The Anti-Mercenary Norm and United Nations' Use of Private Military and Security Companies

Global Governance 25 (2019) 77–99
brill.com/gg
The Anti-Mercenary Norm and United Nations’ Use

of Private Military and Security Companies
Oldrich Bures
Center for Security Studies, Metropolitan University Prague
obures@alumni.nd.edu
Jeremy Meyer
Center for Security Studies, Metropolitan University Prague
jeremymeyer90@gmail.com
Abstract
This article offers an analysis of the influence of the anti-mercenary norm on the
United Nations’ use of services provided by private military and security companies
(PMSCs). It follows a constructivist approach which focuses on violations of the anti-
mercenary norm within the UN system and on the justifications and condemnations
of these violations in official UN documents. The findings suggest that while the anti-
mercenary norm is no longer puritanical, two key aspects of the norm—the lack of
a proper cause and the lack of control—remain influential within the UN system.
Although all parts of the UN system nowadays routinely use a wide variety of services
of PMSCs and the UN Secretary-General officially sanctioned security outsourcing in
2011, the UN continues to insist that it is only using PMSCs as a last resort, when no
other options are available. The continuing need to justify the use of PMSCs’ services
suggests that this practice challenges both the long-established identity of the UN as a
key anti-mercenary norm entrepreneur and its ontological security.
Keywords
United Nations – private military and security companies – anti-mercenary norm –

proper cause – control – ontological security – peacekeeping – regulation
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/19426720-02501002

78 bures and meyer
1 Introduction
In this article, we examine the recent profound changes in the United Nations’
use of services provided by private military and security companies (PMSCs).1
Historically, the UN played a prominent role in both the institutionalization
of the anti-mercenary norm and its linkage to the norms of self-determination
and decolonization. Since the 1960s, the UN General Assembly has passed more
than 100 resolutions criticizing mercenaries. For example, according to the 1976
resolution on the “importance of the universal realization of the right of peo-
ples to self-determination,” which has been reaffirmed annually until 2005,
the use of “mercenaries against national liberation movements and sovereign
states constitutes a criminal act and … mercenaries themselves are criminals.”2
The UN Security Council also adopted several resolutions against mercenary
action already in the 1960s and 1970s, condemning states that persist in permit-
ting or tolerating the recruitment of mercenaries.3 Similar statements can be
found in numerous reports of the former UN special rapporteur on mercenar-
ies, Enrique Ballesteros, who considered PMSCs the “new operational model
of mercenarism” that threatened the civilian populations, peace, and states’
sovereignty.4 These resolutions and reports set the stage for further legal insti-
tutionalization of the anti-mercenary norm, as manifested in the 1989 UN Inter-
national Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of
Mercenaries. Moreover, they also influenced the thinking of senior UN officials
in the Secretariat and key UN agencies, who had not seriously considered the
use of PMSCs’ services in the 1990s and 2000s, albeit the possibilities of using
private force had been mooted on several occasions within the UN system.5
As of 2018, however, all parts the UN system, including its humanitarian,
political, and peacekeeping missions, routinely use a wide variety of the ser-
vices of PMSCs worth several hundred million dollars annually (see Figures 1
and 2). The special rapporteur’s position no longer exists and, although its
replacement is still called the Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries as a
Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of
Peoples to Self-Determination (hereafter Working Group on the Use of Merce-
naries) and many of its members have been critical toward PMSCs, its latest
1 The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Czech Science Foundation
under the standard research grant no. GA16–02288S.
2 UN General Assembly 1976, 31/34 §.
3 UN Security Council 1967; UN Security Council 1977.
4 Ballesteros 1998, para. 68.
5 Percy 2007, 222; see also Bures 2005.

the anti-mercenary norm 79
reports have primarily focused on guidelines and regulations of PMSCs’ activ-

ities at both the national and international level. Moreover, in May 2011 the
Secretary-General for the first time publicly announced that the UN can resort
to using the services of armed PMSCs as the last resort, due to the increasing
demand for UN action in highly insecure (post)conflict areas and the contin-
uing lack of supply of protection for UN personnel and operations by the host
countries or other UN Member States.6 The UN Department of Safety and Secu-
rity subsequently published the first official UN policy7 and specific guidelines
on the use of PMSCs’ services.8 All of this indicates that the use of PMSCs by
the UN is nowadays presumed to be acceptable.9
In this article, we therefore ponder why the UN has shifted its position on
the use of PMSCs so dramatically? Since the UN played such a prominent role
in the twentieth-century institutionalization of the anti-mercenary norm, we
primarily focus our analysis on the influence of this norm on the UN’s direct
use of PMSCs’ services. Following Sarah Percy’s constructivist approach, our
analysis therefore focuses on violations of the anti-mercenary norm within the
UN system and the justifications and condemnations of these violations by UN
officials. This is because, according to Percy, violations, justifications, and con-
demnations of the norm can provide evidence for its influence in three ways.10
First, by examining the frequency and nature of violations, and finding expla-
nations for them, we can show how important a norm is. Second, the reaction
to the violations of a norm is extremely important—condemnation of the vio-
lations is a sign of the continuing impact of the norm while lack of reaction
or support for the violations indicates a recess of the norm. Third, the justifica-
tions for violations of a norm provide empirical data for analysis of the motives
behind justifications, which can reveal the (lack of) importance of the norm.
Moreover, the specific aspects of justifications point to which elements of the
norm are most significant.
The structure of the article is as follows. In the next section, we introduce the
anti-mercenary norm and discuss its relevance to contemporary PMSCs. In the
third section, we analyze the violations of the anti-mercenary norm by the UN.
In the fourth and fifth sections, we explore the official UN justifications and
condemnations of these violations, respectively. In the sixth section, we dis-
cuss our key findings and their implications. In the last section, we conclude
6 UN Secretary-General 2012, para. 8.

