The book concludes with an assessment of the complexities surrounding responses to security privatization - and an exploration of when, and whether, it should be promoted rather than prevented."--BOOK JACKET.

Recent years have seen a growing role for private military contractors in national and international security. To understand the reasons for this, Elke Krahmann examines changing models of the state, the citizen and the soldier in the UK, the US and Germany. She focuses on both the national differences with regard to the outsourcing of military services to private companies and their specific consequences for the democratic control over the legitimate use of armed force. Tracing developments and debates from the late eighteenth century to the present, she explains the transition from the centralized warfare state of the Cold War era to the privatized and fragmented security governance, and the different national attitudes to the privatization of force.

Reliance on the private military industry and the privatization of public functions has left our government less able to govern effectively. When decisions that should have been taken by government officials are delegated (wholly or in part) to private contractors without appropriate oversight, the public interest is jeopardized. Books on private military have described the problem well, but they have not offered prescriptions or solutions this book does.

This book brings to fruition the research done during the CEA-ISCTE project ‘’Monitoring Conflicts in the Horn of Africa’’, reference PTDC/AFR/100460/2008. The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) provided funding for this project. The chapters are based on first-hand data collected through fieldwork in the region’s countries between 4 January 2010 and 3 June 2013. The project’s team members and consultants debated their final research findings in a one-day Conference at ISCTE-IUL on 29 April 2013. The following authors contributed to the project’s final publication: Alexandra M. Dias, Alexandre de Sousa Carvalho, Aleksi Ylönen, Ana Elisa Cascão, Elsa González Aimé, Manuel João Ramos, Patrick Ferras, Pedro Barge Cunha and Ricardo Real P. Sousa.

On August 24-25, 2010, the National Defense University held a conference titled “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security?” to explore the economic element of national power. This special collection of selected papers from the conference represents the view of several keynote speakers and participants in six panel discussions. It explores the complexity surrounding this subject and examines the major elements that, interacting as a system, define the economic component of national security.

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.