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"Conveniently structured into five sections, The Routledge Research Companion to Outsourcing Security offers an overview of the different ways in which states have come to rely on private contractors to support interventions. Part One puts into context the evolution of outsourcing in Western states that are actively involved in expeditionary operations as well as the rise of the commercial security sector in Afghanistan. To explain the various theoretical frameworks that students can use to study security/military outsourcing, Part Two outlines the theories behind security outsourcing. Part Three examines the law and ethics surrounding the outsourcing of security by focusing on how states might monitor contractor behaviour, hold them to account and prosecute them where their behaviour warrants such action. The drivers, politics and consequences of outsourcing foreign policy are covered in Part Four, which is divided into two sections: section one is concerned with armed contractors (providing the provision of private security with the main driver being a capability gap on the part of the military/law enforcement agencies), and section two looks at military contractors (supporting military operations right back to antiquity, less controversial politically and often technologically driven). The final Part takes into consideration emerging perspectives, exploring areas such as gender, feminist methodology, maritime security and the impact of private security on the military profession"--Provided by publisher

This article argues that logistics constrains strategic opportunity while itself being heavily circumscribed by strategic and operational planning. With the academic literature all but ignoring the centrality of logistics to strategy and war, this article argues for a reappraisal of the critical role of military logistics, and posits that the study and conduct of war and strategy are incomplete at best or false at worst when they ignore this crucial component of the art of war. The article conceptualises the logistics–strategy nexus in a novel way, explores its contemporary manifestation in an age of uncertainty, and applies it to a detailed case study of UK operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

With the concept of public security generally absent in Africa and a factionalized security sector of both state and non-state actors delivering security exclusively to certain groups affiliated with patrimonial elites, this paper examines the role of commercial providers of security within African security sectors. In factionalized security sectors with limited territorial reach, the state unable or unwilling to provide security as a public good within its boundaries has long lost its monopoly to control violence. It is against this backdrop that this paper asks the question to what extent commercial providers of security in Africa add another dimension to an already complex non-public security sector dominated by de-publicized statutory and non-statutory security providers. Thereby, this paper focuses on the degree to which commercial providers of security are embedded into patrimonial networks catering for exclusive private security interests of certain elites. Focusing on the issue of the private or public nature of commercially provided security in Africa through the prism of normative theory, this paper neither intends to make a moral value judgment about the legitimacy of commercially provided security in Africa nor intends to relativize the private patrimonial nature of commercially provided security as a phenomenon inherent in African civil-security sector relations. This paper rather tries to lay an exploratory foundation for the understanding of the interests driving commercial providers of security in Africa.

In spite of its sensitivity, diplomatic protection has received very sporadic scholarly attention. This article provides a comparative analysis of US and UK diplomatic security policies, focusing on the increasing use of private military and security companies (PMSCs) for the protection of foreign service and development agencies' personnel. The existing theoretical explanations of the privatization of security tasks cannot explain why countries displaying similar material incentives and similar political and market cultures have outsourced diplomatic protection to different degrees, nor can they account for variance in the use of PMSCs by different agencies within the same country. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating organizations' interests in providing a more accurate explanation of the varying propensity to outsource armed protection. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the outsourcing of diplomatic security was a resultant of foreign policy bureaucracies and military organizations' preferences.

With the concept of public security generally absent in Africa and a factionalized security sector of both state and non-state actors delivering security exclusively to certain groups affiliated with patrimonial elites, this paper examines the role of commercial providers of security within African security sectors. In factionalized security sectors with limited territorial reach, the state unable or unwilling to provide security as a public good within its boundaries has long lost its monopoly to control violence. It is against this backdrop that this paper asks the question to what extent commercial providers of security in Africa add another dimension to an already complex non-public security sector dominated by de-publicized statutory and non-statutory security providers. Thereby, this paper focuses on the degree to which commercial providers of security are embedded into patrimonial networks catering for exclusive private security interests of certain elites. Focusing on the issue of the private or public nature of commercially provided security in Africa through the prism of normative theory, this paper neither intends to make a moral value judgment about the legitimacy of commercially provided security in Africa nor intends to relativize the private patrimonial nature of commercially provided security as a phenomenon inherent in African civil-security sector relations. This paper rather tries to lay an exploratory foundation for the understanding of the interests driving commercial providers of security in Africa.

As with the US led Coalition war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan has seen an unprecedented number of private contractors being utilised in support of military operations in the country. In the case of the United States government for example, over half of its personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq are contract employees, while the same figure in the UK stands at 30 per cent and is set to increase in the coming years. This level of contractor involvement in the 'War on Terror' is not inconsequential. Indeed, their contribution to military operations is so large they are now able to influence NATO's counter-insurgency operations and thus its overall strategy for fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Importantly, such involvement can be both beneficial and/or detrimental. This article first sets out to explore how NATO came to rely on so many contractors in Afghanistan and the risks this involves for the 'War on Terror'.