7 UN Department of Safety and Security 2012a.
8 UN Department of Safety and Security 2012b.
9 UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries 2013, para. 17.
10 Percy 2007, 36–37.

80 bures and meyer
that the anti-mercenary norm is no longer puritanical when it comes to the

UN’s use of PMSCs. Beyond departing from key elements of the anti-mercenary
norm, the official and widespread use of PMSCs by the UN undermines its
long-established identity as a key anti-mercenary norm entrepreneur and also
its ontological security.
2 The Anti-Mercenary Norm
“For as long as there have been mercenaries, there has been a norm against
mercenary use.”11 This opening statement from Percy’s book Mercenaries: The
History of a Norm in International Relations highlights the long pedigree of the
international norm of opposition to mercenarism, whose origins can be traced
as far back as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Nevertheless, albeit it is
possible to trace different variants of this norm throughout history, Percy con-
tends that there is “a clear thread of continuity between the pre-nineteenth
century variants of the anti-mercenary norm and those of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries” when it comes to its two key aspects: (1) the belief that
mercenaries are negative actors because they do not fight for the proper cause
and, as a result, undermine the group that hires them; and (2) the belief that
mercenaries are uncontrolled and, as a result, undermine the role of the state
as the primary holder of the monopoly of the use of force.12 Moreover, while
acknowledging that this norm “cannot explain all aspects of state behaviour,”
Percy further argues that the anti-mercenary norm “is neither epiphenomenal
nor merely an intervening variable” because “it has shaped state interests in
such a way that the use of private force has been restricted and the opportuni-
ties for mercenaries themselves have been constrained.”13 In fact, by the 1990s,
the norm had become so strong and internalized that its influence on policy
was “puritanical, in that its influence [appeared] to be automatic and no longer
tied to the facts,”14 prompting states (and other actors) to behave irrationally in
terms of cost-benefit analysis of the use of private force (i.e., against the logic
of consequences).
While there are other accounts of the history and the influence of the anti-
mercenary norm,15 we follow Percy’s approach because, by singling out only
11 Percy 2007, 1.
12 Percy 2007, 218–219.
13 Percy 2007, 18–19.
14 Percy 2007, 32.
15 Fitzsimmons 2009; Krahmann 2013; Petersohn 2014.

two aspects of the anti-mercenary norm (a larger group cause independent of

personal profit motivation and the control of the proper authority) as crucial, it
allows for the analysis of the norm’s influence on the use of private force in dif-
ferent historical periods. Specifically, Percy argues that although twenty-first-
century PMSCs should not be considered mercenaries because they associate
themselves with a larger group cause and they are under “tight” state control,16
they “do not avoid the anti-mercenary norm entirely.”17 As a consequence, nei-
ther the presence of a sizable PMSCs industry, nor the fact that powerful states
are eager to use its services, “poses a major challenge to the continued influence
of the norm against mercenary use,” which continues to shape the opportu-
nities available to PMSCs and the ways that states and other actors use their
services.18 Percy’s approach therefore offers a plausible way out of the hitherto
inconclusive terminological debate that is fundamental for all assessments of
the proscriptive scope of the anti-mercenary norm—while some would con-
cur with the former UN special rapporteur on mercenaries that PMSCs are
little more than corporatized mercenaries and thus deserve the accompanying
moral and legal opprobrium, others would maintain that PMSCs are legitimate
military and security service providers, capable of self-regulation under indus-
try codes and (inter)national regulatory initiatives.19
In this context, it is important to note that, with the exception of the Work-
ing Group on the Use of Mercenaries, the UN has always stressed that it uses
only defensive security services of private security companies (PSCs) and not
military services of private military companies (PMCs).20 While this is empir-
ically correct in most cases where the UN directly hires security services (see
below), these same companies are also known to provide military services to
other clients in the same areas of operation. Thus, in line with the current aca-
demic literature and the 2008 Montreux Document,21 which summarizes the
pertinent international legal obligations and good practices for states’ use of
private security services, in this article we use the umbrella term private mili-
tary and security companies.
16 Percy argues that private companies not offering offensive combat services can point to
a greater cause because they fight for the goals of their home state, contract “primarily”
or “exclusively” with their home state, or work only on projects approved by their home
state. Percy 2007, 235. For a rebuttal, see Petersohn 2014, 480–482.
17 Percy 2007, 237.
18 Percy 2007, 232; Percy 2014, 80.
19 For a recent literature review, see Sorensen 2015, 405.
20 Østensen 2011, 7.
21 See International Committee of the Red Cross 2011.

