Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs

by Laura Dickinson

Over the past decade, states and international organizations have shifted a surprising range of foreign policy functions to private contractors. But who is accountable when the employees of foreign private firms do violence or create harm? This timely book describes the services that are now delivered by private contractors and the threat this trend poses to core public values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency. The author offers a series of concrete reforms that are necessary to expand traditional legal accountability, construct better mechanisms of public participation, and alter the organizational structure and institutional culture of contractor firms. The result is a pragmatic, nuanced, and comprehensive set of responses to the problem of foreign affairs privatization.

271 pages, Hardcover

First published January 25, 2011

Reviews

[B]

Blackwater got some attention a few years back, but for the most part, the evolution of the military and international development towards privatization has largely gone unnoticed. This book does a concise,if not very brief job of laying out the origin of this trend in the department of defense. Dickenson gives a fair assessment of how US is unlikely to revert from these changes, and while legal protections against contractor misconduct aren't perfect, the main problem is underenforcement. This is to say, we have several laws (international and domestic) against actions like those at Abu Ghraib and Nisour Square, but prosecutors and courts do not use them enough. On a more general level, this book is an interesting case study of the negative consequences and potential safeguards against abuse in the movement from public services to privatization.