Mercenarism, norms and market exchange: Reassembling the private military labour market

The article analyses how the norm against mercenarism shapes the legitimate parameters of exchange in the market for military outsourcing. The dominant interpretation of this dynamic is that neoliberal states and private military companies (PMCs) have come to restrict their transactions to non-combat functions in order to circumvent contemporary articulations of this norm. The article, by contrast, contends that even within these narrowed parameters of exchange, neoliberal states and PMCs have been required to work through the norm against mercenarism. Using the ‘global security assemblages’ approach, and drawing upon new data relating to the UK case, it explores how the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and PMCs have sought to appropriate symbolic capital from a domestic private security licencing regime so as to distance their non-combat transactions from the norm against mercenarism. In so doing, it facilitates a reappraisal of the regulatory potential of this norm within today’s pluralised military landscape.