This article examines the current recrudescence, global expansion, and market concentration of the private security industry. Powered by the revival of an old service for new markets, private security is once again called upon to help conquer new frontiers for capital by assisting with primitive accumulation in a transnational neoliberal project that proceeds largely through "accumulation by dispossession." After identifying challenges to accumulation and the private security response in three periods of U.S. political economy, we discuss four tendencies of the security industry that, together, increase the likelihood and magnitude of the contradictions of private security in a neoliberal political economy.

Key words: private security, neoliberalism, primitive accumulation, security-industrial complex, failed states

Record crime amid political democratization and economic neoliberalism has spurred an astronomical growth in private security throughout the world. After documenting the increase in private firms and discussing its causes in Latin America, the article shows the extent of security privatization by developing a typology based on two dimensions. The first is private security's mission, which now runs the gamut from property protection to public order. The second is state involvement, which ranges from hiring private firms to supporting vigilante groups. Applying this analytical framework to three contrasting countries--Honduras, Bolivia, and Argentina--the article shows the regional extent of private security and highlights its long-term impacts.

Key words: police, crime, violence, democracy, Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, Latin America

This article explores the relationship between private and public security in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The system of private security provision is run by China's public security bureaus in county, city, and provincial jurisdictions. Private security in China, which began a contemporary life in the mid-1980s, has developed in parallel with an economic trajectory that reflects what Michael Dutton calls "the commodification of security," increasingly characterized by a contractual relationship between police and government. Public and private security enjoy a complex but congenial relationship. The establishment and running of private security firms comes under the direct auspices of the public security forces, financially and organizationally. Put simply, private security firms are the handmaiden of public security agencies. This relationship characterizes private security as a parapolicing force that is expected, like its public security counterpart, to play a part in protecting public order. However, this situation is about to change with WTO requirements that China open its security market to foreign ownership.

Key words: private security, public security, Chinese policing, China, security guards

As federal, state, and local governments deepen their commitment to incarceration, so has the private sector operating on the notion that there exists a punishment-profit scheme for the taking. The expanding range of private corrections attracts not only small financial players but also tremendously power investors and corporations, together producing a firm financial infrastructure on which the industry rests. Nevertheless, there appears to be a demand for prisoners to occupy private prison cells; in response, a new geo-economy has emerged whereby prisoners are transported between jurisdictions and across state lines. The article explores those developments of prison profiteering while addressing key political and demographic dimensions of social inequality.

Key words: human geography, investments, neoliberalism, stockholdings, transportation

Pursuing a topic raised by Geoff Ward in Social Justice 31:1-2, and using illustrations from Canada's first privately run adult prison, this article examines work in the burgeoning prison-industrial complex. It argues that (1) corrections officers are best seen as frontline workers, facing typical frontline pressures like work intensification and deskilling; and (2) corrections officers occupy an exposed part of an increasingly coercive regime, where supermax technology and privatization are making corrections work less autonomous and more dangerous.

Key words: corrections officers, guards, privatization, private prisons, neoconservatism

The commercial market in crime control in England and Wales has expanded since the establishment of the first electronic monitoring program in 1989 as central government increasingly subcontracts the provision of security to the commercial sector. While the economic benefits of subcontracting are demonstrable through the audit culture that is central to governmental thinking, wider concerns relating to governance, accountability, and justice have been sidelined in favor of the ideological and economic drive that has opened up the market in commercial crime control. This article looks at the role of the commercial sector as service providers of electronic monitoring.

Key words: privatization, electronic monitoring, techno-corrections, security, social control

The perennial problem for capitalist social orders is that the real, experienced conditions of capitalism undermine the universalist principles that have historically legitimized capitalist social orders. Neoliberalism creates a set of conditions that more openly and transparently undermine the basis of its own legitimacy insofar as the fundamental contradictions between the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few and the liberal tropes of universal prosperity, representation, and freedom become more apparent. As the viability of liberal universalism begins to wane, U.S. imperialist military interventions are increasingly characterized by an ideological mobilization of "market patriotism" that is welding notions of "national security" and the "national interest" to the (neoliberal) market. The article considers how, under conditions of a "war on terror" market patriotism, has been mobilized to facilitate the uninterrupted accumulation of profits, and to provide a basis for heightened collaboration between corporations and government institutions. It analyses the role of market patriotism in the period following the September 11 attacks on New York and in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, before arguing that market patriotism is central to the mobilization of public and private apparatuses to "secure the Imperium" at home and abroad.

Key words: neoliberalism, market patriotism, war on terrorism, hegemony, Gramsci, U.S. imperialism.

War is increasingly becoming a form of state and corporate criminality. Starting from this premise, the author focuses on the illegality perpetrated by invading states and the criminality of the private enterprises these states involve in their military ventures. After discussing the direct involvement of private companies in wars, the article addresses social, political, and legal definitions of white collar and corporate crime, and the way in which these gain acceptance in the public sensibility. Finally, the traits that war and corporate crime possess in common are highlighted, while the definition of "war as corporate crime" presented in the final discussion is situated within the analytical framework of the study, more generally, of the crimes of the powerful.

Key words: war, corporate crime, private enterprise, consensus, market economy public sphere, common good

This article explores the relationship between foreign affairs privatization and public participation. It surveys the administrative law and political science literature and identify the ways that foreign affairs outsourcing may seem, at least at first glance, to thwart various types of public participation. It then considers potential responses, including possible governmental initiatives to increase transparency and ways we might use the private law instruments of contract and trust to create more opportunities for public participation.

Key words: foreign affairs privatization, government contracts, outsourcing, accountability, transparency, World Bank's International Finance Corporation

The development of private prisons over the last few decades reflects a heightened belief that private firms can perform public functions equally as well as governments can. Governments have formed private prisons by "contracting out" government responsibilities to private corporations, thereby attempting to have private entities perform a public function while still holding these corporations publicly accountable. This article examines three key features of accountability with respect to this contracting out: formation, maintenance, and liability. The purpose of this article is to evaluate how the contractual relationship is used to strengthen public accountability of government-private relationships.

Key words: prison, privatization, contract, accountability, government, public-private, formation, maintenance, liability

This article discusses the regulation of the private security industry in South Africa. In the main, it discusses the salient provisions of the Private Security Industry Regulation Act No. 56 of 2001, which establishes the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority. The article discusses the objects of the Authority and its role in the regulatory framework. It further discusses the requirements for registration as a security provider for both natural and juridical persons. The article concludes by discussing the mechanisms for monitoring and investigation of security providers in so far the Act is concerned.

Key words: South Africa, security industry regulation, illegal immigrants, South African Trade Unions (COSATU), Alpha-5 and Teleservices (Angola), Saracen Kampala (Uganda), Osleg Private, Ltd. (Congo)

The doctrine of command responsibility under international law has been diluted by privatization of war. Members of military corporations employed by the United States in armed campaigns remain beyond the sovereign's control in practice. Members of mercenary corporations are not the equivalent of professional soldiers; they lack foundations of lawful authority, professional bonds, and the discipline required to operate under longstanding law of war principles. Conduct of war is an inherently governmental enterprise; the rule for outsourcing to private industry war-fighting functions has been misapplied. Failure to hold individuals culpable for reported war crimes, and interceding contracts between commanders and privatized "soldiers," precludes superiors from being held accountable for offenses of which they had knowledge and failed to prevent or properly punish.

Key words: command responsibility, mercenary corporations, inherently governmental, war crimes