The expansion of commercial private security in the contemporary era is not a return to the buccaneering capitalism of Cecil Rhodes, and even less the renaissance of the military mercantilism of the seventeenth century’s chartered companies. Nor does it, in the majority of cases, mirror the most spectacular activities of late twentieth-century PMCs or ‘neo-mercenaries’, however much this image tends to capture the imagination. To the extent that these historical periods serve useful purposes, it is as metaphors and reminders of the historically and politically constructed nature of the public–private distinction and its connection to shifting structures of political power, not as templates for thinking about the emerging place of commercial security in the world order.

This chapter seeks to develop the theoretical foundations for understanding contemporary global private security. To do so, we make two moves: first, we turn for inspiration to theories of globalization that emphasize the relationship between the restructuring of national state structures and global transformations. Drawing on recent analyses of globalization, we argue that security privatization is part of a wider process of partial state ‘disassembly’ and a concomitant emergence of ‘global assemblages’ that link national and global structures. In security, a result of these shifts is the emergence of what we call global security assemblages – transnational structures and networks in which a range of different actors and normativities interact, cooperate and compete to produce new institutions, practices and forms of deterritorialized security governance. These assemblages are reflections and components of important transformations in social and political power. To better reveal their dynamics, we turn in the second part of the chapter to the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, we suggest that Bourdieu’s understanding of fields of practice provides analytic categories that help clarify the resources available to public and private, as well as global and local security actors, allowing us to examine the shifting forms of power and contestation at work within global security assemblages.