A Study On The Norm Against Mercenary Use And Its International Regulation

Mercenaries are those types of fighters with a low degree of state controland a low degree of attachment to a cause. In the initial stage, mercenaries, most ofwhich were straggler and disbanded soldiers, acted independently and individually.Later, independent mercenary was limited and the state-to-state exchange ofmercenaries was raised. By the end of nineteenth century, citizen army became thestandard. This shift away from mercenary use was so absolutely that mercenary didnot appear on the international stage again until the1960s, and the reappearance wasin Africa. In the post-cold war era, mercenary went to private military companies andplayed an important role in the international stage. The norm against mercenary useoriginated from the twelfth to the fourteenth century and went through three shifts.The fist shift away from mercenary use led states to control the commerce withindependent mercenaries and adopted citizen army; the second shift ended thestate-regulated practice of selling and buying soldiers from and to other states; thethird shift took place in the1960s when the international society struggled to createinternational law to regulate the mercenary problem. The international regulationsystem was neither perfect nor practical while the norm against mercenary use isstrong, which is because the international law system heightened African statesinterest, strong norm might lead to weak law and the norm against mercenary use wasin conflict with other existing norms.