Selling Security: Assessing the Impact of Military Privatization

The rise of the private military industry has become an important and controversial issue in international politics. This article reviews the contributions of four books that analyse the rise and consequences of the privatization of force. Placing military privatization in a broader political context shows how a fuller understanding of these developments requires a global focus and an emphasis on their relationship both to global capital and to shifting state forms where the public and the private, the domestic and the international, are being rearticulated.