Portraits in Practice: The Private Security Business and the Reconfiguration of International Politics

Departing from the self-portrayal of the private security business as a normal, non-political sector at the service of states and other legitimate clients, this article argues that the rise of the private security business reinforces general trends towards techno-managerial, de-politicized, and militarized security practices. Even when firms behave by their own books, security privatization reconfigures international politics. This tends to be obscured both in mainstream international relations analysis and in the critical literature on security privatization. International Relations scholars focus on the extent to which privatization undermines or alters states and the state regulatory systems at the expense of changes that leave these intact. The critical literature