Abstract

This article will consider private military and security companies (further referred to as PMSCs) as violent, non-state actors and as a threat to existing theories of the state system. This article uses the case study of PMSCs used to protect private vessels travelling through the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden against piracy. It describes the way that PMSCs became involved in this sector and how they continue to stifle piracy, in accordance with state-centred efforts. It uses realist theory as a basis for understanding the state system and its assumptions, then qualitatively analyses the ways in which PMSCs are used in anti-piracy operations. The article ultimately finds that PMSCs pose a threat to the state system in theory and in the future, but that they do not pose an immediate physical one.

Keywords: Weapons, Military, Security, PMSC

By Emma Lin Hurlbert

Introduction

Piracy off the coast of Somalia represented a violent threat to seafarers, shipping companies, and flag states largely between 2005-2015. Often attributed to the failed state of Somalia, piracy off the coast sprang up as a way for Somalis to cope with the horrific economic and social conditions in the country [1]. Violent attacks fueled by trafficked arms often resulted in kidnapped crew and extremely high ransoms. As the years went by, ransoms climbed, attacks became more violent, and shipping companies grew increasingly worried [2]. In 2010 alone, over 4,000 seafarers were involved in a piracy attack originating in Somalia [3]. Between 2005 – 2013 ransoms for seafarers kidnapped off of the coast of East Africa and in the Gulf of Aden summed to around $400 million, representing discrete ransoms that cost individual shipping companies millions [4]. Based on expert calculations from 2010, “maritime piracy is costing the international economy between $7 to $12 billion per year,” [5] through direct ransom payments, insurance costs, lost product, lost time, additional security, re-routing, and prosecution costs.

Various states and intergovernmental institutions responded with naval presence in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, forcing pirates to travel further from the coast in order to continue their exploits [6]. The European Union (EU) Naval Force Somalia’s Operation Atalanta has been credited as one of the most successful intergovernmental operations in decreasing the incidence of piracy in the region [7]. The threat continued, however, because underlying causes were not addressed, leading shipping companies to hire Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) to serve as armed escorts and provide armed and unarmed guards onboard ships [8]. By the mid-2010s, state-sanctioned naval patrols and PMSCs together were able to nearly eliminate the incidence of piracy attempts and boardings off the coast of Somalia [9]. Looking back on private responses to this deadly wave of piracy, scholars studying non-state actors are faced with some engaging questions regarding issues of violence, territory (on land and at sea), jurisdiction, and legitimacy. This article is interested in the qualitative ways that PMSCs challenge the state system, which has historically acted under the assumption that states hold the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and private actors do not [10]. This article contributes to the scholarship on the threat of non-state actors to the state system [11].

Existing Literature

Realism and its variants have in truth been the backbone of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies scholarship for millennia but emerged more formally as a field of academic study after World War II (WWII). Arguably first articulated by the Greek historian Thucydides in his Melian Dialogue, realist thought continued through the work of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Carl von Clausewitz, Kenneth Waltz, and J.J. Mearsheimer [12]. Fundamentally, it contends that states exist in a system of international anarchy and that power is their language of communication. Strong states survive and weak states do not. Notably in realist theories, states are the actors of concern and military power is a critical measurement of state power. Scholars have argued the extent to which these theories actually govern international politics today, yet we undoubtedly live in a state-centred international system and military might do still matter.

The growth in number and prominence of non-state actors since the end of WWII has provided a substantial challenge to scholars who still tout the virtues of realism. Non-state actors have come in the forms of inter-governmental organizations, regional organizations, multinational corporations, insurgent groups, secessionist groups, terrorist groups, international criminal networks, among others [13]. Many of these groups act violently, which physically challenges the realist understanding that states alone hold a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence [14]. Scholars have responded to these challenges, studying the behaviour and essence of these actors in order to understand how they fit into the international system.

Analysis and Discussion

Building off of this literature, PMSCs became involved in the control of Somali piracy through shipping companies [15], who turned to private protection as they continued to face the threat of piracy, despite significant governmental success in patrolling the area [16]. Private protection is usually hired by the day and can consist of an armed escort boat, unarmed guards on board, and armed guards on board [17].

The issue of private companies wielding arms brings to light questions of regulation, jurisdiction, territory, and legitimacy. Whose laws regulate PMSCs on the high seas? Who legitimates them? Are they accountable to the hiring flag state or their home state? In response to these questions, states have come up with a sort of patchwork framework to haphazardly deal with the issue. Pirates have been universally declared “enemy of the human race”, which legally means that they can be killed by anyone [18]. Furthermore, in international waters, pirates can legally be arrested by any state and punished according to the laws of that state [19]. Therefore, dealing with piracy has become a sort of free-for-all.

