Privatizing the Cosmopolitan Responsibility to Protect. : Considering a Normative Argument for Why the Contractor Might Be Better Suited Vis-à-Vis the State Soldier to Serve Common Humanity
The idea for this thesis arose from my previous research on liberal state motivations for conducting military humanitarian intervention1. Learning about the reluctance of liberal states to commit wholeheartedly to the protection of strangers overseas, I started asking the question of how to ensure that liberal states commit to their responsibility to protect individuals comprehensibly and resolutely. From this thought stems the core ambition of this research: To explore different ideas that might help the liberal state to provide security as a global good effectively and ethically in humanitarian intervention. This ambition marks the beginning of this exploratory research. In this research I approached the underlying problem of the liberal state’s reluctance to commit its soldier wholeheartedly to humanitarian intervention by trying to conceptualize the relationship between society, state and soldier using liberal Social Contract theory. Through the normative conceptualization of civil-military relations I identified a normative explanation for the empirical observation that soldiers when employed on humanitarian interventions, provide security often ineffectively and unethically. Hence, an exploratory conceptualization of the relationship between society, state and soldier provided me with a theoretical explanation of the link between the particular nature of liberal civil-military relations and the conduct of the soldier in the specific context of humanitarian intervention. It was this conceptualization that inspired the idea of exploring the hypothetical possibility of employing the private armed contractor as an alternative agent of the liberal state to provide security as a global good in humanitarian intervention. Combining two timely topics, namely the future of the responsibility to protect and the commercialization of security, I arrived at an interesting normative question, which was to lie at the heart of this research: Should the contractor become the liberal state’s cosmopolitan agent to provide security as a global good in humanitarian intervention? In a grounded theory approach, I intended to develop a conceptualization of civil-military and civil-contractor relations. This conceptualization was to constitute the foundation of a theory about the impact of the particular nature of civil-combatant relations on the combatant’s conduct in humanitarian intervention. Although informed by a diverse body of empirical data, this research develops a theory that is inherently normative in nature. This normative theory advances the core argument that the contractor should become the liberal state’s cosmopolitan agent. The reason is that his abstract relationship to society and state allows him to provide security as a global good effectively and ethically in humanitarian intervention. This argument is based on my developed theory that the nature of the relationship of society and state to the soldier and the contractor, determines how each type of combatant can apply his skills virtuously in humanitarian intervention. The soldier’s conduct in humanitarian intervention is the result of the soldier’s embedment within social contractarian civil-military relations, which causes friction with the liberal state’s cosmopolitan duty to protect strangers overseas. As a result of the liberal state’s normative predicament between its social contractarian and cosmopolitan obligations, the liberal state cannot employ the soldier to the most virtuous of his abilities. Conceptualizing the contractor’s raison d’être outside social contractarian civil-military relations, the liberal state does not face a similar normative predicament when employing the contractor in humanitarian intervention to provide security as a global good. As a consequence, I argue that the liberal state can employ the contractor to the most virtuous of his abilities in humanitarian intervention. My theory thereby contributes to the understanding of the contractor’s particular relationship to society and state on the one hand and the private military company on the other. It is this relationship that enables the contractor to maximize his virtuosity as a security service provider within the context of humanitarian intervention. 1 Krieg, A. (2012). Motivations for Humanitarian Intervention-Theoretical and Empirical Considerations. New York: Springer.
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