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In the aftermath of the Sierra Leone civil war, demobilized militia soldiers have become an attractive resource to private security companies. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article traces the outsourcing of security at American military bases in Iraq to Sierra Leonean ex-militias, facilitated by a British security company and the Sierra Leone government. In doing so, the article contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate on the privatization of security by offering a \"local\" ethnographically informed perspective on the micro-dynamics of \"global\" security. It is argued that the supply of global security depends on a form of local immobility: on a population that is \"stuck\", yet constantly on the move to seize opportunities for survival and recognition. Structured by a chronological account of the recruitment, deployment, and deportation of Sierra Leonean exmilitias, the article discusses how these former militia soldiers experience being reduced to mere bodies rather than recognized labourers. It concludes that notions of race and slavery are employed by the ex-militias to make sense of their predicaments, but most notably as a moral response to the unequal relationships in which they find themselves embedded, in the context of security outsourcing in a global economy.

This article explores the political mobilization of ex-militias for support during post-war elections in Sierra Leone. Taking its point of departure from the tension between ex-militias' potential for deployment and displacement of violence, it illuminates the ambiguous ways in which ex-militia members engage with political big men. The article suggests that the notion of debt can be employed as a prism to explain the complexities of social relations between ex-militia rank-and-file members and political elites and thus aims at shedding novel light on how big men systems and patronage work in post-war society, most notably in the political domain. By tracing particular relations between ex-militia members and political big men over time, the article empirically unravels the enduring yet ambiguous nature of debt relations and how they are shaped by and give shape to “the gift of violence.”

Contemporary warfare depends on private security contractors from countries in the Global South. In Sierra Leone, this dependency has produced emerging markets for private military and security companies (PMSCs) seeking to recruit cheap, military-experienced labor. This article explores how demobilized militia and soldiers in Sierra Leone negotiate categorical divides to make themselves employable for private security contracting in Iraq. Based on 19 months of fieldwork tracing militia soldiers as they move between shift ing security constellations, the article introduces the notion of “shadow soldiering” to explain the entanglements of public-private spheres and the blurring of boundaries between the visible and invisible that characterize these constellations. While scholarly work on PMSCs has increasingly highlighted the public-private interconnectedness, the article contributes an ethnographically informed perspective on how security contractors on the ground interpret such entanglements and how global security dynamics intersects with the local, everyday practices and processes that facilitate the supply of contractors.

Contemporary warfare depends on private security contractors from countries in the Global South. In Sierra Leone, this dependency has produced emerging markets for private military and security companies (PMSCs) seeking to recruit cheap, military-experienced labor. This article explores how demobilized militia and soldiers in Sierra Leone negotiate categorical divides to make themselves employable for private security contracting in Iraq. Based on 19 months of fieldwork tracing militia soldiers as they move between shift ing security constellations, the article introduces the notion of “shadow soldiering” to explain the entanglements of public-private spheres and the blurring of boundaries between the visible and invisible that characterize these constellations. While scholarly work on PMSCs has increasingly highlighted the public-private interconnectedness, the article contributes an ethnographically informed perspective on how security contractors on the ground interpret such entanglements and how global security dynamics intersects with the local, everyday practices and processes that facilitate the supply of contractors.

ABSTRACT Contemporary warfare depends on private security contractors from countries in the Global South. In Sierra Leone, this dependency has produced emerging markets for private military and security companies (PMSCs) seeking to recruit cheap, military-experienced labor. This article explores how demobilized militia and soldiers in Sierra Leone negotiate categorical divides to make themselves employable for private security contracting in Iraq. Based on 19 months of fieldwork tracing militia soldiers as they move between shifting security constellations, the article introduces the notion of “shadow soldiering” to explain the entanglements of public-private spheres and the blurring of boundaries between the visible and invisible that characterize these constellations. While scholarly work on PMSCs has increasingly highlighted the public-private interconnectedness, the article contributes an ethnographically informed perspective on how security contractors on the ground interpret such entanglements and how global security dynamics intersects with the local, everyday practices and processes that facilitate the supply of contractors.

This article examines policy responses to crime and terror as cases through which to illuminate the transformations of contemporary security governance in Denmark. The policies reveal how particular events have triggered a process of security escalation in which conflated notions of threat have called for new policing measures and organizations. We focus on three critical events linked to ‘foreign fighters’, ‘gangs’, and ‘crossovers’ as cases of escalating threat through which to analyze the expansion and conflation of security domains. Policy responses to the crime-terror nexus, we argue, merge reactive and proactive policing measures and formerly distinct domains of securitization and risk management, highlighting the frictional characteristics of security governance. While the Danish Model—informed by a networked-based and multiagency approach to preventing and countering radicalization and extremism—is often referred to as a model of best practice—we propose that future research needs to explore in greater detail how the expansion and conflation of security domains impact security actors who are mandated to implement the operational response to crime and terror.

Through the case of Ghana, this article proposes a link between international peacekeeping deployments and national processes of stabilisation. Based on fieldwork among soldiers and police officers, it explores how peacekeeping experiences are transferred and translated into security provision at home within the field of counterterrorism. Introducing the notion of the ‘peacekeeping-counterterrorism assemblage’ as an analytical lens for unpacking the co-production of external and internal security provision and, more specifically, the processes and practices through which international peacekeeping experiences become entangled with national counterterror policing, the article empirically unfolds the relational and societal impact of peacekeeping on domestic security. The exposure to the human consequences of warfare in peacekeeping missions, the article shows, has nurtured a profound awareness of keeping war at a distance, which may have a preventive effect on the policing of the threat of terrorism, as well as on the broader dynamics of domestic security and stability in Ghana

In the aftermath of an armed conflict in Africa, the international community both produces and demands from local partners a variety of blueprints for reconstructing state and society. The aim is to re-formalize the state after what is viewed as a period of fragmentation. In reality, African economies and polities are very much informal in character, with informal actors, including so-called Big Men, often using their positions in the formal structure as a means to reach their own goals. Through a variety of in-depth case studies, including the DRC, Sierra Leone and Liberia, this comprehensive volume shows how important informal political and economic networks are in many of the continent's conflict areas. Moreover, it demonstrates that without a proper understanding of the impact of these networks, attempts to formalize African states, particularly those emerging from wars, will be in vain.

Christensen reviews Securing Sierra Leone 1997-2013: Defence, diplomacy and development in action by Peter Albrecht and Paul Jackson.