Edited by Ori Swed and Thomas Crosbie

FROM THE PREFACE: “This book started as a known unknown. We knew and admired the rich body of work being produced by political scientists, international relations scholars, legal scholars and historians (as well as a handful of sociologists) on the emerging private military and security industry. We knew about and were concerned with the political consequences of this development, with its nasty barbs of undermining legitimacy, stability and professionalism in the conduct of war and security operations. And we knew that we didn't know what this meant from a sociological perspective. With time, this known unknown transformed before our eyes into an unknown known. In other words, we realized that many of our fellow sociologists were as concerned as we were with establishing and promoting a sociological perspective on the privatization of security. The problem changed from one of disciplinary neglect to one of disciplinary resistance. In The Sociology of Privatized Security, we present a collection of nine chapters written by more than a dozen sociologists on a topic that is widely discussed in the public sphere but almost absent from the discipline. The book came about for that very reason: we want to bring this important topic into disciplinary discussion, to push our collcagues to take seriously the global trend toward privatizing security and military affairs as something that really matters to contemporary societies and to social life…”

NY. Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. 292p.