Scholars of various backgrounds have noted how societies across the globe have come to rely on more and more policing and incarceration since the late 1970s. To date, however, detailed analyses of the causes and consequences of this “punitive turn” have been limited to the Global North, with the vast majority of studies focused on the expansion of states’ capacity for violence. This article offers a corrective to the global study of the punitive turn by tracing the rise of South Africa’s private security industry from its inception in the late apartheid period to its current position as one of the largest of its kind in the world. Using newspaper reports, archival material from the apartheid state’s security apparatus, and ethnographic interviews of former and current members of the security industry, it shows how counterinsurgency doctrine, civil war, and deindustrialization shaped South Africa’s punitive turn, precipitating a process where violence was devolved from the state to private actors, including local militias, vigilante groups, and private security firms. This process, it is argued, is far from anomalous, and should be seen as a paradigm for the way the post-1970s punitive turn has unfolded in the majority of the world.

Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

Most American police departments claim to practice community-oriented policing (COP). The stated goals are to build partnerships between the police and the community, maintain order and quality of life, and solve problems that contribute to crime and fear of crime. However, researchers have noted how most departments attempting to implement COP have fallen short in successfully adopting the recommended reforms. This paper argues that the institutional setting in which American public policing operates leads to this result. By contrast, the institutional features of private security make its operation more conducive to achieving the goals of COP. These institutional differences include whether economic calculation is possible, the domain that is policed, and which rules are enforced.

The private security industry in Latin America has been associated with human rights abuses, particularly in the context of extractive operations. Most private security guards in the region are poorly trained and do not undergo adequate vetting. These factors combined with serious deficiencies in the rule of law across the region too often enable private security companies to effectively operate outside state control and engage in human rights abusive practices. This article argues that adoption of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers (ICoC) by Latin American private security companies and states, coupled with civil society engagement with ICoC’s Association, may help reduce negative human rights impacts arising out of private security services within the extractive industry.

This article assesses the implications of the shifting market-state relationship for feminism in the neoliberal era. In a case study of the private military and security industry as an actor that is uniquely positioned at the intersections of security governance and global markets, the analysis combines feminist security studies’ critique of securitized gender discourses and feminist global political economy scholarship on corporate-led equality initiatives. Based on a critical discourse analysis of documents from industry and nongovernmental organizations, such as codes of conduct and policy recommendations, I argue that the discourses on gender put forward in the context of security privatization merge securitized and marketized discourses to the effect that the emancipatory potential of “gender” is further curtailed, raising new challenges for feminist knowledge in powerful organizations. The article thus contributes to the critical gender research on private security, debates on the neoliberalization and securitization of feminism, and the integration of feminist security studies and feminist global political economy.

The growth of the private security industry on the African continent has resulted in an expanding labor force engaged in surveillance-type activities. This article analyzes various levels of regulation of private security officers as a form of surveillance. Based on qualitative methodology, it compares the numerous regulatory efforts implemented by the state, industry, and companies of the private security industry in Kenya and South Africa and shows that although different, they essentially share the ultimate aim of controlling private security officers, i.e., to implement a means of “surveillance of the surveillers.”

Security is generally considered a core public good provided by the state. Since outsourcing military and security tasks erodes the state's monopoly of force, we would expect regulation in this area to be stronger than in areas that do not have potentially lethal consequences. But neither caution nor careful regulation is evident in state responses to the emergence of private military and security companies; instead, the industry's rapid growth has outpaced government efforts to control their activities. This article assesses whether two industry associations, the US-based International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) and the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC), have adopted mechanisms necessary for effective self-regulation, and it evaluates different national approaches to self-regulation. Neither the IPOA nor the BAPSC has established self-regulatory mechanisms able to monitor or sanction member companies' behavior. The IPOA's activities correspond to American patterns of self-regulation, while the BAPSC's efforts suggest weaker linkages with the British government than seen in other self-regulatory mechanisms.