82 bures and meyer
3 Violations of the Norm: UN Use of Private Military and Security

Companies
Internal UN reports22 and external studies23 have established that contract-

ing the services of PMSCs is nowadays a common and systemwide practice
of most, if not all, UN agencies, funds, programs, departments, country teams,
and local duty stations. They have used PMSCs for a wide range of services,
including both armed and unarmed security, risk assessment, security training
and management, logistical support, base construction, transportation, convoy
protection, consultancy, and other specialized services such as demining, elec-
tion support, strategic information gathering, and security sector reform. The
use of PMSCs’ services has also been documented in all types of UN field mis-
sions, including humanitarian, political, and peacekeeping missions. However,
despite calls and proposals for rather extensive PMSCs’ operations to remedy
UN Member State inaction,24 PMSCs have thus far not been directly contracted
as frontline peacekeepers by the UN.
When it comes to the UN’s direct use of PMSCs’ services, specific data has
thus far been published in only two UN reports. In December 2012, the annexes
of a report by the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Ques-
tions for the first time offered concrete information regarding the numbers
of armed PMSCs’ personnel used in UN political missions and peacekeeping
operations in 2012–2013, including company names and UN General Assem-
bly approved budgets. Specifically, the report indicated that 42 PMSCs were
under contract with UN missions and operations as of October 2012, employ-
ing over 5,000 armed private guards, with a total budget of $ 30,931,122. It also
showed that contracts for armed guards were estimated at $ 40,914,000 for
2013–2014, with a large portion linked to new contracts for the UN Assistance
Mission in Somalia.25 The lists of both political and peacekeeping missions also
revealed that, while the UN primarily used armed PMSCs’ services in complex
(post)conflict settings in Africa (fifteen countries) and the Middle East (three
countries), private security was also procured for the UN Global Support Cen-
ter in Spain.
However, closer scrutiny of the 42 PMSCs listed in the annexes of the 2012
Advisory Committee report reveals that their authors (“representatives of the
22 Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions 2012; UN Secretary-

General 2012; UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries 2014.
23 Pingeot 2014; Østensen 2011; Patterson 2008; Østensen 2013; Pingeot 2012.
24 Boot and Kirkpatrick 2006; Fitzsimmons 2005; Patterson 2009; Rochester 2007.
25 Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions 2012.

Secretary-General”)26 were not well versed in the complex global nature of

the PMSCs’ business. While they informed the committee that the UN system
had “only one contract with a large multinational armed private security com-
pany”27—namely, IDG Security in Afghanistan—they listed in the annexes
several contracts for armed private security with local branches of G4S, the
largest PMSC in the world, in Cameroon, Haiti, and Kosovo.28 This, in turn,
suggests that while the UN may have a “policy of contracting primarily with
locally registered companies or companies that have local partnerships” so
that most security-related contracts would go to local providers,29 in practice
many contracts had been awarded to local branches of global PMSCs regis-
tered under different names. This is also apparent from the official UN list of
all companies registered as a supplier to the UN Secretariat (UN headquarters,
offices away from headquarters, regional commissions, special tribunals, and
field missions), which includes many major British and US PMSCs, including
Aegis Defence Services, Gray Security Services, Hart Security, Specialist Gurkha
Services, MPRI, and Olive Group.30 This information supports the findings of
two external studies that found that the UN typically uses major PMSCs for
longer periods (several years in a row) rather than for short-term, quick deploy-
ment “temporary” solutions,31 and that several major US and British PMSCs
“feature prominently in UN contracts,” a result of “pre-qualifications, prefer-
ence for companies which have local partnerships, personal preferences or
connections, urgency, or a combination of these factors.”32
The second UN report with specific data on the UN’s contracting of PMSCs
is the August 2014 report of the UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenar-
ies. While not providing lists of PMSCs’ contracts in different UN missions, the
report stated that as of May 2014, thirty unarmed and armed companies had
been used in peacekeeping missions and political missions. It further speci-
fied that the UN used armed PMSCs in three countries and unarmed PMSCs
in twelve countries where there were peacekeeping missions and eleven coun-
tries where there were special political missions. However, the report specifi-
26 Presumably, UN officials from the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Department

of Political Affairs, or Department of Safety and Security.
27 Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions 2012, para. 23.
28 Moreover, another private military and security company (PMSC) listed in the annexes,
Ronco Consulting, had been acquired by G4S before the publication of the report. See
G4S 2008.
29 Østensen 2011, 55.
30 See UN Procurement Division 2018.
31 Pingeot 2012, 32.
32 Østensen 2011, 58.

