Towards an International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers

Towards an International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers PDF

Author: Anne-Marie Buzatu

Publisher: Ubiquity Press

Published: 2015-09-19

Total Pages: 61

ISBN-13: 1911529390

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The use of private security companies (PSCs) to provide security services has been on the rise since the end of the Cold War, with PSCs operating in a number of contexts, including armed conflict and areas where the rule of law has been compromised. The use of private actors to perform services that are traditionally associated with the state is not limited to PSCs, but is emblematic of a growing trend by governments to outsource functions with a view to improving efficiency and cutting budgets. Privatization of public functions can, however, present a number of challenges to existing national and international regulatory and oversight frameworks. In the private security sector these challenges were brought to international attention after high-profile incidents in which PSCs injured civilians revealed difficulties in effectively holding international PSCs accountable. This paper argues that crafting a multistakeholder regulatory approach in which key stakeholders work together to develop standards that are appropriately adapted for the private sector, as well as to create governance and oversight mechanisms to hold these private actors to effective account, helps to fill some of the governance gaps found in traditional regulatory approaches. It recounts the developments leading to the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICOC) and its governance and oversight mechanism, the ICOC Association, offering an example of the development of an initiative which sets new international standards and elaborates a multistakeholder framework and approach to governance for the private security sector. A recent trend of state and non-state clients requiring compliance with the ICOC initiative in their contracts with PSCs offers a new take on binding international regulation of private actors.

Private Actors and Security Governance

Private Actors and Security Governance PDF

Author: Alan Bryden

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9783825898403

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The privatization of security understood as both the top-down decision to outsource military and security-related tasks to private firms and the bottom-up activities of armed non-state actors such as rebel opposition groups, insurgents, militias, and warlord factions has implications for the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Both top-down and bottom-up privatization have significant consequences for effective, democratically accountable security sector governance as well as on opportunities for security sector reform across a range of different reform contexts. This volume situates security privatization within a broader policy framework, considers several relevant national and regional contexts, and analyzes different modes of regulation and control relating to a phenomenon with deep historical roots but also strong links to more recent trends of globalization and transnationalization. Alan Bryden is deputy head of research at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF). Marina Caparini is senior research fellow at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF).

The Governance of Private Security

The Governance of Private Security PDF

Author: Marco Boggero

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 3319695932

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This book offers new insights and original empirical research on private military and security companies (PMSCs), including China’s negotiation approach to governance, an account of Nigeria’s first engagement with regulatory cooperation under the threat of Boko Haram, and a study of PMSCs in Ebola-hit Western Africa. The author engages with concepts and theories from IR, Political Economy, and African studies—like regime, forum shopping, and extraversion—to describe what shapes state choices in national and international fora. The volume clarifies and spells out the needed questions and definitions and proposes a synthesis of how regime formation is shaped by ideas, interests, and institutions, starting from the proposition that regulatory cooperation consists in facilitating the acceptance and use of a single identifier for private military and security companies.

Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies

Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies PDF

Author: Rita Abrahamsen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-08

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1317914333

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This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of current research on private security and military companies, comprising essays by leading scholars from around the world. The increasing privatization of security across the globe has been the subject of much debate and controversy, inciting fears of private warfare and even the collapse of the state. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the range of issues raised by contemporary security privatization, offering both a survey of the numerous roles performed by private actors and an analysis of their implications and effects. Ranging from the mundane to the spectacular, from secretive intelligence gathering and neighbourhood surveillance to piracy control and warfare, this Handbook shows how private actors are involved in both domestic and international security provision and governance. It places this involvement in historical perspective, and demonstrates how the impact of security privatization goes well beyond the security field to influence diverse social, economic and political relationships and institutions. Finally, this volume analyses the evolving regulation of the global private security sector. Seeking to overcome the disciplinary boundaries that have plagued the study of private security, the Handbook promotes an interdisciplinary approach and contains contributions from a range of disciplines, including international relations, politics, criminology, law, sociology, geography and anthropology. This book will be of much interest to students of private security companies, global governance, military studies, security studies and IR in general.

Security Privatization

Security Privatization PDF

Author: Oldrich Bures

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 3319630105

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This book widens the current debate on security privatization by examining how and why an increasing number of private actors beyond private military and security companies (PMSCs) have come to perform various security related functions. While PMSCs provide security for profit, most other private sector stakeholders make a profit by selling goods and services that were not originally connected with security in the traditional sense. However, due to the continuous introduction of new legal and technical regulations by public authorities, many non-security-related private businesses now have to perform at least some security functions. This volume offers new insights into security practices of non-security-related private businesses and their impact on security governance. The contributions extend beyond the conceptual and theoretical arguments in the existing body of literature to offer a range of original case studies on the specific roles of non-security-related private companies of all sizes, from all areas of business and from different geographic regions.

