Regulating Law or Being Regulated by the Law? An Analysis of Private Military Security Companies under the Regime of International Humanitarian Law

Sammanfattning: The international legal system has weathered sweeping changes during last decades as new actors have appeared in international system. Private Military Security Companies (PMSCs) are one example of the most prominent shifts occurred in the context of laws of war with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) being part of it. Traditionally IHL has been recognized as a body of law regulating the relationships between states or organized armed groups that shared some hierarchical, territorial and administrative characteristics of states. Holding such characteristics made these public actors distinctive from the private actors and drew a line between public and private. However, the improvement of the transnational trade and furtherance of globalization, together with the economic and political climate after the Cold War brought about an idea of outsourcing some activities previously undertaken exclusively by states. In such a context, new actors have raised and operated within international realm that blurred the said traditional line between public and private and brought up doubts on how these new actors could be addressed by IHL. I have evaluated the actual capacity of IHL in accommodating PMSCs. In doing so, I have uncovered a dilemma within IHL when it comes to address the PMSCs. Further, I suggest that this dilemma informs us of what I call a broader self-challenge within the regime of IL; a self-challenge to perceive statehood and to configure the public and private. I suggest that the normalization of the existence and operation of PMSCs discloses a shift in international legal rhetoric when it comes to accommodate non-state actors and it can be translated as a call to go beyond state-centrism as well as a dilution of the state and rhetoric of sovereignty.