Abstract

In this episode, Professor Deborah Avant describes how privatisation of the monopoly of violence evolved from the two conflicts in Iraq up till the fall of Kabul.

This podcast series is presented by Dr Alessandro Arduino, Principal Research Fellow and Dr Ameem Lutfi, Research Fellow, at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore.

Listen to the full podcast here:

Full Transcript:

[Alessandro Arduino]: Welcome to the 19th episode of the National University of Singapore Middle East Institute podcast series Boots Off the Ground: Security in Transition in the Middle East and Beyond. In this series, we look at the future of warfare which will see uniformed soldiers, or boots on the ground,  being replaced by private military companies, autonomous weapons systems and cyber weapon. My name is Alessandro Arduino, and I will be the co-host for this series along with my colleague Ameem Lutfi.

[Ameem Lutfi]: We’re very thrilled to have with us today Professor Deborah Avant who is Sié Chéou-Kang Chair for International Security and Diplomacy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. Her research has focused on civil–military relations and the role of non-state actors in controlling violence and generating governance. She’s the author/editor of Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence in Conflicts; The New Power Politics: Networks and Transnational Security Governance; and of course The Market for Force: the Consequences of Privatizing Security and Political Institutions, which for those of us who are in this field, is one of the entry points into understanding the relationship between violence and economics. She was also the inaugural director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy. Thank you so much for joining us today Professor Avant.

[Deborah Avant]: Thank you for having me, it’s nice to be here.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Deborah I just want to repeat what Ameem just said; we are extremely delighted to have you with US today, as your work is a pillar for all those researching on private military security.

I will go straight to the first question — could you describe to our audience why you came to conduct research on the role of non-state actors, and how has the privatisation of the state monopoly of violence evolved from the two conflicts in Iraq until now, and especially now that we are looking at how Kabul has fallen so extremely quickly. Thank you Deborah.

[Deborah Avant]: Yeah thank you. Well, there was a lot of luck and coincidence I guess in my decision. I actually began my work looking at counterinsurgency, in which I looked at the US experience of Vietnam, the British experience in the World War and Malaya, and really had kind of an argument about how democracies respond to insurgent forces. When I did my work, John Ruggie who was on my dissertation committee said it’s too bad that you have such an interesting topic, and nobody will ever read this because it was during the Cold War, and everyone was focused on the US–Soviet conflict.

Of course, I finished my dissertation in 1991, and by then the Cold War was ending; and it turned out a lot of people were interested, and I was focusing a lot on the various peace missions that were occurring all over the Balkans in Africa. And as I went to conferences to present my research on these peace missions I began to notice that there were people there from Brown and Root and from MPRI, and these people were essentially attending these conferences trying to figure out what was going on in these conflicts. But they were also participating as private actors doing logistics support; in the case of Brown and Root and then MPRI of course did a variety of training missions in the Balkans and in Africa actually. And so I just was curious about this; I had as kind of a side argument in my dissertation project about practices of war and how they change; and was just finishing an article on how mercenary armies went away; and it was kind of intriguing to think about the possibility of them coming back. I started keeping a file in say 1997 [on private military actors], and by the time I got tenure I was ready for something big and meaty and interesting, and I thought I would just do work on this new phenomenon. I travelled a lot in 1999-2000 across the Balkans, Africa, and the UK visiting governments that exported these services; companies that provided them; host governments; and then also looking NGOs, oil companies, and other extractive companies hiring these forces. And that essentially became my book.

But to get to the second part of your question; you know when I was first doing my research, most of the cases that I selected were actually cases of training, and some cases of logistical support. But training was really the mission that seemed to have the most potential for abuse and concern, because it was really these private companies that were placing US forces, European forces, British forces in their training missions. By the time I had a draft of my book ready, the war in Iraq had already begun; the war in Afghanistan was already a year-or-so-over old, and I realised I needed to incorporate them because it wasn’t just training and logistics, but the growth of personal security, site security, mobile security and all of these things had been there in the Balkans, and in wars in Africa. But these wars, these kind of peace missions tended to be much more permissive environments; and so these kinds of roles were not as large, and they just didn’t get pulled into so many difficult circumstances. And so, I think that when we look at the history of Iraq and Afghanistan we will look at both the growth of these forces; the growth of this particular type of force and the kinds of problems that it generated, and then because the demand grew so quickly you also saw a trans-nationalisation of the industry.

