Privatizing Peace?

Is the world ready to privatize peace? Or more precisely, is the United Nations (UN) ready to contract-out peacekeeping/support/making operations to private military firms (PMF)? Kofi Annan did not think so in 1998 (Fidler and Catan 2003). Nor do other UN officials; “There is little support for the privatization of U.N. peacekeeping” (Deen 2004). However, with the recent proposal from Blackwater Security, an American PMF, to intervene on behalf of the UN in Darfur (Witter 2006) the issue of contracting a PMF to conduct a UN sanctioned peace operation remains relevant. Indeed, a vibrant political-economy of knowledge production (academic, policy, media, and industry) sustains discussion of the prospects of and for privatized peace operations. The purpose of this paper is to engage with those literatures that constitute the proposal to privatize UN peace operations as an issue of relevance for and to (academic, policy, popular) discussions of contemporary security issues.