidence that helps us understand these institutions and their collective role in maintaining global order.

Andrew Thomson rethinks the history of US imperialism, from the Cold War to today, to reveal how paramilitaries, militias, mercenaries, private armies, and contractors have always been central to US-sponsored insurgencies and US counterinsurgent statecraft. Examining a broad range of events from the Bay of Pigs to the occupation of Iraq, and from the Soviet-Afghan war to the ongoing conflict in Syria, Thomson offers an analysis of the evolution of US support for various para-institutional actors or non-state armed forces. He demonstrates how and why militias, mercenaries, and private military companies have increasingly formed a central part of US imperial strategies designed to influence political and economic conditions abroad. Drawing on declassified documents including military training manuals, CIA communiqus, and national security documents, Outsourced Empire reveals new evidence that helps us understand these institutions and their collective role in maintaining global order.

The growth in scope and importance of the private military and security industry in the past decade has challenged the role of the state as the main provider of defence and security functions. At the same time it has put under stress the state's authority to properly oversee the conduct of private contractors and has raised the question of whether existing rules of domestic law and international law are adequate to ensure their accountability in the event of abuse. This book addresses this question through the lens of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. It presents a systematic analysis of the way in which these two bodies of international law, applicable in times of peace and in the event of armed conflict, may be interpreted and implemented in a way so as to fill possible accountability gaps.
Human rights and humanitarian law obligations are analysed from the point of view of their applicability to the states involved, to international organizations, and to the companies and their individual employees. Victims' access to civil remedies and the criminal prosecution of private contractors, as well as new policy issues, such as the use of private contractors in the fight against piracy, are also covered in the book.

Frequently characterized as either mercenaries in modern guise or the market's response to a security vaccuum, private military companies are commercial firms offering military services ranging from combat and military training and advice to logistical support, and which play an increasingly important role in armed conflicts, UN peace operations, and providing security in unstable states. Executive Outcomes turned around an orphaned conflict in Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s; Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) was instrumental in shifting the balance of power in the Balkans, enabling the Croatian military to defeat Serb forces and clear the way for the Dayton negotiations; in Iraq, estimates of the number of private contractors on the ground are in the tens of thousands. As they assume more responsibilities in conflict and post-conflict settings, their growing significance raises fundamental questions about their nature, their role in different regions and contexts, and their regulation. This volume examines these issues with a focus on governance, in particular the interaction between regulation and market forces. It analyzes the current legal framework and the needs and possibilities for regulation in the years ahead. The book as a whole is organized around four sets of questions, which are reflected in the four parts of the book. First, why and how is regulation of PMCs now a challenging issue? Secondly, how have problems leading to a call for regulation manifested in different regions and contexts? Third, what regulatory norms and institutions currently exist and how effective are they? And, fourth, what role has the market to play in regulation?

Frequently characterized as either mercenaries in modern guise or the market's response to a security vacuum, private military companies are commercial firms offering military services ranging from combat and military training and advice to logistical support, and which play an increasingly important role in armed conflicts, UN peace operations, and providing security in unstable states. Executive Outcomes turned around an orphaned conflict in Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s; Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) was instrumental in shifting the balance of power in the Balkans, enabling the Croatian military to defeat Serb forces and clear the way for the Dayton negotiations; in Iraq, estimates of the number of private contractors on the ground are in the tens of thousands. As they assume more responsibilities in conflict and post-conflict settings, their growing significance raises fundamental questions about their nature, their role in different regions and contexts, and their regulation. This volume examines these issues with a focus on governance, in particular the interaction between regulation and market forces. It analyzes the current legal framework and the needs and possibilities for regulation in the years ahead. The book as a whole is organized around four sets of questions, which are reflected in the four parts of the book. First, why and how is regulation of PMCs now a challenging issue? Secondly, how have problems leading to a call for regulation manifested in different regions and contexts? Third, what regulatory norms and institutions currently exist and how effective are they? And, fourth, what role has the market to play in regulation?

The Middle Ages were a turbulent and violent time, when the fate of nations was most often decided on the battlefield, and strength of arms was key to acquiring and maintaining power. Feudal oaths and local militias were more often than not incapable of providing the skilled and disciplined warriors necessary to keep the enemy at bay. It was the mercenary who stepped in to fill the ranks. A mercenary was a professional soldier who took employment with no concern for the morals or cause of the paymaster. But within these confines we discover a surprising array of men, from the lowest-born foot soldier to the wealthiest aristocrat the occasional clergyman, even. What united them all was a willingness, and often the desire, to fight for their supper. In this benchmark work, William Urban explores the vital importance of the mercenary to the medieval power-broker, from the Byzantine Varangian Guard to fifteenth-century soldiers of fortune in the Baltic. Through contemporary chronicles and the most up-to-date scholarship, he presents an in-depth portrait of the mercenary across the Middle Ages.