So in the 1990s it was still small networks of military operatives that had worked together in various missions, and after the demand exploded particularly in the middle of the 2000s, there was a growth of these kinds of middle firms — that would be essentially matchmakers — pull in forces from all over the world and pair them with industry leaders in order to sort of meet contract demands. And so you saw a lot more of what they called third-country nationals participating in the conflicts that was fairly new to that period of time.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much Professor Avant. So we’ve been running this podcast for about a year and a half or so, and there’s been a running debate across these episodes about how do you label these actors; or how do you categorise them. We had Sean Mcfate on one of our first shows, and his argument was that by using multiple separate labels, there’s a way that a lot of these actors can get away with regulation. For example, you call yourself a contractor instead of a private soldier, and there’s certain regulations that you can get away with. Mcfate suggested that it’s better to study this phenomena under sort of a collective label, be it even ‘mercenary’. But on the other side we had people from ICoCA and ISOA, and they suggested that this would essentially lead to a lot of problems especially with policy and regulation where you need specificity and detailed labelling of different actors according to what they do.

So I’m wondering — where do you stand on this? And I ask this because you’re someone who straddles between the world of policy and academia; so is there some tension between the demands of academia and policy-making? Also,  where do you stand on the issue of labelling and categorising this field more broadly?

[Deborah Avant]: That’s an interesting question. Academics of course love to label things and put them in boxes. I think that my position early on was that we ought to really be focusing on the service that’s provided; so there was a lot of debate over whether companies were private military companies or private security companies or mercenary groups; and I was much more comfortable looking at what they were doing and kind of labelling that, and I think that is still a pretty useful tool; and in fact one of the things that I think would be really useful for regulation is so much of it has grown around these really particular site security, mobile security

personal security detail services; and we have not developed the same kinds of codes of conduct for, say, trainers or logistics support or other operational support missions; and so I think that you might even break down operational support missions in different categories. But I think that focusing on what they do is critically important — that’s partly because these companies can morph very quickly like any other service industry; they essentially match talent with a job, a need for contract; and so as the needs change they don’t have these massive numbers of full-time employees that keep them in one sort of service category; they can move. I think going forward, now as the US has pulled out of Afghanistan and has only a small presence in Iraq, it will be very important to pay attention to these shifts, to observe where is the demand going to come from, and what these companies can morph into?

So I think that the urge to call them private security companies or private military companies is labelling a company rather than the kinds of services that they provide. And I understand the need for that at some level, but I think actually focusing more on the services is more productive. And then now we have this whole new category of quasi-mercenary groups such as the Wagner group; different  quasi-state groups like those associated with the Belt and Road Initiative and others that are really in between. I think trying to figure out what it is about them that makes us nervous is probably more important than trying to figure out what to call them. And I do agree with the folks at ICoCA that being able to distinguish between legitimate services and illegitimate services is a key part of this debate. And so, I still think the service angle does more for us than categorising the groups per se.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I can totally agree with the distinction. Looking at the service especially now, I do believe that in the coming decades we are going to witness a trend as you just correctly mentioned of quasi-private military companies; and drawing the line where the state ends and the private starts in my personal opinion is going to be the real challenge, not only when we are looking at the Wagner group, but also when we are looking at the development of private security in the People’s Republic of China. As you mentioned before when you launched your first research they were dubbed a public that was going to read your book; when I worked on my first book China’s Private Army they were not only doubting if there was an audience for it, but they were doubting if there was an existence of Chinese private security firms and I proved them wrong.

Moving on, now a day all the focus has been on the Taliban’s lighting speed retake of Kabul, and there is really endless talk about Afghanistan. As you mentioned earlier, one of the central discussions in your research has been the transnational network and this sort of middleman that has started to grow around the business of private military and private security, and one of the issues that we have been looking with our previous speaker like Dr Joshua Reno or Dr Noah Coburn was war materiel and labor left behind. And it’s quite an important topic especially now that we are talking about Afghanistan; the large numbers of third-country nationals that are still there — I know that ISOA is still bent on trying to evacuate them as we speak from  Kabul.

But my question is what do you see as the future of contract workers and technology that have been made redundant with the end of the US military presence in Afghanistan; and especially where will both ultimately end up?

