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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.
Across the globe, from mega-cities to isolated resource enclaves,
the provision and governance of security takes place within
assemblages that are de-territorialized in terms of actors,
technologies, norms and discourses. They are embedded in a complex
transnational architecture, defying conventional distinctions
between public and private, global and local. Drawing on theories
of globalization and late modernity, along with insights from
criminology, political science and sociology, Security Beyond the
State maps the emergence of the global private security sector and
develops a novel analytical framework for understanding these
global security assemblages. Through in-depth examinations of four
African countries - Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa -
it demonstrates how global security assemblages affect the
distribution of social power, the dynamics of state stability, and
the operations of the international political economy, with
significant implications for who gets secured and how in a global
era.
Spanning the period from the cold war to the 'war on terror',
examines the political economy dynamics of security and insecurity
on the continent, as well as its implications for political
actions. More than any other part of the globe, Africa has become
associated with conflict, insecurity and human rights atrocities.
In the popular imagination and the media, overpopulation,
environmental degradation and ethnic hatred dominate accounts of
African violence, while in academic and policy-making circles,
conflict and insecurity have also come to occupy centre stage, with
resource-hungry warlords and notions of 'greed' and 'grievance'
playing key explanatory roles. Since the attacks of 9/11, there has
also been mounting concern that the continent's so-called
'ungoverned spaces' will provide safe havens for terrorists intent
on destroying Western civilization. The Review of African Political
Economy has engaged extensively with issues of conflict and
security, both analysing on-going conflicts and often challenging
predominant modes of explanation and interpretation. This Review of
African Political Economy Reader provides a timely, comprehensive
and critical contribution to contemporary debates about conflict
and security on the continent. The first section, covers some of
the continent's main post-Cold War conflicts and demonstrates their
global connections. The articles also discuss the so-called
'resource curse', as well as the global arms trade, and reveal the
complexities of the relationship between the economic and the
political. The second section focuses on security as part of
post-Cold War global governance, and discusses the effects of
liberal peace-building as well as the link between development
assistance and the 'war on terror'. The final section examines life
as it continues in conditions of war and shows how insecurity
reconfigures urban space, transforms social order, identities and
authority. Rita Abrahamsen is Professor in the Graduate School of
Publicand International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada
Published in association with ROAPE ROAPE African Readers Series
Editors: Tunde Zack-Williams & Ray Bush
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.
Not very long ago, authoritarian forms of government were widely
regarded as necessary for rapid economic growth and development,
and Western donors supported dictatorial regimes in every
continent. Today the political mantra is democracy, and the World
Bank and Western donors require it almost as a condition of
assistance. This thought-provoking book argues not simply that the
West's good governance agenda came into being with the demise of
the Soviet Union. Much more importantly, it shows how this agenda
comprises only very superficial democratic institutional forms that
are compatible with continued structural adjustment. African
governments, in particular, remain in a cleft stick - supposedly
responsible to their electorates at home, in fact beholden to
external creditors and donors. The result is the creation of
fragile democracies unable to respond to the demands of the poor -
who are in the great majority - for socio-economic improvements,
and where the requirements of external actors frequently overrule
the wishes of domestic constituencies. Using the example of the
good governance discourse, Rita Abrahamsen contributes powerfully
to our understanding of development, not as some universally valid
set of goals or procedures, but as a historically contingent form
of knowledge intimately connected to prevailing structures and
relations of power. Her book argues that a key effect of
contemporary development discourse, despite all its proclamations
in favour of democracy, is to help reproduce a world order that is
essentially undemocratic.
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