Spotlighted Event
Private Security and the State
- NINT 5276 - Private Security and the State (Spring 2008)
International security during the twentieth century was largely dominated by concern for the causes and effects of war and conflict between nation-states. Today, security concerns are formulated in accordance with the assumption that war and conflict result from sources lying outside the bounds of the nation-state. This course will investigate this shift in the way that national-security is formulated. To do so, we will turn to the documentation of 1) the ways in which nation-states have had recourse to private – as opposed to public – security forces, 2) the increasing privatization of security forces and concomitant recourse to a security industry, and 3) recent trans-border war economies. We will examine the extent to which these various processes either undermine state sovereignty or arise from the very actions or workings of the state itself. Ultimately, review of various cases involving civil war, warlord formations, and war economies will help us to understand how the classical representation of sovereignty fails to grasp the dynamics of these situations.