Canadian Consortium on Human Security

James Cockayne

What can the international humanitarian community learn from the recent scandal surrounding Blackwater? Above all, that while outsourcing security functions may increase staff security in the short term it comes with a range of risks in the long term. Dealing with those risks will require multiple stakeholders in the global security industry to be much more creative in their efforts to professionalize this industry. Humanitarians have an important role to play.

Security is increasingly treated – like textiles, food and other consumer products – as a ‘good’ to be delivered through globalized commercial supply chains. The major clients of this global security industry include governments, extractive industries and humanitarian assistance providers. Humanitarians turn to security companies to provide staff security, training and theater risk analysis in the absence of a reliable supply from governments and in-house expertise.

Before Blackwatergate, many clients may have assumed that outsourcing security functions in humanitarian operations meant avoiding the reputational and strategic risks associated with contractor misconduct. But like stakeholders in other globalized industries, clients of the global security industry are beginning to learn that global supply chains also serve as global risk chains. As the US government has learnt the hard way through Blackwatergate, a client’s own reputation – and ability to work with its intended beneficiaries – may be on the line when contractors they employ kill civilians and damage their property. Similarly, a client’s reputation may be jeopardized when its security providers recruit personnel previously involved in human rights abuse – even if the contractors are working for some other client at the time. Clients see administrative efficiencies, cost savings and access to improved expertise in turning to the global security industry. However, reduced administrative costs means reduced administrative control – and increased vulnerability to reputational risk. Risks flow back along these global supply chains; but as of yet, control and accountability arrangements do not.

With public trust in the industry ebbing rapidly, donors, investors and the general public are increasingly asking hard questions about clients’ lack of control over security contractors. Arguments that humanitarians face increased risks in the field and have few alternatives to security companies will hold little sway until they do more to ensure that security companies provide services that increase public security, rather than jeopardize it.

Yet while humanitarians are exposed to all the same risks as states who are clients of security contractors, humanitarians lack the command and control and criminal accountability mechanisms that states enjoy. Humanitarians also lack the market power that states are beginning to use to change contractor practice and centralize information about contractor selection and performance, with the US leading the way post-Blackwatergate.

As a result, many humanitarians are flying blind, relying on the gut instincts and bar-room talk that passes for ‘background vetting’ of companies amongst many field security managers in selecting contractors. Too often, humanitarians select companies without any sense of industry best practices or any use of humanitarians’ potential collective bargaining power to drive up standards and improve market transparency. This will only change if humanitarians work together or with states – especially donors – to share information about contractor selection and performance as well as best practices in contracting and control arrangements.

To begin with, all clients of the global security industry need to reach a clearer position on what functions each of them will and will not outsource – and not simply stumble into ad hoc arrangements as most of them have to date. The backlash against Blackwater in the US has led to bipartisan calls for limits on security contracting, especially in combat, detention and interrogation tasks – and other functions that might be considered ‘inherently governmental’. The new two-year Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting is mandated specifically to address this question.

Humanitarians face similarly fundamental questions about whether turning to the global security industry increases staff security, or in fact blurs the boundaries of humanitarian space by associating humanitarians with military actors. This blurring of the lines between protected civilians and targetable combatants may in fact increase staff insecurity in the long run.

These are risks that the leaders of humanitarian organizations need to take much more seriously. At present, by leaving security arrangements largely to specialist field security managers, whose mandate is to provide staff security in the short term rather than protect the reputation and responsiveness of the organization in the long-term – humanitarians leave their organizational interests hostage both to fortune and to the soldiers of fortune in the global security industry.

Next, clients of the industry need to consider how to harmonize control arrangements across the industry in order to reduce investor and client uncertainty. In the wake of Blackwatergate, the US Congress has taken steps to ensure US criminal jurisdiction is effectively implemented over contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. But numerous other states are also stakeholders in the industry: as hosts to companies, to their operations and as sources of personnel. Unless these states develop criminal accountability regimes on par with what the US is now putting into place, the industry may simply look for ways to avoid US regulatory jurisdiction. Harmonization of criminal accountability arrangements and coordination of jurisdictional priority and transfer arrangements is clearly needed to avoid regulatory arbitrage.

There is also a need to clarify how existing command and control arrangements extend to security contractors in multinational operating theaters. In other words, who decides whether a humanitarian actor’s security contractors can enter a particular area? Who can remove them from that area? Answers to these questions will determine whether or not, in the near future, humanitarians will be able to access specific beneficiaries.

All of this will require cooperation between states. But humanitarians themselves can also do more directly to improve industry practice. States have begun to move in this direction, through an initiative backed by the Swiss government in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross, by identifying good practices for states on contracting, export licensing and hosting security companies. Humanitarian actors could adapt these standards or develop their own, for example, through the important research being done by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Overseas Development Institute, as well as separately by Save the Children UK, on humanitarian practice in working with the industry.

Yet standards will be purely ceremonial without adequate implementation and enforcement. Here, there are huge opportunities for humanitarians – and their donors – to innovate. For example, few humanitarian clients use contractual mechanisms to influence contractor behavior, although they could use contractual penalties and rewards to incentivize good practice in the areas of training, vetting of operatives, rules of engagement, incident reporting, the establishment of complaints mechanisms, labor standards, or the assessment of the social impacts of security companies. Furthermore, few humanitarian clients involve independent third parties in the monitoring of contractor performance, although this is common in some other industries.

Complaints and accountability mechanisms seem particularly important. Their wholesale absence to date has lulled stakeholders in the global security industry into thinking that the costs of security contractor misconduct could be entirely ‘externalized’. Blackwatergate has exploded that myth. The UN Working Group on mercenaries has shown some leadership here by establishing a basic complaints mechanism accessible to NGOs, though this remains controversial amongst some states and has limited reach. Encouragingly, many other researchers and activists are also working on this issue.

In the long run, professionalizing the global security industry will require thinking beyond external accountability mechanisms, toward approaches that instill and reward an ethic of public service within the global security industry and turn it into a ‘profession’. It is the different internal motivations and disciplines of national military forces and humanitarians on the one hand (with their ethic of public service) and the global security industry (with its ethic of profit maximization) on the other that ultimately distinguish them most radically. A mixture of internal and external disciplines will be needed to ensure these motivations converge. Without such professionalization, we will have to continue to ask of ourselves whether it is any wonder that individual contractor personnel are sometimes undisciplined given the failure of contractors’ clients to discipline the contractors.