Private Military and Security Companies: Transforming Security Governance?

The proliferation of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) since the early 1990s has spawned a new field of research. However, despite or perhaps because of the small but growing number of academics and students involved in this research, the field has remained theoretically and empirically disjointed. Unlike research on international organizations or non-governmental organizations, which can draw on common conceptual languages and theoretical traditions, the investigation of PMSCs is usually subsumed under other fields such as the study of private policing in criminology, their impact on military interventions in security studies and the question of state control over the legitimate use of force in international relations and international law. The objective of this workshop is to bring these different communities and strands of research together to facilitate an exchange of ideas and to investigate the possibilities of a joint research programme around the central idea of a transformation of security governance. Specifically, the workshop addresses four key questions: (1) What theoretical approaches have been used to analyse and understand the transformations of security policy making related to the proliferation of PMSCs and what synergies exist with the concept of security governance? (2) How do particular conceptualizations and definitions of PMSCs hide or illustrate new modes of security governance? (3) What do we know empirically about the role of PMSCs in local, national and global security governance? (4) What are the primary issues of concern with regards to PMSCs and security governance and what questions have been under-researched?