Jelle Leunis (Vrije Universiteit Brussel): Managing the Use of Armed Force: From Democratic Control to Regulatory Governance

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) are now a familiar presence in complex security environments. Nevertheless, the past decade has illustrated that traditional mechanisms of managing the exercise of armed force, designed with the aim of controlling the uniformed military, were often ill-equipped to hold PMSCs to account. In reaction, diverse stakeholders joined hands to bring this governance framework up-to-date, resulting in several new regulatory initiatives including the Montreux Document and the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers. This paper maps the implications of these initiatives for the norm on the democratic control of armed force. It does so in three steps. First, on the basis of existing literature, it reviews the established ideal-type of democratic control of the military. Secondly, it develops a new ideal-type of regulatory governance of PMSCs, to help us make sense of the values that underlie the aforementioned regulatory initiatives. This ideal-type is tested in three case studies covering a broad spectrum of PMSC clients working in complex security environments, including a government agency, a private corporation and a non-governmental organisation. The paper concludes, thirdly, with comparing these two ideal-types. It reviews the opportunities for the stakeholders and the population to participate in the governance of armed force and maps the impact of the proliferation of PMSCs and of the instruments to govern them on the traditional norm of the democratic control of armed force. On the basis of this comparison, the paper argues that democratic involvement in the governance of PMSCs is no longer founded on a representational basis, as was the case with the military, but on a participatory basis. Since not all stakeholders have an equal opportunity to participate in these governance processes, this might endanger the democratic oversight of armed force.