[Deborah Avant]: That’s a good question. So there were third-country nationals in Afghanistan, but far fewer than in Iraq. In Iraq, the third-country nationals played a much larger role in Afghanistan; a lot of the contract workers were actually Afghans. And so, thinking about not only the third-country national future but the Afghani future, I think it’s really important certainly from an ethical standpoint, from a standpoint of just what kind of civil–military relations you have when you’re talking about the relationship between a contract government and a contracting force, I think it’s a really important thing to pay attention to. There actually has been some good work done recently; a gentleman by the name of Adam Moore who’s at UCLA — I think he’s a geographer or sociologist — but he has this great book called the Empire’s Labor where he interviews workers from the Philippines, the Balkans, mostly, and kind of traces their experiences working in different parts of the world. And you know it’s not a pretty sight in many cases, but he really draws out I think all of the different people that bear responsibility for their concerns, including sometimes the workers themselves. I think there’s just so much more work to be done I guess in this area. I was just talking to a reporter earlier this week who told me about a friend she know in Afghanistan who worked for the US earlier in the war through a security company between 2005 and 2007. Their family was trying to get a visa to get out of the country; but in trying to do that they actually had difficulty when they contacted the company of even finding records of their employment, which was not at all uncommon. The industry grew so rapidly in those early years that the companies really had no sense of what they were doing. They didn’t sometimes even have ways of getting contractors who died in the conflict home. There were many kinds of regulations that were sort of not in place at the company level, and in this case they didn’t even have records of who had been employed. And it was very difficult for this person to get a visa to get out, and this was an Afghan national.  To be fair, over the course of time the US government actually instituted a number of requirements for companies and they have gotten sort of better at handling these things. But I’ll really hand it to ICoCA for paying attention to labour issues, and in fact I chaired a panel a couple of years ago — our last in person — ICoCA’s General Assembly had a panel on trafficking issues, and it was very well attended; lots of industry leaders were very concerned about this issue, and willing to think about what to do about it. But that’s only a small part of the problem, you know the kinds of psychological services that people who have experienced trauma in these wars, via contract not via military service; it’s unclear how they get reintegrated in society; what kind of financial support they have; what happens to them if they’re in Afghanistan — all of those questions are really unanswered.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you. Actually it’s funny that you bring up Dr Adam Moore because we had him on two episodes ago to talk about Empire’s Labor, and it was a fascinating see beyond the security world of the workers and look into the machinery that’s needed to pull this all together. And one of the issues that came up was that most of the work that private contractors are doing is actually not even security work, it’s all sorts all sorts of labour. But still there is this perception that this entire category of people suffers from a mislabelling as ‘mercenary’ that come with great notoriety that often hinders their reintegration into different workforces. Of course, part of this blame goes on to the private contractors themselves; but in your opinion what are some of the measures that can perhaps be introduced to increase transparency into these processes; into the nature of the work that they’re doing; into the nature of contracting? And what would be the best approaches to do that and to shed this notoriety?

[Deborah Avant]: Well I mean one of the things is that this a constantly changing social site, and so I do think that that’s one of the difficulties that people have had with these regulatory solutions; especially treaties or hard law; you know it can’t really keep up with the changes. I actually am a big fan of the Montreux Process, the International Code of Conduct, the standards; partly because they are built to be evolving; and I think there’s a lot more attention that political scientists and others could pay to how we think about these norms, these best practices; how we hold people accountable with them; all of those kinds of things. But I still think that kind of tool is probably the best that we can get in a situation where things are changing very quickly.

One of the things that’s really interesting is that the way this has functioned generally is to take norms we already agree on in international humanitarian law and national human rights law and basically translate it into the situation of private security contractors, private military contractors; and that has been a useful way of basically incorporating a lot of different forces, including rebel forces and terrorists — you know, some political philosophers actually argue that those two have a code of ethics, and it’s tied to that same kind of logic that that grows out of international humanitarian law and human rights obligations. So I would expect that those kinds of things would continue to be useful tools; but how they will evolve is hard to predict.

Actually I’ll mention another book that’s just coming out by Simon Pratt, which looks at the way that different norms have changed during the War on Terror; and he looks at private military and security companies as one of those, but also issues of targeted killing — how do you interpret targeted killing in a way that’s consistent with international humanitarian law? The US has tried to do that; and so sort of thinking about kind of how normative configurations change I think will be a really important part of understanding whether we like or don’t like the kinds of norms that evolve around this industry; but I do think this in combination with laws that use these normative frameworks in the US — for instance, the Department of Defence requires that contractors be   standards-compliant in order to compete for security contracts. So there’s an enforcement angle that’s coming from the government but how the code works is much more alive, because it’s a code of conduct and not written into law.

