Distinctions, distinctions: ‘public’ and ‘private’ force? International Afairs 84: 5 (2008) 977–990 © 2008 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Afairs PATRICIA OWENS Historically and conceptually, the distinctions between the domestic and the foreign, and between the public and the private, have been crucial to how we have understood the functioning of modern government and the mobilization of resources to ight in ‘national’ armies. Home police forces were tasked with enforcing law and order in the domestic sphere; only in national emergencies and in European empires was the army to assist in these functions. 1 It is now well known that policing and security institutions are merging, and that the distinction between external and internal is blurring, as soldiers take on policing activity and vice versa. 2 A ‘private’ security industry able to ofer highly trained combatants, equipment and training now works within and across state boundaries, protecting national and transnational military and economic interests. ‘Private’ corporations engage in a variety of classical military and domestic security operations, providing skills, strategic planning, intelligence and much more. They even possess their own trade organization, the International Peace Operations Association. According to P. W. Singer, ‘the responsibility for a public end—security—is difused across a number of actors, public and private’. Public and private are not what they used to be: ‘the public–private dichotomy … which was once solidly ixed, is now under siege’. 3 The idea that security and insecurity are now experienced and practised in ways that merge the internal and external, the public and private, is an important feature of recent literature on the changing character of war and security. 4 We are frequently told that the state, the privileged public realm in the modern imaginary, is under threat as the primary provider of military and economic security in the face of military globalization and neo-liberal capitalism. The scale of involve- ment of commercial irms in the business of security is vast, and the challenges they pose to existing domestic and international law, civil–military relations and political accountability are huge. 5 Wealthy individuals, gated communities, 1 Mathieu Delem, Policing world society: historical foundations of international police cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2 David H. Bayley, Changing the guard: developing democratic police abroad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 3 P. W. Singer, Corporate warriors, 2nd edn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 220, 8. 4 For a thorough review, see Ian Loader and Neil Walker, Civilizing security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5 Caroline Holmqvist, ‘Private security companies: the case for regulation’, SIPRI policy paper 9, 2005.