The Private Security Events Database

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the private provision of military and security services has become a common feature of local, national, and transnational politics. The prevalence of private security has generated important questions about its consequences, but data to answer these questions are sparse. In this article, we introduce the Private Security Events Database (PSED) that traces the involvement of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in events in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia from 1990 to 2012. We describe the PSED project, highlight its descriptive findings, conduct a replication and reanalysis of Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski’s contract data in Africa, and compare the two databases’ coverage of Sierra Leone from 1991 to 1997. Our analysis demonstrates new insights into the relationship between PMSCs and civil war duration, confirming a correlation between PMSC presence and shorter conflicts, but questioning the logic Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski propose. It also points to a number of productive paths for future research.

Delegating violence in democracies: embedded developmentalism and persistence of labor repression in South Korea

“…i.e., low-capacity, non-democratic politieswhich we find less theoretically puzzling (Radziszewski and Akcinaroglu, 2012;Avant and Neu, 2019;Eck et al, 2021).…”

“…Few studies have addressed the causal mechanisms shaping such theoretically ill-explained, yet empirically well-established patterns. Although there is growing work on the role of private security/military companies and related political violence, much of it is focused on cases in developing – i.e., low-capacity, non-democratic polities – which we find less theoretically puzzling (Radziszewski and Akcinaroglu, 2012; Avant and Neu, 2019; Eck et al ., 2021).…”

Policing and Political Violence

“…Scholars have built on this geographically and temporally disaggregated work by also unboxing the plurality of actors that can be found in the conflict space. These research efforts have examined, among other things, the proliferation of different rebels groups across contested spaces, as well as their internal fractionalization (Bakke, Cunningham, and Seymour 2012; Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour 2012; Findley and Rudloff 2012; Fjelde and Nilsson 2012), pro-government militias (Carey, Mitchell, and Lowe 2013; Jentzsch, Kalyvas, and Schubiger 2015; Staniland 2015), transnational agents of violence (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2013; Avant and Neu 2019; Bakke 2014) and civilians themselves as agents active in mitigating the impact of armed actors (Arjona 2017; Kaplan 2017). Despite this growing research program on individual types of actors, scholars have only begun to challenge the unitary actor assumption regarding the state.…”

The Commercial Military Actor Database

“…By contrast, the Private Security Event Database (PSED), published in January 2019, covers all newsworthy events related to private security that have unfolded in three regions— Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia—from 1990 to 2012 (Avant and Neu 2019). Relative to the PSD, the PSED has a substantial geographic scope encompassing all countries, hence all civil wars, in the three regions.…”

“…To date, three datasets offer information about PMSCs: the Private Security Dataset (PSD), the Private Security Event Dataset (PSED), and Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski’s (AandR) dataset (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2020; Avant and Neu 2019; Branovic 2011). However, as demonstrated in this section, they all differ from the CMAD in crucial respects.…”