States as Clients and Regulators of PMSCs Working Group
Co-chairs: Saskia Stachowitsch and Maya Eichler
States are key actors at the intersection of Private, Military and Security Companies (PMSC) with Women, Peace and Security (WPS), and their roles at this nexus are complex and potentially contradictory.
States are crucial in grounding WPS institutionally through the establishment and implementation of national action plans (NAPs), although the importance of NAPs within the implementation of WPS varies cross-nationally. They are also taking on a larger role in regulating the private market for force, while at the same time providing the main source of contracts for this industry.
As previous research has shown, states are not neutral actors and bring their own economic, gendered, and racialized dynamics to both WPS implementation and security outsourcing. Against this background, this group explores academic and policy questions around the complicated and varied role of states in (re)producing, addressing, and regulating the intersectionally gendered effects of security outsourcing and PMSCs.
