‘If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say we’re going to govern those countries … You can say that about pretty much all of Africa; they’re incapable of governing themselves.” So claims Erik Prince, the billionaire entrepreneur of the modern mercenary business. Speaking on his podcast Off Leash, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide advocated for the United States to get back into the intervention business, albeit with a twist: Rather than sending American troops to enforce order abroad, the dirty work of empire should be contracted out to private firms. Prince’s provocation is not a relic of colonial thinking but rather a fact of modern politics: a neoliberal model of state violence.
“Privatized violence migrates seamlessly between domestic and foreign spheres.”
Prince’s latest venture has been security contracting in weak countries, primarily Haiti and Peru. He has carved out a niche for himself by offering a market-based option for functions typically performed by sovereign states—in particular, the exercise of violence for both domestic order and operations abroad. In Haiti, Prince’s services have been retained to combat rampant gang violence near Port-au-Prince, where opportunistic non-state actors have all but taken over territories surrounding the capital city. In Peru, Prince’s company Vectus Global recently signed a contract worth $10 million a year to eliminate criminal networks that threaten the country’s gold mines. Governments too strained to monopolize violence within their borders engage Prince, who brings the organization, discipline, and technology that local security forces lack.
While Prince’s reputation took a hit in the wake of the Iraq War, he is now back in favor with the US government. The brother of Betsy DeVos and occasional swimming partner of Pete Hegseth, the tycoon has maintained close ties with the Trump administration. Prince has pitched the White House a $25 billion contract for mass deportations, with a plan for privately run processing camps as well as the transportation and manpower necessary for such operations. On the matter of Trump’s deportation goals, Prince commented that “if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector” support. His vision of contracting out mass deportations shows how the same logic of privatized violence migrates seamlessly between domestic and foreign spheres, where state functions are delegated to private companies. One can imagine Prince having similar proposals at the ready for overseas endeavors should Trump desire to don “the imperial hat.”
Mercenaries have long been derided as disloyal and undisciplined, with Niccolò Machiavelli designating them “useless and dangerous” in his serendipitously titled The Prince. To rely on hired arms, Machiavelli argued, was to put oneself at risk of either incompetence or mutiny. This danger was realized quite recently by Evgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated march to Moscow with his Wagner Group, the mercenaries on whom Russia relied in Ukraine, Syria, and throughout northern and central Africa. Despite Machiavelli’s warnings, governments have long depended on private actors to supplement state capacity: Queen Elizabeth I engaged privateers to cripple Spanish command of the seas, Hessians were employed to suppress American revolutionaries, and, notably, joint-stock companies ran the business of empire.
Historian Philip Stern popularized the term “the company-state” in his eponymous 2011 book to capture the public–private hybridization that characterized imperial projects from the mid-16th century onward. Stern focuses on the innovation of the chartered joint-stock corporation, an organizational form notable for the merchant imperialism of the British Empire. The paragon of this form is the East India Company. Originally formed to manage trade in the East Indies, the Company would later account for half of the world’s trade in the 18th century and govern the Indian subcontinent with an army twice the size of the British military. Alongside the East India Company were other shareholder-owned enterprises granted monopolies over trade in various parts of the globe: The Muscovy Company monopolized trade between England and Russia, while the Hudson Bay, Virginia, and Plymouth companies directed trade and colonization in North America.
Cooperation with private capital allowed the British to expand their political influence and control without exhausting state resources to maintain a far-flung empire. In India, the East India Company performed the dirty work of imperial extraction as a private actor. To do so, it assembled a pseudo-state to administer and coerce. The British Army was not needed to protect the property of European merchants. The Company had its own incentives to maintain order and created a private army to do so. It was this delegation to private actors that enabled the relatively weak British state to transform a minimalist “trading post empire” into the territorial domination of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“The state had endowed a private entity with a power that was not the state’s to give away.”
However, it would be a mistake to view such public–private relationships as purely one-directional. Narratives that cast the state as simply “outsourcing empire” obscure the blurred boundaries between public and private. In the 1770s, nearly a quarter of East India Company shares were held by members of Parliament. As the Company expanded British commerce and power overseas, it also redirected state policy toward shareholder interests and away from the public good. This was not mere delegation of empire’s dirty work. Rather, it was the erosion of the state for private gain. Empowering private actors to wield violence and extract revenues from subject populations creates entities that perform the functions of a sovereign state without the legitimacy that comes from accountability to the people in whose name they rule. The state’s acquisition of territory and its exercise of violence were not directed by the public good but by private profit. Edmund Burke, advocating for more oversight of the Company, argued that Parliament “had not a right to make a market of our duties.” In short, the state had endowed a private entity with a power that was not the state’s to give away.