PMSCs have been legitimized to kill pirates through state sponsorship and their general use of self-defence as a “legitimacy paradigm” in their use of violence [20]. This implies that PMSCs are not able to legitimately engage with pirates offensively; they can only act in self-defence preemptively or responsively against a pirate attack. Furthermore, violence in international waters is regulated by flag states, which means that violence committed on a ship belonging to a certain flag state will be accountable to the laws of that state [21].

In order to qualitatively characterize the threat that PMSCs pose to the state system, I would like to focus on two scales of threat: the physical nature and the time scale. Regarding the physical scale specifically regarding anti-piracy operations, I argue that PMSCs fall on the opposite end, posing a threat in theory and that their use in these operations does not pose a physical threat to the state system. PMSCs used for anti-piracy purposes have largely acted in accordance with state policies and interests, meaning that they have not come into a physical confrontation with states very often, if at all [22]. Furthermore, they are generally accepted as legitimate, especially when they are hired or approved by state governments [23]. PMSCs may not be viewed as legitimately as state militaries, for example, but they are not universally delegitimized as pirates are. Therefore, they hold somewhat of a middle ground of legitimacy, often depending on the territory in which they are acting. Because of this legitimacy, PMSCs have the potential to erode the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Therefore, the threat posed by these groups is theoretical; they threaten the idea of legitimacy in the use of violence and the idea of states as the only important actors in the international system.

Secondly, I would like to highlight the time scale as another factor: the theoretical threat posed by PMSCs represents a future threat. As previously noted, PMSCs have in general acted in accordance with hiring or flag state interests, particularly so in the case of Somali piracy [24]. Moreover, in this situation all states are in essence allies against pirates, who have been universally declared as “enemies of the human race”; therefore, PMSCs used in this context have in fact acted autonomously in alliance with all states in the system, despite their particular hiring state [25]. However, they may not act in universal allyship in the future, particularly in contexts when states are not in agreement. These situations will continue to challenge current assumptions about their regulation, legitimacy, and impact. Their general legitimacy indicates that if the number and military power of PMSCs continues to grow, as they have in the past decades, they will increasingly and significantly challenge the state system and the way states interact within it, particularly because there are very weak national and virtually nonexistent international regulatory mechanisms [26]. Indeed, according to a dataset from the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Laboratory at Texas Tech University on PMSCs, the number of PMSCs globally has grown from less than 200 in 1980 to close to 1,200 in 2020 [27]. Therefore, I characterize the use of PMSCs in anti-piracy operations as posing a threat to the state system in theory and in the future, but not a physical and immediate threat. Nevertheless, going forward, states may not be the only legitimate violent actors and they may no longer be the ones with the most military power.

Conclusion

Though this analysis has focused on PMSCs used in anti-piracy operations, it is applicable to the use of PMSCs in other contexts as well, one example being instances they have been hired in support of state-led military efforts. In these contexts today, PMSCs act in alliance with their hiring states, but they may nevertheless pose a theoretical and future threat to the state system within which they act. The next article in this series will address situations in which PMSCs are used by states in armed conflicts against other states and non-state actors, further complicating the picture of PMSCs as all-around state allies used in anti-piracy operations. When states use PMSCs against each other in combat, further questions arise about how they either fit into or push back against state-centred realist theories.

Citations

[1] Stephen Anning and MLR Smith, “The Accidental Pirate: Reassessing the Legitimacy of Counterpiracy Operations,” Parameters 42, no. 2 (2012), file:///Users/emma/Downloads/The_accidental_pirate_reassess.PDF; Peter Dombrowski and Simon Reich, “The EU’s Maritime Operations and the Future of European Security: Learning from Operations Atalanta and Sophia,” Comparative European Politics 17, no. 6 (December 1, 2019): 872, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-018-0131-4.

[2] Geneva Small Arms Survey, ed., “Escalation at Sea: Somali Piracy and Private Security Companies,” in Small Arms Survey 2012: Moving Targets, Small Arms Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 190–217, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139013925.011.

[3] Kaija Hurlburt, “The Human Cost of Somali Piracy,” WMU Studies in Maritime Affairs (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013), 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39620-5_19.

[4] Dombrowski and Reich, “The EU’s Maritime Operations and the Future of European Security,” 869.