84 bures and meyer
cally listed only the 12 peacekeeping missions and 1 facility of the Department
of Field Support, claiming that of the total of 4,412 security guards contacted by
these 13 entities, only 574 were armed. It then also stated that from the total esti-
mated budget for 2013/2014 for the use of PMSCs, approximately $ 42,125,297,
$ 14,015,520 was for “armed services” in just 2 missions—UN Stabilization Mis-
sion In Haiti ($5,125,200) and UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan
($8,890,320).33
Thus, not only does there appear to be a discrepancy within the reported
figures regarding the number of missions/countries where the UN used armed
PMSCs in the 2014 Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries report but, more-
over, these figures are much lower than the figures reported in the October
2012 Advisory Committee report (see above). Since it appears unlikely that
the UN’s use of armed PMSCs would go down from 22 missions to just 2
or 3 and that the number of armed security guards in these missions would
drop from over 5,000 to less than 600 in the course of less than 2 years, one
has to wonder about the accuracy of the data presented in these UN reports.
In addition to terminological issues (PSCs vs. PMCs; see above), a plausible
explanation for the substantial differences in the data presented in the 2014
Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries and the 2012 Advisory Commit-
tee reports is their haphazard compilation. For example, although the 2012
report was supposed to list contracts with “armed private security compa-
nies” at UN political missions and peacekeeping operations, it also included
contracts for the “provision of explosive detection devices” and “canine ser-
vices.”34
To complement the problematic data from UN reports on the direct use of
PMSCs’ services by the UN Secretariat and political and peacekeeping mis-
sions, we searched the Annual Statistical Reports on UN Procurement and the
statistics provided by the UN Procurement Division. Since 2009, the Annual
Statistical Reports have included data for two further unspecified categories of
“security services” and “security and safety equipment” and, as such, they offer
insights on all security outsourcing by the entire UN system. Importantly, this
includes data for most of the key UN funds, programs, and agencies, which tend
to procure their own contracts with PMSCs. In contrast, the statistics provided
since 2007 by the UN Procurement Division has included data for security pro-
curement of UN headquarters and local UN missions only.

34 Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions 2012, Annex I, 12.

figure 1 Annual statistical report on United Nations Procurement figures for security ser-
vices and equipment (2009–2016)
Note: Y axis shows the annual UN expenditures in millions of dollars, rounded to
the nearest million. X axis indicates the relevant year. First column from the left
represents UN expenditures for security services, second column represents UN
expenditures for security equipment, third column shows total UN expenditures
for security services and equipment in the given year.
Prepared by the authors using data from the Annual Statistical
Report on United Nations Procurement from 2009–2016, www.ungm
.org/Public/ASR.
Albeit the data in the annual UN Statistical Reports and the UN Procure-
ment Division databases may be incomplete and the specific figures that they
provide often differ,35 they do allow for tracking the overall trends of UN expen-
ditures on security procurement over the past decade. As indicated in Figure 1,
there has been an overall 521 percent increase in the UN’s total expenditures on
security services and security equipment contracting between 2009 and 2016.
Even more remarkable is the overall 1,440 percent increase in the total expendi-
tures on security procurement by UN headquarters and local missions between
2007 and 2016 captured in Figure 2, albeit much of it is due to the sharp rise
of security procurement by UN headquarters between 2015 and 2016. In the
absence of any explanations provided by the UN, we speculate that this hike,
as well as the sharp drop in expenditures for security equipment within the
35 Pingeot 2012, 47.

86 bures and meyer
figure 2 UN headquarters and local missions’ procurement of security services and equip-
ment (2007–2016)
Note: Y axis shows the annual UN expenditures in millions of dollars, rounded
to the nearest million. X axis indicates the relevant year. First column from the
left represents UN headquarters’ expenditures for “security and safety services
and equipment,” second column represents UN local missions’ expenditures for
“security and safety services and equipment,” and third column shows the total
UN headquarters’ and local missions’ expenditures for “security and safety ser-
vices and equipment” in the given year. No data is available for 2008. For 2016,
all columns provide data for expenditures for a further unspecified category
titled “security.”
Prepared by the authors using data from the UN Procurement
Division website from 2007–2016, www.un.org/Depts/ptd/
procurement‑by‑commodity‑table‑detail/2016.
entire UN system from 2015 to 2016 depicted in Figure 1, is primarily due to

changes in the terminology or methodology used to compile the relevant UN
statistics.36
36 The terminology used in the Annual Statistical Reports on UN Procurement has changed
several times since 2009. The latest available report for 2016 referred to “Public Order and
Security and Safety Services” and “Law Enforcement and Security and Safety Equipment
and Supplies.” The terminology used by the UN Procurement Division has been more
consistent—prior to 2016, when a generic “Security” category was introduced, the rele-
vant category was consistently called “Security & Safety Equipment & Services.”

