Introduction

International armed interventions in intrastate conflicts are planned with the expectation that order will be restored through the controlled application of limited military force. This persuasive orthodoxy endures despite the erratic course of foreign interventions in the Middle East over the past two decades. Notions of order, equilibrium or stasis imply systemic balances that, where disturbed, can be reconciled or restored through counteraction. Yet, while we can gather abundant conflict data, observe events from many different vantage points, correlate variables and calibrate possibilities, the calculation of future trajectories of conflict events remains an imprecise and hazardous exercise. Indeed, planned and coordinated international action to address selected strategic challenges, in the current global context, merely manufactures new uncertainties (Beck 1999; 2009). There is extensive evidence that armed interventions provoke protracted asymmetric retaliation on the part of those displaced by traumatic regime change. In the interconnected contemporary global system, the effects of these displacements have regional and global ramifications. ‘Distant localities’ (adapting James Rosenau's notion of ‘distant proximities’) are today intimately associated across political and geographical space (Rosenau 2003). Polarities between political interests and ideologies, geographical and societal inequalities in wealth and power broadly defined and the many and varied complex connections between people and peoples across space generate uncertainties that defy prediction. Thus, to anticipate only positive change from the rapid assertion of overwhelming military power into faraway places is to downplay the strings or threads of happenings, decisions, ideas and beliefs that shape the subjective realities of global security. Globalisation is aberrant in its complexity, and global dynamics do not yield simple choices between binary opposites of order and disorder, control or chaos. The search for a more nuanced and contextualised understanding of global security relations leads inescapably towards the analysis of global patterns of connection and organisation that generate and sustain multiscalar supply chains of violence. This chapter argues for a global and adaptive approach to the governance of private force.