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| 1 |
ID:
132051
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
With governments increasingly contracting private military and security companies (PMSCs) to perform military and police-related tasks, international relations scholars have made attempts to better understand PMSCs and to investigate the reasons for the boom of private security. Rather than focusing on the services these companies offer, which has been a common approach, we offer an identity-based explanation for their surge. We show that PMSCs eclectically assume identities related to the military, business managers and humanitarians, independent of the services they perform, their market segment or their location on the battlefield. This finding points to an important yet little-noted dimension in the private security industry. Although companies are heterogeneous, they also appear increasingly homogeneous because they incorporate a similar set of identities. On the one hand, this enables PMSCs to adapt to any context, client or employee, and, on the other hand, it has constitutive qualities, contributing to an important source of power for the respective companies. These multiple identities contribute to a norm of what a superior security provider should look like.
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| 2 |
ID:
120304
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
International responses to conflicts and humanitarian emergencies have become more crowded. Not only do traditional actors intervene on a greater scale, such as non-governmental organizations and the military, but new actors such as Private Military Security Companies also play an increasingly important role. These actors often differ in their precise objective and the constituencies they are accountable to. Yet, the practices of these actors in operations are intertwined and many of their tasks overlap. Improved communication and coordination of these actors in complex operations can thus be expected to lead to strong increases in mission effectiveness. This Special Issue provides a conceptual platform to understand and explain under what conditions coordination among these actors occurs. The articles cluster around three themes. A first set focuses on who the actors involved are along a private vs public and military vs civilian divide; a second group of articles assesses experiences of coordination of different actors in the field; finally, a third looks at a plurality of elements that may trigger or hinder coordination.
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