Ready, aim, hire: The socio-political dynamics of military outsourcing

This dissertation explores the incorporation of private military companies (PMCs) into state policy. In the early years of the 21st century, PMCs have become an integral part of foreign policy and military intervention. In this dissertation, I examine how this change came about and what it means for the democratic control of the use of force. Analysis is based on a case study of the United States government's deployment of PMCs for the Drug War and counter-insurgency operations in Colombia. The study relies on extensive ethnographic and interview data with state officials, PMC employees, UN representatives, and members of civil society.;Particular attention is paid to the structural relationships between state officials and the PMC representatives in their employ. I explore the organizational strategies that PMCs used to gain legitimacy and the overt backing of state allies; the types of tasks that PMCs are assigned in conflict situations and the ways that those tasks are portrayed to outside constituencies; and the implications of the state's use of PMC for legal and political accountability.;With regard to legal accountability, I argue that PMCs occupy a hybrid status at the border of public/private and civilian/military realms. This hybridity furthers legal impunity for PMC actors by allowing state officials to select among various "legal paradigms". In terms of political accountability, outsourcing increases the autonomy of certain state agencies by making officials from those agencies less dependent on the approval of the legislature, the electorate, and the host nation (e.g. Colombia). Outsourcing therefore privileges "contractual accountability" to a particular state agency over "political accountability" to broader publics, with implications for which military policies are considered feasible and desirable. Outsourcing also diffuses the locus of violence within the state, by providing the means for the militarization of civilian agencies (e.g. State Department or the Department of the Interior). The findings of this dissertation are relevant not only for military sociologists, but also for organizational and sociolegal scholars, state theorists and those concerned with democratic politics.