[5] Anna Bowden et al., “The Economic Cost of Maritime Piracy” (Oceans Beyond Piracy, December 2010), 2, http://oceansbeyondpiracy.org/sites/default/files/attachments/The%20Economic%20Cost%20of%20Piracy%20Full%20Report.pdf.

[6] “EU/Somalia: EU NAVFOR Hails Pirates’ Move East as Sign of Success” (European Report, April 22, 2010), https://go-gale-com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/ps/i.do?p=EAIM&u=glasuni&id=GALE|A237747612&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon; “EU/SOMALIA : EU NAVFOR Extends Area of Anti-Piracy Operations” (European Report, September 24, 2010), https://go-gale-com.ezproxy.lib.gla.ac.uk/ps/i.do?p=EAIM&u=glasuni&id=GALE|A224423250&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon.

[7] Dombrowski and Reich, “The EU’s Maritime Operations and the Future of European Security,” 872–74.

[8] John J. Pitney Jr. and John-Clark Levin, “Current and Proposed Forces,” in Private Anti-Piracy Navies: How Warships for Hire Are Changing Maritime Security (Lanham, MD, UNITED STATES: Lexington Books, 2013), 51–74, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=1580312.

[9] Dombrowski and Reich, “The EU’s Maritime Operations and the Future of European Security,” 872–74.

[10] Elke Krahmann, “The United States, PMSCs and the State Monopoly on Violence: Leading the Way towards Norm Change,” Security Dialogue 44, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 53–71, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010612470292.

[11] Paul Higate, “The Private Militarized and Security Contractor as Geocorporeal Actor,” International Political Sociology 6, no. 4 (December 2012): 355–72, https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12004; Sabine C Carey, Neil J Mitchell, and Will Lowe, “States, the Security Sector, and the Monopoly of Violence: A New Database on pro-Government Militias,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 2 (March 1, 2013): 249–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343312464881; Krahmann, “The United States, PMSCs and the State Monopoly on Violence”; Kasper Hoffmann et al., Protection and (in)Security beyond the State: Insights from Eastern Africa and Sahel (Copenhagen: DIIS, 2015); Michael E. Newell, “How the Normative Resistance of Anarchism Shaped the State Monopoly on Violence,” European Journal of International Relations 25, no. 4 (December 1, 2019): 1236–60, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119848037.

[12] Thucydides, “History of the Peloponnesian War,” 431AD, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm; Kenneth Neal Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston, Mass. ; London: McGraw Hill, 1979); Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (New York, N.Y. etc.: Everyman’s Library, 1993); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Norton Series in World Politics (New York, N.Y. ; London: Norton, 2001); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Minneapolis, UNITED STATES: Lerner Publishing Group, 2018), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=5443203.

[13] Peter Wijninga et al., “STATE AND NON-STATE ACTORS:: BEYOND THE DICHOTOMY,” STRATEGIC MONITOR 2014 (Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, 2014), https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep12608.8.

[14] Ibid., 141-144.

[15] R Graham Caldwell, “Private Security and Armed Military Guards: Minimising State Liability in the Fight against Maritime Piracy,” The RUSI Journal 157, no. 5 (October 2012): 16–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2012.733097.

[16] “EU/Somalia: EU NAVFOR Hails Pirates’ Move East as Sign of Success.”

[17] Pitney and Levin, “Current and Proposed Forces.”

[18] John J. Pitney Jr. and John-Clark Levin, “Legal and Regulatory Issues,” in Private Anti-Piracy Navies: How Warships for Hire Are Changing Maritime Security (Lanham, MD, UNITED STATES: Lexington Books, 2013), 92, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=1580312.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ladan Affi et al., “Countering Piracy through Private Security in the Horn of Africa: Prospects and Pitfalls,” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 5 (March 29, 2015): 934–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1114882; John J. Pitney Jr. and John-Clark Levin, “Operational and Tactical Challenges,” in Private Anti-Piracy Navies: How Warships for Hire Are Changing Maritime Security (Lanham, MD, UNITED STATES: Lexington Books, 2013), 91–136, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=1580312.

[23] Krahmann, “The United States, PMSCs and the State Monopoly on Violence.”

[24] Pitney and Levin, “Legal and Regulatory Issues.”

[25] Ibid., p. 92

[26] Private Military & Security Companies (PMSCs) (no date). Global Policy Forum. Available at: https://archive.globalpolicy.org/nations-a-states/private-military-a-security-companies.html (Accessed: 23 March 2021).

[27] Swed, Ori, and Daniel Burland. “The Global Expansion of PMSCs: Trends, Opportunities, and Risks,” August 21, 2020.