Struggle over outsourcing of the security functions of the state: The case of September 16, 2007 shooting in Baghdad

Outsourcing of the state’s security and warfare related tasks has become an increasingly popular, but contested policy in the United States. An increasing number of tasks that used to be carried out by the state armed forces has been delegated to private military and security companies (PMSCs) which currently, for example, protect employees of and visitors to the State Department (DoS) and other US state agencies in conflict zones. This thesis discusses the production of the outsourcing of the tasks of state armed forces into the general understanding. How do we perceive the outsourcing and the actors related to it? How are truth and knowledge about the phenomenon produced and disseminated in the general understanding? The study is conducted by examining a shooting incident in Iraq in 2007 which involved personnel of a private security company (PSC) working for DoS. In addition to constructing a historical narrative about “the September 16 shooting”, Foucaultian discourse/dispositive analysis is utilised to investigate knowledge production around the incident and power struggles related to it. In the discourse the emergence and existence of PMSCs are primarily produced as a negative phenomenon. The state armed forces are used as a priori which PMSCs are compared with. The companies are perceived as uncontrolled actors which are to be brought under improved state supervision and stricter control, and military models are often suggested to be utilised in this normalising process. In the dispositive the state gradually reinforces its position in relation to other governance actors, while PMSCs become legitimised actors in conflict zones. Theories of state transformation, transformation of the American warfare and commodification of security provide an explanatory framework that seems to promote the aforementioned legitimisation process. However, whether to locate PMSCs in civilian or in military sphere and whether there exists legislation to hold the companies accountable remain unanswered questions in the dispositive even after the judicial proceedings in the September 16 shooting case that had the character of a precedent