4 Justifications for the UN’s Use of Private Military and Security

Companies
In contrast to numerous arguments advanced in favor of the UN’s use of

PMSCs’ services in the academic literature,37 the aforementioned official UN
reports have specifically advanced only two interlinked justifications of the
proliferation of private security procurement in the past decade: (1) an ever
increasing demand for UN delivery on the ground in increasingly complex
(post)conflict areas, which represent the riskiest operational environments;
and (2) the absence of other means to ensure the protection of UN person-
nel, premises, and operations by the host country, other Member States, or the
UN system in such environments.
The former justification has its origins in 2009 when the UN system Chief
Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) adopted a new strategic vision that
instituted a major policy shift in UN security management from a “when-to-
leave” to a “how-to-stay” approach.38 As a consequence of this shift, “the UN
does continue to work in areas that we probably would not have worked in
10 [or] 15 years ago.”39 However, similar to other actors operating in insecure
conflict areas, the UN has increasingly suffered attacks against its personnel
and premises—between 2003 and 2014, 567 UN civilian staff were attacked
and over 200 killed, most of them in Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Nigeria, Timor-
Leste, and Somalia.40 As a consequence, a growing number of UN staff have
come to believe “that the United Nations is no longer a shield but a target” and
that “the Organization lacks the internal capacity to provide for the safety and
security of its staff deployed in highly volatile environments.”41
Ultimately, such concerns about the lack of security of UN staff and premises
have prompted the Secretary-General to “review the appropriateness of the use
of armed private security companies and their personnel.” In May 2011, “on the
basis of consultations within the United Nations system,” the Secretary-General
decided “that the Organization should resort to the use of armed private secu-
rity companies and their personnel only as the last option to enable United
Nations activities in high-risk environments … when a United Nations security
37 These include the availability, professionalism, and deployment readiness of PMSCs’ per-
sonnel; better organization and equipment; and lower costs. For a detailed discussion, see
Bures 2005; Patterson 2008; Spearin 2011.
39 Interview with the UN under-secretary-general for safety and security, Kevin Kennedy,
cited in Pingeot 2014, 12.
40 UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries 2014, paras. 8, 20.
41 UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, paras. 16, 20.

88 bures and meyer
risk assessment had concluded that other alternatives … were insufficient.”42

Although the UN has been using PMSCs’ services since the 1990s,43 and in 2011
alone it spent almost $114 million for security services (see Figure 1), this rep-
resented the first official public acknowledgment on behalf of the UN system.
Moreover, the Secretary-General explicitly justified the contracting of PMSCs
as a last resort measure, when no other alternatives are available to protect UN
staff and premises.
However, since the use of PMSCs’ services was not an officially recognized
option before May 2011, the UN lacked an official policy and coherent sys-
temwide guidelines for the use of PMSCs’ services, and different parts of the
UN system had adopted their own position on this issue. Thus, shortly after
the Secretary-General formally approved the use of PMSCs, a working group
of the UN Inter-Agency Security Management Network, with representatives
from relevant departments, funds, and programs as well as the two UN staff
federations, was convened to produce a new UN policy and new guidelines on
the use of PMSCs’ services.44 Published in November 2012 by the UN Depart-
ment of Safety and Security, the policy specifies that the UN system may use
services provided by armed PMSCs only to protect UN personnel, premises,
and property and to provide mobile protection for UN personnel and assets. In
line with the earlier decision by the Secretary-General, it stresses that the use
of armed PMSCs “may be considered only when there is no possible provision
of adequate and appropriate armed security from the host Government, alter-
nate member State(s), or internal United Nations system resources.”45 It also
specifies that PMSCs hired by the UN are required to provide confirmation,
in writing, of compliance with a mandatory screening process and are asked to
develop and implement company policies on the use of force, firearms manage-
ment, and weapons manuals. These policies must conform to the national laws
of the home and host states, and should be consistent with the International
Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC).46 The guide-
lines outline the procurement process, including the establishment of a model
contract, statement of works, and the mechanisms for ensuring accountabil-
ity at all levels within the UN security management system. They also specify
that armed PMSCs’ guards can be used to “provide a visible deterrent to poten-
tial attackers and an armed response to repel any attack” in only two cases:
42 UN Secretary-General 2012, para. 8.

44 Pingeot 2014, 10.
45 UN Department of Safety and Security 2012b, para. 3.
46 See International Code of Conduct Association 2018.