On September 16, 2007, a team of private security contractors opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The contractors, a Blackwater team answering to call sign “Raven 23,” fired upon a Kia sedan that failed to yield to their warnings, believing it to be a car bomb. Seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed in the ensuing chaos and 20 more were wounded, with several of the victims shot in the back as they tried to flee. The shooting only stopped when one of the Blackwater guards drew his weapon on a fellow guard who would not stop firing.
The Nisour Square massacre prompted a crisis of jurisdiction. A United Nations report on the event concluded that private security contractors were performing military actions, which are forbidden by the United Nations’s 1989 Mercenary Convention; however, the United States is not a signatory. As private citizens, the Raven 23 guards were not subject to the laws of the US military and could not be court-martialed. The Iraqi government demanded that the perpetrators face criminal charges in Iraq, but Order 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority—the governing body of occupied Iraq—specified that private contractors were not subject to Iraqi law. The FBI eventually carried out an investigation, the validity of which was disputed by Erik Prince during a seven-hour testimony before Congress. Four Blackwater employees were convicted of murder and manslaughter charges in 2014. All four were later pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020.
During the Iraq War, private military contractors outnumbered US military personnel on the ground. When four Blackwater employees were ambushed and brutally murdered in Fallujah by Iraqi insurgents, the deaths of these “private American citizens” led Lt. Col. Gary Brandl to claim that “the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him.” The subsequent siege and aerial bombardment of the city led to estimates that over half of its 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines. Blackwater was far from alone. Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, had the largest presence of any US contractor in Iraq, with approximately 14,000 personnel on the ground for logistical support operations. KBR’s actions in Iraq revived a nickname the company had acquired during the Vietnam War: Burn & Loot. The company received over $40 billion in federal contracts during the Iraq War. Private contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc. was found legally responsible by a federal jury for the torture of three Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib in 2004 after 15 years of legal limbo.
“Subcontracting also enabled a stunning prevalence of graft.”
A further complication was the practice of subcontracting. Political scientist Swati Srivastava notes that “a federal contract can go through as many as three layers of subcontracts,” while “companies can refuse to publicly disclose subcontractors for proprietary reasons.” When those four Blackwater employees were killed in Fallujah, it took years for a Congressional oversight committee to determine who had hired them in the first place, eventually finding that Blackwater had been subcontracted by Halliburton. Subcontracting also enabled a stunning prevalence of graft, as the federal government often paid twice for a single contract.
Military contracting in Iraq demonstrates nearly all the shortcomings of relying on private actors to execute a state’s foreign policy. Armed contractors like Blackwater allowed violence to be wielded on behalf of the United States with impunity. Atrocities were committed in the name of the American people without accountability, shielded by the derivative sovereignty afforded to federal contractors. The use of military contractors also allowed the federal government a degree of plausible deniability, insulating it from political consequences. These were not American military personnel, and therefore their conduct was often treated as secondary to the conflict at large—despite the majority of US personnel on the ground being private citizens. Obfuscation for the sake of “national security” led to a lack of regulatory oversight and the mismanagement of federal funds, primarily benefiting firms like Blackwater and Halliburton. Once again, the public-private partnership is a two-way street, and one wonders who is the principal and who is the agent in this relationship.
America has not experienced a “Prigozhin moment,” and it is laughable to imagine Erik Prince crossing the Potomac as though it were the Rubicon. However, mutiny is not the only reason Machiavelli cautions against dependence on mercenaries. One of the enduring lessons of The Prince is that conquest by virtue is far preferable to conquest by fortune—or by the virtues of others. While it is more difficult to rise to power through one’s own skill and resources, Machiavelli notes that self-sufficiency makes for more effective and secure rule. Dependence on the capacities of others may initially seem easier, but it produces a vulnerable prince unlikely to survive.
An empire of contractors is eating the foundations of the American state from within. Advocates for the privatization of governmental functions insist that market competition leads to efficiency and innovation. In practice, selling off the state’s monopoly on violence to self-interested actors has undermined the American national interest. Not only is the American public insulated from the consequences of interventionist foreign policy as casualty numbers are deflated and responsibilities deflected onto contractors, but the influence these private actors hold over US engagements abroad is steering the state toward ruin. Just as neoliberalism hollowed out the welfare state, it is now hollowing out the warfare state by substituting market logic for public responsibility in the use of force. If America cannot carry out military interventions without the assistance of external contractors, perhaps the “imperial hat” is best left at home.