The past few decades have been marked by a significant shift towards the privatisation of security. While the concept of private security provision is far from new, its modern presence and role has tremendously increased since the start of the 21st century, a trend that is likely to continue.

As privatisation surges, existing legal frameworks face new challenges stemming from their traditional focus on states as central actors. Several initiatives seek to address the legal grey zone within which private security and military companies (PMSCs) operate, resulting in an on-going race to develop the standards that will regulate future activities.

The area of PMSCs is mired with a lack of transparency, even though current self-regulatory efforts may play an important role in future policies and practices around violence and armed conflict. The CCDP is therefore happy to publish Working Paper 11, which seeks to shed light on this area that has been subject to only little academic research thus far.

This timely Working Paper addresses the divergence of current efforts to subject PMSCs to international regulations in order to ensure their respect for human rights and international humanitarian law. The paper contends that regulatory efforts can be divided into two camps, with one proposing containment strategies through intergovernmental bodies and the other suggesting self-imposed regulations through the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). As the latter of the two camps has fast-tracked its verification process, the paper cautions that this has been done in an attempt to avoid subjecting PMSCs to more stringent ethical requirements.

This publication, somewhat exceptionally, was not generated from the CCDP’s own research activities. Yet the novelty of the paper’s topic and its primary data makes it a significant contribution to an important debate about the regulation of the privatisation of military and security services.

The Working Paper in its entirety can be consulted here.