For the last two decades, the hiring of Private Military Companies (PMCs) has significantly

increased. While Western conventional armies have become more reliant on services provided
by private military firms, weak states as well as international governmental organizations have
also recurrently outsourced military operations. Furthermore, PMCs have been widely
contracted by corporate companies and NGOs working in hostile environment. This new
security context challenges the traditional Weberian concept of the state as being the sole
depository of legitimate violence, and therefore engenders interrogations regarding the use
and consequences of privatizing security. The objective of this study is to identify pertinent
roles for PMCs in today’s security context and explore their ever-increasing access to what
previously constituted – or was understood as – the monopole of the public domain. As a
central argument, this work normatively deducts that, in the light of the problems linked to
and/or generated by the existence and functions of today’s PMCs, the privatization of security
ought to have a very restricted and regulated space within the contemporary security
environment.