PSC's, Sovereignty, and Machiavelli's Warnings

Upon reading the work by Abrahamsen and Williams Security beyond the State: Global Security Assemblages in International Politics, Machiavelli’s warnings about mercenaries and auxiliary forces quickly came to mind. In chapter 12 of The Prince Machiavelli states:

The mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous, and if anyone has a state founded on the arms of mercenaries, he will never be stable or secure, because they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, disloyal; bold among friends, among enemies cowardly, without fear of God, without faith in men; and your ruin is deferred only as long as the assault is deferred; and in peace you are plundered by them, in war by the enemy.

He then explains the reason as:

The reason for this is that they have no love or any motive that keeps them in the field other than a little bit of salary, which is not enough to make them willing to die for you. They are quite willing to be your soldiers as long as you are not waging war, but when war comes, then it is: retreat or run away.

This concern was somewhat reiterated in class by the students. With PSC’s there is a question of accountability and who they are really serving. Another student pointed out that many of the individuals employed by these firms are ex U.S. military and may be serving U.S. interests to an extent. I must give credit to Genorie and Meshal for bring up these excellent points. From the onset of reading this text I certainly shared this skepticism and the article has only just begun to alleviate that skepticism.

Following this kind of reasonable skepticism and Machiavelli’s warnings one can consider PSC’s to be a threat to the sovereignty of the states that require their services. However, after reading the article, it seems that understanding the PSC’s as international firms helps to put the PSC’s under a slightly different light. As large firms susceptible to market conditions and public scrutiny they are less likely to neatly fit into the mold set by Machiavelli regarding Mercenaries. This makes it less likely for individual ambitions amongst the security personnel to negatively affect those that employ them assuming that they are working under contracts the security personnel view as fair. Assuming that the firms are strong and stable enough to be considered a foreign force rather than a force of individual mercenaries we might then consider Machiavelli’s thoughts on Auxiliary forces in chapter 13 of The Prince.

These troops can be useful and good in themselves, but they are almost always harmful for the man who calls them in, for if they lose, you are undone; if they win, you remain their prisoner.

The auxiliary forces provided by firms however stand apart from those described by Machiavelli in sever ways. One key difference is that the security PSC’s given in the examples were typically working to safe guard the assets of private entities. In both cases these assets were natural resources. These assets or natural resources are typically also large sources of economic growth or at least sustainability for the countries that are home to these assets. Because of this, the interests of the local governments and firms providing the PSC’s were in line. Furthermore, with a sole focus on profit, the firms that hire the PSC’s are less likely to challenge the authority of the local governments as it would likely be too costly for any firm to govern an entire population. With that it seems less likely that they would hold a state “prisoner” although it was noted that the dynamics between the PSC’s and the local governments were sometime criticized along the lines that the firms might be able to influence the vulnerable local governments. This might very well be the case but it probably wouldn’t be through the tradition coercive force that Machiavelli refers to and this kind of private influence on government from firms can arguably be seen across the globe.  

Regarding PSC’s and coercive force. There has been a lot of pushback to the attempts of the PSC’s to use arms in the host countries. This has increased the need for the PSC’s to work together with local forces. Additionally, the article by Abrahamsen and Williams specifically notes the following about the PSC’s in the Niger Delta:

In the past, the oil companies at the very least tolerated, and in some eyes promoted, the highly coercive security strategies of the Nigerian police and military (Okonta and Douglas 2003; Meier 2004). There are now signs that companies are seeking (at least in part) to abandon such strategies and to distance themselves from the coercion of public security services, in recognition of the failure of these policies and the considerable international opposition and negative publicity they have generated. Instead, the oil companies are adopting more ‘comprehensive’’ security strategies incorporating community engagement and development (Omeje 2006; SPDC 2002).   

  

                Although the article also notes that the degree of commitment to this strategy is questionable it does show a significant step away from the tradition use of coercive force. It seems more than likely, commitment to this strategy will increase in response to continuous positive feedback. If it works they will continue to employ it. This also illustrates that both the international firms, PSC’s, and local governments are working together along similar interests to increase their total capacity to enforce their various forms of authority, whether it is an authority to govern or an authority over an asset to be collected and put into market. Skepticism still seems reasonable about these security assemblages however and only time will tell if such alliance truly are tenuous. That being said this article certainly opens up the door to an idealized world where such long lasting assemblages and perhaps even some sort of globalized security might be conceivable.