(1) for static protection of UN personnel, premises, and property; and (2) for
mobile protection of UN personnel and property. Although the guidelines give
an overview of the basic functions that these services encompass, they do not
specify which services cannot be outsourced to PMSCs.47
The increasing emphasis on regulation of PMSCs is also apparent from con-
tent analysis of reports by the Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries, the
only UN body specifically tasked with covering the activities of traditional
mercenaries and, since September 2014, PMSCs.48 While its initial reports
(published from 2005 to 2008) largely echoed the self-determination, national
sovereignty, and human rights violations critiques from the annual reports
published by the working group’s predecessor—the special rapporteur on use
of mercenaries—from 2008, the focus has gradually shifted to regulation of
PMSCs’ activities.49 Thus, instead of describing the problematic activities of
PMSCs and cataloging various human rights violations committed by their
employees, the working group has increasingly focused on analyzing existing
national legislation and relevant international treaties. Regarding the latter,
it has repeatedly pointed out the need for a new international legally bind-
ing regulatory instrument that would replace the largely ineffective 1989 UN
International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Train-
ing of Mercenaries. In 2009, pending a request by the Human Rights Council,
the working group presented such an instrument—the UN Draft International
Convention on the Regulation, Oversight and Monitoring of Private Military
and Security Companies, which emphasizes state responsibility to regulate
and monitor, rather than ban and criminalize, PMSCs’ activities.50 In 2010, the
UN Human Rights Council established another open-ended intergovernmen-
tal working group with the mandate to consider the possibility of elaborating
an international regulatory framework on PMSCs. Albeit such a framework has
yet to come to fruition and the 2009 Draft Convention has had few practical or
political implications thus far, but the recent UN emphasis on regulation and
control of PMSCs’ activities is both clear and unprecedented.
47 UN Department of Safety and Security 2012a.

48 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 2016.
49 The working group reports are available at http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx
?m=152. The special rapporteur reports are available at http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/
dpage_e.aspx?m=105.
50 For an analysis of the Draft Conventions’ provisions, as well as their shortcomings, see
Østensen 2011.

90 bures and meyer
5 Condemnations versus Opacity
Although numerous reports have been produced by the two UN special rap-
porteurs (condemning the activities of PMSCs in general) and the UN Work-
ing Group on the Use of Mercenaries (criticizing the PMSCs in general and
recently also their use by the UN in particular), few other parts of the UN sys-
tem have officially stated their opinions regarding the UN’s use of PMSCs. Two
notable exceptions include the 2002 report of the Secretary-General on UN
outsourcing practices, which stated that contracting out security services “may
compromise the safety and security of delegations staff and visitors” and noted
that PMSCs’ services “will be phased out in due course” and replaced with UN
staff members.51 For its part, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitar-
ian Affairs (OCHA) has raised its own concerns about PMSCs’ role in war-torn
areas in its 2004 guidelines on humanitarian-military interaction in Iraq, not-
ing that they were “increasingly becoming a target” and raised “problems of
operational control, accountability and liability.”52
There also is only limited evidence of open condemnation or opposition
to the UN’s use of PMSCs’ services in interviews and statements of top UN
officials. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who also had been the
under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations in the 1990s, preferred
“to improve the organization’s recruitment of national troop contingents and
to strengthen UN operational control over its missions.”53 Jean-Marie Gué-
henno, another former under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations,
“was likewise cool towards PMSCs.”54 In her 2007 book, Percy cited only three
interviews with senior UN officials to support her claim that “the depth of
international dislike for mercenaries would prevent the UN from ever using
private force in a peacekeeping capacity, no matter how useful they might
be.”55
It is also important to note that except for the 2014 report by the UN Work-
ing Group on the Use of Mercenaries, all other aforementioned UN reports
and statements of UN top officials date back to the first decade of the twenty-
first century. Moreover, their limited numbers point to the prodigious opacity
that surrounds the UN’s use of PMSCs. In spite of repeated requests for greater
51 UN General Assembly 2002, para. 4.

52 UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2004, 5.
53 Cited in Pingeot 2012, 23.
54 Cited in Pingeot 2012, 23.
55 Percy 2007, 224.

transparency from within the UN system56 and from external experts,57 only
two UN reports have thus far provided specific data regarding the UN’s use of
PMSCs, and the accuracy of some of this data is open to debate (see above).
There are several technical explanations for this persisting lack of informa-
tion, including client confidentiality clauses in PMSCs’ contracts; poor record
keeping and reporting across the UN system as a whole, as well as within the
Secretariat and individual parts of the UN system.58 Jointly, these explanations
could also imply that the UN has been remarkably shy about discussing its use
of PMSCs simply because the UN system is too unwieldy and disorganized to
produce a coherent policy. However, UN staff have also often lacked the autho-
rization to participate in or provide information to studies of the UN’s use of
PMSCs,59 which suggests that the persisting opacity that surrounds its use of
PMSCs’ services may be “a deliberate strategy of the UN’s leadership to avoid
open discussion and keep its policymaking process almost completely in the
dark, reflecting the sensitive and potentially embarrassing nature of the com-
panies and their work.”60 This strategy appears to have worked reasonably well
vis-à-vis the UN Member States, who for the first time openly debated the orga-
nization’s use of PMSCs only after the publication of the first two UN reports on
its use of PMSCs in late 2012 (see above).61 However, this proves only that opac-
ity runs contrary to the UN’s official primary strategy to address the intricacies
of its use of PMSCs’ services—without transparency, no amount of UN guide-
lines and regulations can ensure democratic oversight and public scrutiny.
6 No Longer Puritanical and Changing, but Still Influential?
The findings of our analysis of the UN’s use of PMSCs’ services suggest that
the puritanical turn in the history of the anti-mercenary norm is over. Albeit
the official UN data is still relatively scarce and incomplete, there is irrefutable
evidence of regular, widespread, and often long-term contracting of PMSCs
within the UN system and its field missions. The UN’s use of armed PMSCs’ ser-

57 Østensen 2011; Pingeot 2014.
58 Østensen 2011, 8–9.
60 Pingeot 2012, 9.
61 These debates revealed stark differences of opinion among UN Member States, largely
reflecting their own national policies regarding PMSCs. Interviews are cited in Pingeot
2014, 10.

