USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

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.

by Trevor Johnston, Erik E. Mueller, Irina A. Chindea, Hannah Jane Byrne, Nathan Vest, Colin P. Clarke, Anusree Garg, Howard J. Shatz

Violent nonstate actors (VNSAs) obtain money from multiple sources, both licit (e.g., donations and legitimate businesses) and illicit (e.g., extortion, smuggling, theft). They use that money to pay, equip, and sustain their fighters and to provide services to local populations, which can help build support for the groups, allowing them to extract resources, gain safe havens, and challenge state authority and territorial control. In this way, financial resources can prolong conflicts and undermine stabilization efforts after the fighting ends. Countering VNSA financing plays a critical role in degrading such organizations. Various means are available to disrupt financing. These include kinetic means, such as destroying resources or neutralizing leadership, and nonkinetic means, such as targeted financial sanctions and legal remedies. The counter–threat financing (CTF) tools that work best for transnational groups may not work as well for national ones, and some tools may prove counterproductive in certain situations. Which tools to use in a given case is not always obvious. The authors draw lessons from efforts against five VNSA groups to discover, in each case, how they financed their activities and for what purposes, as well as which methods to counter this financing worked best and which were counterproductive. The authors then consider what the U.S. Army can do to support counter–terrorism financing efforts.

Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023. 386p.