Abstract
With governments increasingly contracting private military and security
companies (PMSCs) to perform military and police-related tasks, international relations
scholars have made attempts to better understand PMSCs and to investigate the reasons
for the boom of private security. Rather than focusing on the services these companies offer,
which has been a common approach, we offer an identity-based explanation for their surge.
We show that PMSCs eclectically assume identities related to the military, business
managers and humanitarians, independent of the services they perform, their market
segment or their location on the battlefield. This finding points to an important yet littlenoted
dimension in the private security industry. Although companies are heterogeneous,
they also appear increasingly homogeneous because they incorporate a similar set of
identities. On the one hand, this enables PMSCs to adapt to any context, client or
employee, and, on the other hand, it has constitutive qualities, contributing to an
important source of power for the respective companies. These multiple identities
contribute to a norm of what a superior security provider should look like.
