Since the 1990s, private military and security companies (PMSCs) have intervened in civil wars around the globe. International, legally registered corporate actors have assisted governments with a myriad of tasks including combat support, logistics, army and police training, intelligence analysis, and guard services. However, reports that such contractors have been responsible for human rights abuses have spurred the need to evaluate the industry's impact on conflicts. Are these contractors effective in curbing violence or does emphasis on profit and lack of accountability get in the way? And how can governments improve PMSCs' commitment to contractual obligations, including adherence to international humanitarian laws? This book identifies two market forces that impact PMSCs' military effectiveness: local or conflict-level competition and global or industry-level competition. Specifically, Seden Akcinaroglu and Elizabeth Radziszewski challenge the assumption that interventions by profit-driven coporations are likely to destabilize areas engaged in war, and provide data that private contractors do contribute to conflict termination under certain circumstances. They argue that competitive market pressure creates a strong monitoring system and that the company's corporate structure and external competitive environment in a given conflict help to explain the variance in accountability to clients. Including an analysis of data on international PMSCs' interventions in civil wars from 1990-2008, Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski show the impact of competition on companies' contribution to the termination of different types of civil wars.

Domestic terrorist groups, like all violent non-state actors, compete with governments for their monopoly on violence and their legitimacy in terms of representing the citizenry. Strategic Battles for Hearts and Minds in Conflict shows violence is neither the only nor the most effective way in which non-state actors and governments work to achieve their goals. As much as non-violent strategies are a rarely considered piece of the puzzle, the role of the audience is another crucial piece often downplayed in the literature. Many studies emphasize the interactions between the government and the terrorist group at the expense of the constituency, as the constituency is the common cluster for both actors to gain legitimacy, and to demand its allegiance. In fact, the competition between the two actors goes far beyond who is superior in terms of military force and tactics. The hardest battles are fought over the allegiance of the citizens. Using a multi-method approach based on exclusive interviews and focus groups from Turkey and large N original data from around the world, Seden Akcinaroglu and Efe Tokdemir present the first systematic empirical analysis of the ways in which the terrorist group, the government, and the citizens relate to each other in a triadic web of action. They study the non-violent actions of terrorist groups toward their constituencies, the non-violent actions of governments toward terrorists, and the non-violent actions of governments toward the terrorist group’s constituencies. By investigating the causes, targets, and consequences of accommodative actions, this book sheds light on an important, but generally ignored, aspect of terrorism: interactive non-violent strategies.