[Alessandro Arduino]: Now definitely as you mentioned, norms on targeted killing are a dire need; but if I want to link it with our discussion of private military, I foresee that not too long in the future unfortunately, we are going to witness private military companies that are managing armed drones and the kind of pay-per-use capability in the use of armed drones. And talking about private military, there is this constant mention that the United States have opened the Pandora’s box of military contracting and privatisation; but as we just mentioned, we have already witnessed numerous other states that are experimenting with military contracting. Just recently on 28 July 2021 when State Councillor and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi from China met in Tianjin the Taliban envoys he mentioned that the Chinese private security firms are an important tool in protecting the Belt and Road infrastructure; and additionally, we have already witnessed the quasi-groups such as the Wagner group working in grey areas for Mother Russia, from Crimea, Syria and even the African continent. When we are talking about quasi-private military companies, do you see any notable differences in how this country, let’s say for example Russia and China, are using or are using private security and private militaries differently from the US; or are they just using and coping the US playbook?

[Deborah Avant]: I think one of the interesting features of the governance of this industry is it started looking at state obligations with respect to these companies; and notably, the Chinese government is party to the Montreux document, and the Russian government is not; and I think that one of the big features that groups like Wagner offer to the Russian government is the ability for the government to really operate outside of international humanitarian law that it is in a sense signed on to. And so I think that in some instances what these companies really do is allow governments to misbehave; in other instances they are themselves not held to account, and potentially misbehave themselves. But I think the big difference   particularly with Russia is the degree to which these companies are first of all not even admitted to be there — are officially still illegal —  but are used frequently and that gives Putin and his allies quite a lot of latitude to really make sure that these companies are pursuing his interests or the interests of a small group rather than any sort of collective concern — and I think that’s really the big issue that we have.

I agree the US government was an important player in unleashing or opening this Pandora’s box, but I think the box was really bound to open because there really has been a situation for a while where the kinds of concerns that people have — that they want to use the market for force— are not tightly tied to national interests. And this kind of global interconnectedness has really created worries that Exxon has, or Shell has, or Save the Children has, or World Wildlife Fund has, as well as consortia of different governments. And if you sort of look at the way that these companies have been used, they’ve often been used in these unexpected things that pop up. Even in the Russian case a lot of their work has been protecting extractive industries. And so I think that we really need to pay attention to these kinds of deeper structural economic issues that have sort of laid the groundwork for this. And ultimately, I would liken this much more to the condition and the military enterprisers that were rampant in the sort of late Middle Ages, Early Modern Period; I think we are going through another transformation where there are increasing connections globally. And you know the kinds of big national wars are just much less frequent, and the kinds of conflict that you get is changing; and I think that these kinds of companies, these kinds of services, contracting — it tends to be sort of a flexible tool for dealing with these new sorts of missions. And so I think it will continue to evolve; and part of how it will evolve depends on how people think about using force; and the degree to which they focus on more collective concerns, or they focus on sort of gaining advantage. And I would put the Russian government right now in the latter category, and I think a lot of the Montreux process was an attempt to ensure that governments, if they were going to use these companies or allow them to export from their territory, that they would keep them focused on things that could be legitimised by some sort of collective claim.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you I mean that’s a very interesting idea, that what we see or private security or private military is perhaps better thought of as the result of a deeper change that is happening socially where national interests are not really aligned with the social; the security goals do not necessarily align with national interests. And you know this has been an issue of debate now with Afghanistan; and I want to bring you back to Afghanistan since that is in the news right now and everyone wants to hear more about that. So the bucket for blame-making, for where the blame lies, has been going around in Afghanistan; and people are asking what was it for; who was it for; and who do we get to blame. In that discussion, does the decision to privatise the war to such a great degree both in Afghanistan and Iraq get some of the blame? I’m here thinking about how the Afghan national army folded so quickly. One of the arguments is that this was because a lot of the missions that ANA had earlier conducted were in collaboration with private contractors, and a lot of the skill transfers that normally happens in such in such situations did not happen, because instead of transferring some of those skills to the local army and local forces, there were private contractors who did those jobs, and hence the army was not doing them… So I mean this an example, but more broadly how much of the blame of what went wrong perhaps lies on the decision to privatise?