92 bures and meyer
vices was officially justified by the Secretary-General in May 2011 as a last resort
measure that allows the UN to operate in increasingly complex and hostile
(post)conflict areas where no other alternatives are available to protect UN
personnel and premises. Since late 2012, the UN also has had an official pol-
icy and specific guidelines for security outsourcing. All of this indicates that
the use of PMSCs’ services, both unarmed and armed, is nowadays presumed
to be acceptable within the entire UN system.
A second important indicator of the waning proscriptive impact of the anti-
mercenary norm is the relative absence of condemnations of security outsourc-
ing in official UN reports and statements by UN officials. The few critical excep-
tions all date back to the first decade of the twenty-first century, and they have
had little practical impact as there is no empirical evidence of the UN taking
back security functions from PMSCs. In fact, the opposite has happened and
all parts of the UN system and UN field missions, including peacekeeping oper-
ations, have progressively expanded their use of PMSCs’ services in the 2010s
(see Figures 1 and 2). As a consequence, even the Working Group on the Use
of Mercenaries nowadays primarily focuses on the analysis of guidelines and
regulations of PMSCs. Similarly, in stark contrast to the 1989 UN International
Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenar-
ies, the 2009 UN Draft International Convention on the Regulation, Oversight
and Monitoring of Private Military and Security Companies emphasizes state
responsibility to regulate, rather than ban, PMSCs’ activities.
The abrupt shift of the UN’s position on the use of PMSCs in 2011 therefore
can also be interpreted as a belated recognition of the costs of its long-standing
anti-mercenary norm entrepreneurship.62 The UN played a prominent role in
the institutionalization of the anti-mercenary norm in the second half of the
twentieth century and both the special rapporteur and, at least initially, the
Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries were extremely critical of PMSCs
even as their services were used by an ever increasing number of customers,
including states as well as other international and nongovernmental organiza-
tions. As a consequence, the bulk of the recent regulatory action has happened
outside of the UN (i.e., the 2008 Montreux and 2010 ICoC processes). More-
over, the UN’s refusal to officially acknowledge its use of PMSCs’ services up
until 2011 also clearly impeded the development of its own coherent internal
policy for at least two decades.
A closer analysis of the key UN documents, however, also reveals some lin-
gering influence of both key aspects of the anti-mercenary norm within the
62 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point to our attention.

UN system. When it comes to the lack of control, all recent UN documents

have emphasized the need for regulation of PMSCs’ contracting to ensure their
accountability. Perhaps most importantly, albeit that the 2012 UN Policy and
Guidelines have both been criticized on several grounds,63 they introduced
the first set of standardized rules for the use of armed PMSCs’ services within
the entire UN system. In particular, the guidelines established a clear chain
of accountability (the use of armed private security must be approved by the
under-secretary-general for safety and security); increased systemwide trans-
parency (all UN agencies, funds, and programs must be notified when any UN
entity hires armed security services); and attempted to prevent the hiring of
PMSCs with dubious records (their operating procedures must be consistent
with the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers)
and problematic employees (companies must conduct screening and train-
ing of all employees to meet specified UN standards) that could tarnish the
UN’s own reputation. Moreover, both the UN Policy and Guidelines envisaged
relatively tight oversight of PMSCs’ activities on the ground with daily onsite
inspections and monthly review of performance by UN staff.
When it comes to the lack of a proper cause, the UN’s attempt to justify the
need to contract PMSCs as a last resort suggests that the practice is still per-
ceived as controversial. This is because similar to “a decision by a government
to employ outside military assistance is an admission of its own forces’ fail-
ure [which] is likely to cause severe loss of face for its military personnel,”64
the UN’s need to use PMSCs’ services to carry out some of its core functions
reveals its fundamental weakness. The UN, therefore, wants to at least signal
that its decision to use PMSCs should not be taken as its endorsement, but as
an act of desperation—had other options been available, UN officials would
have pursued them.65
In this context, however, it is important to note the dual nature of the UN
as an international organization. Although this article concerns primarily the
direct use of PMSCs’ services by the UN system, over which UN officials exer-
cise considerable control, PMSCs also frequently get involved in UN field oper-
63 For paying no attention to security services other than armed guards; excessively rely-
ing on self-reporting from hired PMSCs when it comes to their employees’ screening and
training; showing limited concern for the impact of PMSCs on the UN’s security posture,
UN mandates, and image of the organization; and failing to address access to justice issues
for victims of misconduct by PMSCs and human rights violations of their employees. See
The Use of Private Military and Security Companies by the United Nations: International
Legal Aspects 2014.
64 Shearer 1997, 205.
65 For a rebuttal, see Pingeot 2012.