Private Security

Private Security PDF

Author: Charles P. Nemeth

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2022-12-28

Total Pages: 959

ISBN-13: 1000711943

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Private Security: An Introduction to Principles and Practice, Second Edition explains foundational security principles—defining terms and outlining the increasing scope of security in daily life—while reflecting current practices of private security as an industry and profession. The book looks at the development and history of the industry, outlines fundamental security principles, and the growing dynamic and overlap that exists between the private sector security and public safety and law enforcement—especially since the events of 9/11. Chapters focus on current practice, reflecting the technology-driven, fast-paced, global security environment. Such topics covered include security law and legal issues, risk management, physical security, human resources and personnel considerations, investigations, institutional and industry-specific security, crisis and emergency planning, computer, and information security. A running theme of this edition is highlighting—where appropriate—how security awareness, features, and applications have permeated all aspects of our modern lives. Key Features: Provides current best practices detailing the skills that professionals, in the diverse and expanding range of career options, need to succeed in the field Outlines the unique role of private sector security companies as compared to federal and state law enforcement responsibilities Includes key terms, learning objectives, end of chapter questions, Web exercises, and numerous references—throughout the book—to enhance student learning Critical infrastructure protection and terrorism concepts, increasingly of interest and relevant to the private sector, are referenced throughout the book. Threat assessment and information sharing partnerships between private security entities public sector authorities—at the state and federal levels—are highlighted. Private Security, Second Edition takes a fresh, practical approach to the private security industry’s role and impact in a dynamic, ever-changing threat landscape.

The Politics of Private Security

The Politics of Private Security PDF

Author: Adam White

Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9786612999482

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The Politics of Private Security is the first in-depth analysis of the political issues, processes and themes associated with private security provision. Drawing upon a wealth of historical and contemporary data, as well as the latest theoretical innovations in this research area, it advances original answers to the following key questions. How have private security companies become so prominent? What motivates them? What is their relationship with the state? How can they be controlled? And what does their increasingly ubiquitous presence in twenty-first century society tell us about the future of security provision?

Transnational Companies and Security Governance

Transnational Companies and Security Governance PDF

Author: Jana Hönke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-08-21

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1136219897

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This book investigates governance practiced by non-state actors. It analyses how multinational mining companies protect their sites in fragile contexts and what that tells us about political ordering 'beyond' the state. Based on extensive primary research in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Europe and North America, the book compares companies' political role in the 19th and 21st centuries. It demonstrates that despite a number of disturbing parallels, many contemporary practices are not a reversion to the past but unique to the present. The book discloses hybrid security practices with highly ambiguous effects around the sites of contemporary companies that have committed to norms of corporate social and security responsibility. Companies invest in local communities, and offer human rights training to security forces alongside coercive techniques of fortress protection, and stability-oriented clientele practice and arrangements of indirect rule. The book traces this hybridity back to contradictory collective meaning systems that cross borders and structure the perceptions and choices of company managers, private security officers, NGO collaborators and others practitioners. The book argues that hybrid security practices are not the result of an encounter between a supposed ‘local’ with the liberal ‘global’. Instead, this hybridity is inherent in the transnational and part and parcel of liberal transnational governance. Therefore, more critical reflection of global governance in practice is required. These issues are sharply pertinent to liberal peacebuilding as well as global governance more broadly. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in business, politics and human rights; critical security studies; peacebuilding and statebuilding; African politics; and ethnographic and sociological approaches to global governance and international relations more generally.

Private Security, Public Order

Private Security, Public Order PDF

Author: Simon Chesterman

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-11-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0191610275

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Private actors are increasingly taking on roles traditionally arrogated to the state. Both in the industrialized North and the developing South, functions essential to external and internal security and to the satisfaction of basic human needs are routinely contracted out to non-state agents. In the area of privatization of security functions, attention by academics and policy makers tends to focus on the activities of private military and security companies, especially in the context of armed conflicts, and their impact on human rights and post-conflict stability and reconstruction. The first edited volume emerging from New York University School of Law's Institute for International Justice project on private military and security companies, From Mercenaries to Market: The Rise and Regulation of Private Military Companies broadened this debate to situate the private military phenomenon in the context of moves towards the regulation of activities through market and non-market mechanisms. Where that first volume looked at the emerging market for use of force, this second volume looks at the transformations in the nature of state authority. Drawing on insights from work on privatization, regulation, and accountability in the emerging field of global administrative law, the book examines private military and security companies through the wider lens of private actors performing public functions. In the past two decades, the responsibilities delegated to such actors - especially but not only in the United States - have grown exponentially. The central question of this volume is whether there should be any limits on government capacity to outsource traditionally "public" functions. Can and should a government put out to private tender the fulfilment of military, intelligence, and prison services? Can and should it transfer control of utilities essential to life, such as the supply of water? This discussion incorporates numerous perspectives on regulatory and governance issues in the private provision of public functions, but focuses primarily on private actors offering services that impact the fundamental rights of the affected population.