[Deborah Avant]: I think the Afghan army not fighting had much more to do with the fact that the government collapsed than it had to do with any particular skill concern. So I think that people suggesting that they were sort of unskilled and laid down their arms and it was because of that… this is overplaying that. Also, the US government never decided to privatise the war in Afghanistan. Basically, the war didn’t go exactly the way they hoped, and the industry provided an escape valve for bad policy essentially. In that escape valve I think there were a lot of ways in which money went to contractors instead of the Afghan government, for instance.

But secondly, the way it flowed opened many more possibilities for corruption because basically contractors are always performing a particular job for a very particular client, and they’re not necessarily attentive to the overall goal of the conflict. And I think we saw this in very concrete ways in Iraq; but I think we saw it similarly in Afghanistan, when you have contractors paying off local strongmen potentially with ties to the Taliban in order to generate safe passage  in building a very important road. This was one of the big corruption issues in Afghanistan; think that there’s you know quite a lot of evidence that money flowing through contractors ended up generating more corruption and more pockets of power in Afghanistan that made it hard for the central government to gain legitimacy. That wasn’t the only thing that made it hard; I mean there’s so many problems with Afghanistan that it’s hard to know where to start; but I think that the way the money flowed to contractors and the way that they’re sort of dicing up this this very complicated job of counterinsurgency that requires a very close connection between the use of force, political incentives and practical benefits for the population — that just can’t happen when you’re dicing everything up and everybody is pursuing their own client contract, as opposed to keeping their eye on the big project. So I mean counterinsurgency is hard no matter what; it’s particularly hard in a place like Afghanistan, and yet I think that the degree to which different services were contracted out made it even harder. So I wouldn’t blame the fall of Afghanistan to contractors, but I think the use of contractors in Afghanistan did not help to generate a more successful counterinsurgency. You know I should actually also mention counterterrorism; the US was doing two things in Afghanistan — they were killing terrorists, and they were trying to persuade the population to support a government; and those two things don’t really go together very well, and so there was a lot of problems in US policy as well. So I do think contractors are not at all the main story here.

[Alessandro Arduino]: I can agree when you mention scrutiny, accountability and corruption — it’s a difficult task for the state when you are at peace; figure it out during a war. Having said that, accountability is extremely important, and while we are looking at private military firms in the area where we work and study, that is the Middle East; but also if we move to other areas like Sahel, Mozambique in the African continent; if we are talking about mercenary activity recently in Haiti or Venezuela, then we see that there is a kind of trend in blurring the line between illicit and illicit activity. And in such places there is a perception — let’s say that private contractors now and in the near future are going to operate with greater impunity; what’s your take on this?

[Deborah Avant]: I’m actually kind of on record saying exactly that a little while ago about the trends in the industry, and the coup in Haiti. I do think there was quite a lot of momentum from 2007 to 2012 or so; then ICoCA sort of came into force; many people hoped that there would be continued again new codes of conduct for different kinds of services that the US government would generate a more uniform way of requiring these kind of codes and standards to be part of US policy; that these would spread to other governments. And really what you saw instead was a stall. And in fact Chris Mayer who worked at the Department of Defence on these issues for a very long time; and I wrote something in 2015 about all the things that were just waiting to be done, and why wasn’t Congress doing them; and of course there’s a lot of other things going on, and then the US has had a bit of a political crisis for the last five years; and you know in the midst of that crisis, instead of progress on these issues you’ve seen Eric Prince, who is flouting many of these regulations, meeting in the Oval Office, making arguments about what to do in Afghanistan that go against the very core of the Montreux process. At the same time, the Department of Defence basically took apart the office that oversaw the contract support, especially the transnational coordination of it; and so one of the motors really behind the heft of this regulation died. And I think that has provided more avenues for different kinds of companies — the Wagner group is only one of them. And I think in Mozambique you see a real mix, that’s a case where there definitely is a lot of grey zone there and it is really hard to say is this a legit company or not. There also was quite a lot of advising going on in Mozambique’s government by Prince and others that is much more of that sort of cowboy style I would say of the early 2000s.