94 bures and meyer
ations via indirect contracting through UN Member State contingencies. This

includes Western countries unable or unwilling to supply sworn public person-
nel to UN missions66 and developing countries motivated to take part in peace-
keeping operations by the UN reimbursement system.67 Some UN Member
States have also exercised their host government responsibility to protect the
UN staff and local premises by hiring PMSCs’ personnel instead of using their
public security agencies.68 Besides, several Western countries have outsourced
to PMSCs their training and security sector reform assistance programs aimed
at increasing the numbers of capable troops and police units that could also be
deployed in UN operations. The contracted PMSCs, therefore, have a “consider-
able influence on the evolution of peacekeeping, as they help define concepts,
standards and criteria for peacekeepers.”69
Moreover, there is also some evidence that Member States that have them-
selves resorted to large-scale security outsourcing have openly encouraged the
UN to follow their example. In its report accompanying the appropriations bill
regarding US contributions to UN peacekeeping activities in 2005, the Senate
Committee on Appropriations, for example, stated the following:
In some cases, private companies can carry out effective peacekeeping

missions for a fraction of the funding the United Nations requires to carry
out the same missions. At a minimum, such companies should be uti-
lized to supplement the number of blue berets and blue helmets which,
in these turbulent times, the United Nations is having a difficult time
recruiting. The United Nations can no longer afford to ignore the potential
cost-savings that private companies with proven records of good service
and good behavior offer.70
Furthermore, prior professional experiences of UN officials at the national

level also matter. For example, from May 2009 until January 2013, the post of
under-secretary-general for safety and security, who has to approve all requests
for security contracting, was filled by Gregory B. Starr. He has been known to
embrace the deployment of PMSCs in his past posts as director of the Diplo-
66 In the United States, for example, the federal police force cannot be seconded directly to
international missions, so the State Department relies entirely on recruiting police per-
sonnel from PMSCs.
67 Coleman 2014.
68 Østensen 2011, 13.
69 Østensen 2014, 437.
70 US Senate 2004.

matic Security Service and principal deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau
of Diplomatic Security in the US Department of State.71
The discussion above therefore not only highlights the significant role of UN
Member States when it comes to understanding the shift in the UN’s institu-
tional position on the use of PMSCs in 2011, but it also hints at a norm change at
the state level. This finding is in line with several recent studies, which suggest
that the anti-mercenary norm has evolved so that, since the 1990s, “private force
is acceptable when used by ‘legitimate states’ and when used defensively.”72
7 Conclusion
As we have shown above, it is clear that the widespread use of PMSCs’ ser-
vices raises more than just technical and legal dilemmas for all parts of the UN
system. The very need to justify this practice suggests that it poses a number
of profound challenges to the UN’s internal and external legitimacy. Perhaps
most importantly, the official and widespread use of PMSCs’ services by the
UN may undermine its ontological security—that is, the UN’s view of itself as
the beacon of international peace and security. As such, the publication of the
UN Policy and Guidelines can be interpreted as an attempt to minimize the
reputational risk to the UN caused by its officially sanctioned use of PMSCs’
services. Correspondingly, the persisting and, apparently deliberate, opacity
surrounding the UN’s use of PMSCs can be interpreted as an attempt by the
Secretariat to minimize the associated ontological dissonance caused by the
unresolved clash of this practice with the UN’s long-established identity as a
key anti-mercenary norm entrepreneur. Alternatively, however, the abrupt shift
of the UN’s position on the use of PMSCs in 2011 can also be interpreted as
recognition that a priori normative hostility toward PMSCs pushed them to
work outside the UN processes for regulation. As a consequence, the UN has
failed to provide effective governance and it is struggling to come back to rele-
vance on this important issue. In either case, the UN’s officially sanctioned use
of PMSCs reflects a major departure from the orthodox historical understand-
ing of the anti-mercenary norm, which the organization actively promoted for
decades. Future proponents of the anti-mercenary norm will therefore find it
much more difficult to argue against the deployment of force by private sector
actors.
71 Østensen 2011, 42.

72 Percy 2014, 74; see also Petersohn 2014; Krahmann 2011.

96 bures and meyer
Similar to many of its Member States that have even longer and more exten-
sive records of security outsourcing, the UN should have first tackled the diffi-
cult question of whether some of its activities are too important to be (co)per-
formed by PMSCs. The hitherto national-level experiences73 also suggest that
even if they were not in contradiction, neither of the two current strategies of
the UN Secretariat—official guidelines and regulation, and unofficial, yet per-
sisting, opacity—can sufficiently address all of the dilemmas of UN security
outsourcing. Thus, in addition to being frank about the realities of the UN’s
use of PMSCs’ services, UN as well as national-level policymakers should pri-
marily focus on identifying those remedies that would ultimately eliminate the
current need to make the hard choices between PMSCs and nonaction.
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Global Governance 25 (2019) 77–99