- Title
- Subcontracting sovereignty: commodification of military force and fragmentation of state authority
- Creator
- Maogoto, Jackson Nyamuya
- Relation
- Brown Journal of World Affairs Vol. 13, Issue 1, p. 147 - 160
- Relation
- http://www.bjwa.org/article.php?id=2uPsO6GCkY7Vd2am8oJpsG6kjL4I7BSw8330V6Or
- Publisher
- Brown University
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2006
- Description
- The end of the cold war in the early 1990s produced dramatic changes in the relationship of the nation-state to the private exercise of force. Throughout much of the cold war era, "military privatization" mainly involved the purchase of weapons and hardware from the private sector. However, with the demise of an active Soviet military threat, many major military powers in the West—including the sole remaining superpower, the United States—embarked on ambitious programs of downsizing and privatizing the military. At the heart of the privatization initiative was the imperative to reinvent and streamline government and to cut military costs. The net result was that the world’s major powers—the traditional actors in regional and intrastate conflicts during the bipolar cold war era—decreased their involvement in many conflicts. Consequently, geopolitical power gradually diffused, leaving power vacuums that afforded private military firms (PMFs) a golden opportunity to proliferate and fill the space. The resulting shift in the geopolitical paradigm was particularly evident in weak third world countries, which increasingly sought private military resources to fulfill and/or augment their security needs. With downsizing increasing its pace, tighter military budgets have resulted in the underutilization and displacement of military personnel. As a consequence, a huge surplus of military expertise soon flooded the marketplace. With retired members of Special Forces and general combatants readily available, the hiring of robust, effective privatized armies was a reality. The rapid proliferation of new PMFs was accompanied by existing firms’ broadening the range of services to harness the surplus expertise.
- Subject
- military privatization; miltary downsizing; private military firms; military budgets; privatized armies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/26653
- Identifier
- uon:1009
- Identifier
- ISSN:1080-0786
- Language
- eng
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