From Cowboy Detectives to Soldiers of Fortune Private.pdfVIP

Introduction  From Cowboy Detectives to Soldiers of Fortune: Private Security Contracting and Its Contradictions on the New Frontiers of Capitalist Expansion Robert P. Weiss Statesmen, diplomats, business leaders, aristocrats, fascinated by their profession, invited the Pinkertons to their dinner tables and in time ac- cepted them as the law in America, a land they viewed as part frontier. Within a decade the Agency had changedfrom a uniqueprivate American firm of bounty hunters to a sophisticated organization of international law-enforcement officers.—Horan ( 967: 255) Still,for every economic hand wringer, there is at least one cowboy capi- talist ready to tame the newfrontier. “It’s like Texas in 1879,” said Ihsan Hussein Ali, who was not sure why he chose to cite that year inparticular. There are no rules.—Vieth (2003) his special issue of Social JuStice examines The currenT recrudescence, global expansion, and market concentration of the private security industry. TToday’s private security boom is to a large extent powered by the revival of an old service for new markets: assisting in original accumulation. Private se- curity has once again been called upon to help conquer new frontiers for capitalist exploitation, assisting with primitive accumulation in a transnational neoliberal project that proceeds largely through “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2 3 2003: 67). The neoliberal economic policies of global privatization and economic deregulation currently championed by the U.K. and the U.S.—coupled with the “war on terrorism” (which is substantially an imperialist exercise)—are creating a hothouse for private security entrepreneurs, largely U.S.