So I do think that we have sort of moved in a much more sort of problematic direction overall, even as organisations like ICoCA have really done good work. And so it’s a matter now of what will happen; are people going to sort of mobilise around carrying these regulations forward, or are they going to mobilise around sort of gaining advantage through these much more flexible grey area organisations. So I think we’re really at an inflection point right now as to whether we continue down that path or not. I will say the US government, the GAO has just issued a good report and they are working on more essentially calling the government to task for not doing more with respect to these companies. So it’s possible that the US government will step up its efforts; but part of that will depend on how much this is on the agenda of Congress members, and   unfortunately I think that Afghanistan might make it less likely better than more likely.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you; I mean hearing this trend towards more grey areas you can understand why countries like Singapore remain extremely hesitant towards making any moves towards greater privatisation. More broadly, there’s a sentiment here in Singapore that military privatisation is either for the states in crisis or expansionary powers, and a stable and peaceful country like Singapore perhaps should keep its hands completely away from privatisation. But is that a luxury that some of these countries can afford? Can they keep completely themselves out of this, or is this a glowing trend that eventually will touch different parts; and if it is, I mean is there perhaps even a role that a place like Singapore, that has historically been a centre for international arbitrations of various kinds — is there a role that such small neutral countries can play perhaps even in the monitoring and regulation of this global industry?

[Deborah Avant]: Now that’s an interesting question. I actually have a chapter coming out in a book on the future of globalisation or the future of global governance that makes an argument about the Swiss government; in very much a similar way that they basically played the role of a policy entrepreneur — and of course the Swiss have their own history and brought their own sets of concerns to the fore; and so I would imagine Singapore might engage differently. But I do think there’s a role for basically any player — that’s one of the things that has been so interesting to me as I have studied more and more of the different clients that participate in this industry; it’s convinced me that governments only function in relation to other actors, social actors. And social actors can play a very large role in encouraging governments to do more of what they ought to do, which is pay attention to sort of common concerns; or they can encourage them to pay attention to much narrower concerns, and basically take advantage of governments in different ways, and so I think there’s a large role for various commercial civil society actors, but I also think in terms of governments — you know, governments live in a society of other governments, and they can’t call each other to account, and they can also nudge each other in important ways; and you know it’s interesting.

I do have a database looking at military, I mean media mentions of private military and security companies in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa, and there’s actually quite a lot of private security activity in Southeast Asia; much of it focuses more on what we might think as domestic policing kinds of things. But these different missions are really merging in important ways, and I think you know G4S is a good example of that. And so I do think that the Singaporean government, you know any government, could potentially play a positive role in sort of looking critically at what’s going on in its borders, but then also in attending to what others have agreed to already and playing a supportive role in that. So yes,  there may be actually more privatisation already in Singapore than you’re thinking about.

[Dr Alessandro Arduino]: Unfortunately, the time for our podcast is running out and we have time just for the last question. It’s sad because I’m sure both Ameem and me would love to talk with you about this topic for hours on end, but now basically I’m going to ask you what we call the million dollar question and that is — what is the future of warfare and security management in complex environments going to look like in the coming 30 years?

[Deborah Avant]: I think the whole world is becoming a complex environment you know; certainly in the last five years we’ve seen a lot of complexity in the US domestic environment as well as in foreign policy, and I think the days of major power war, despite all the discussion of geopolitical rivalries is not quick to come back. I think we will see much more in this grey area in cyber attacks, in drone warfare, in targeted killing; rather than combat between armed groups. And I think there will be a continued transformation and growth of the grey area and a continued need to sort of think about the ways in which those who are more concerned with organising force around common concerns sort of join together and decide what those common concerns are and generate norms around them and try to work together to manage conflict. I think that the days of individual governments managing conflict is probably on the way out, and there’s much greater need I think for these kinds of collaborative arrangements for thinking about how we’re going to control force and around what sorts of norms. And as I said, I think we are at an inflection point; I think a lot of work has been done to try to manage some parts of this grey area, and I know that people thinking about cyber security norms are looking at what the private military and security industry did as a potential model for thinking about new normative configurations. But you also have the growth of this kind of geopolitical set of arguments, which in my view are really a mask for using this industry for advantage, or using state mechanisms for advantage or for a small group. And so I think that’s that’s the big question — it’s where the balance I guess will fall between those sort of aiming to use force for their individual advantage or small group advantage, and those focused on larger more common concerns. But it’s going to be complicated; I think all of us will be busy with research projects as far as I can see.

[Ameem Lutfi]: Thank you so much Professor Avant for joining us today; this has been an incredibly thought-provoking conversation, and as Alex mentioned we could have gone on for much longer but we’re not going to take more of your time. So again thank you so much for joining us today; I want to thank also the MEI support staff and the events team for putting this together, and please do keep listening to us. Send any questions or comments that you have to us, and we’ll be back with you with another speaker in our next episode; so thank you everyone for joining US today.

[Deborah Avant]: Thank you.