This article maps out a new research agenda for interpreting the trajectory and dynamics of domestic private security provision in advanced democratic countries: the 'new political economy of private security'. It proceeds on the basis that the key challenge in this field is to construct an agenda which takes account of how both the economic context (shifts in supply and demand) and the political context (statecentric conceptions of legitimacy) of domestic security simultaneously serve to shape the conduct of contemporary private security providers. In attempting to meet this challenge, the article not only builds upon the important theoretical research already undertaken in the form of the nodal governance and anchored pluralism models, but also sheds new light on the nature of domestic private security today.

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How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking to cleanse the market of deviant sellers, the other to communalize the market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical economic conception of how market transactions map onto the public interest. This article makes the case for a new model of regulation, one that seeks to civilize private security. Drawing upon the insights of economic sociology, our model regards the market for security as a moral economy in which commodity and noncommodity values jostle and collide. On this basis, we propose a regulatory architecture where buyers and sellers are cast not only as economic actors but also as moral actors, in the process revealing new avenues through which to encompass private security within the democratic promise of security.

In the last decade, space debris modelling studies have suggested that the long-term low Earth orbit (LEO) debris population will continue to grow even with the widespread adoption of mitigation measures recommended by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee. More recently, studies have shown that it is possible to prevent the expected growth of debris in LEO with the additional removal of a small number of selected debris objects, through a process of active debris removal (ADR). In order to constrain the many degrees of freedom within these studies, some reasonable assumptions were made concerning parameters describing future launch, explosion, solar and mitigation activities. There remains uncertainty about how the values of these parameters will change in the future. As a result, the effectiveness of ADR has only been established and quantified for a narrow range of possible future cases. There is, therefore, a need to broaden the values of these parameters to investigate further the potential benefits of ADR.A study was completed to model and quantify the influence of four key parameters describing launch and explosion rates, the magnitude of solar activity and the level of post-mission disposal compliance on the effectiveness of ADR to reduce the LEO debris population. Each parameter's value was drawn from a realistic range, based upon historical data of the last 50 years and, in the case of post-mission disposal, a current estimate of the level of compliance and a second optimistic value. Using the University of The results showed an increase in the variance of the size of the LEO population at the 2209 epoch compared with previous ADR modelling studies. In some cases, the number of LEO debris objects in the population varied by a factor greater than ten. Ten removals per year were not sufficient to prevent the longterm growth of the population in some cases, whilst ADR was not required to prevent population growth in others.