Regulating private military security companies by contract
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Private military and security companies (PMSCs) are central players in the transnational market for force that unites power and profit in complex ways, and reconfigures state sovereignty, blurring the locus of authority and control. The inadequacy of existing mechanisms for holding PMSCs, their employees and subcontractors, as well as the relevant states, accountable, allowed PMSCs to operate with a liberty verging on impunity. This chapter briefly outlines the choices of states to outsource security and military needs, evaluates the inadequacies in existing domestic and international legal regimes that give rise to the need for private regulation, and in line with the overarching theme of the volume, engages contract as a potential regulatory instrument. The analysis draws on incomplete contracting theory to review a selection of publicly-available contracts and examines the International Code of Conduct (ICoC), a recent transnational initiative. The chapter concludes with some concerns about the limitations of regulating security through contract and identifies directions for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".