Normalising Private Military Force: US Media Discourse and the Legitimization of Private Security Companies in Iraq

This book examines the normalization of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), and analyses US media discourse around the Nisour Square incident in Iraq as a pivotal case. States are increasingly relying on PMSCs to meet security needs. As a sign of ongoing normalization, these companies are now increasingly targeted by soft law or self-regulation. Rejecting the common claim that ‘mercenaries have always been with us’, this book sets out to analyse the underlying conditions that have allowed PMSCs to emerge in their uniquely contemporary incarnation. Divided into two parts, this book develops a novel poststructural framework of analy-sis to articulate social, political, and affective conditions that enabled PMSCs to prevail despite controversy. It draws on and operationalizes the Essex School’s logics-based approach, while developing it further with corpus linguistics, and ap-plies this framework to a large corpus of American mainstream media articles. The volume contributes to efforts aiming to overcome the alleged ‘methodological deficit’ of discourse analysis, while highlighting the importance of making uncon-sciously held truths visible. This book will be of interest to students of private security companies, military studies, critical security studies, and International Relations.