Associated research project

Not only historians consider the increased privatization of warfare since the 1960s the “single most important change in military affairs in recent history” (Yelda S. Kaya). Political scientists, legal scholars and activists are engaged in controversial debates about the legitimacy and efficiency of so-called Private Military Companies that form an all-encompassing and prospering industry in the early 21st century. The ongoing controversy surrounding the so-called “rebirth of mercenarism” (Torsten Thomas/Gerhard Wiechmann) since the 1960s makes clear that the privatization of military force constitutes a major challenge to both globally established social and political norms as well as national laws. Given the fact that mercenaries are generally considered as outlaws who represent “venality, unscrupulousness, detachment” (Michael Sikora), it is highly remarkable that so far no one has investigated how and why people became mercenaries and what individual motivations were connected to their decision.     

This research project investigates the agency of modern mercenaries since the 1960s, focusing particularly on British mercenaries who not only pioneered the prospering private military industry but also published numerous accounts recounting their individual exploits. When, why and how did they decide to become mercenaries? How did they manage to survive in an environment that is not only characterized as highly dangerous but also as informal and clandestine for over decades? And how did their actions inform and influence the nascent private military industry since the 1990s?    

Focusing on the agency of modern mercenaries, this research project connects three important strands of contemporary history: Only recently, labor history has overcome its reservations to consider war as work, highlighting instead the various parallels of war and industrial labor that help to productively reformulate questions about „why soldiers enlist, why they fight and how they understand what they are owned“ (Samuel Daly). Numerous commercially successful memoirs indicate that modern mercenaries are more than willing to talk about their exploits. Given their social outreach, these memoirs are strategic interventions in social and political debates about how Western societies debate the nature and legitimacy of contemporary warfare and its cultural repercussions at home. Taking into account their global outreach, modern mercenaries represent global biographies that shed light on the dark side of globalization and its transnational encounters. Mercenaries traditionally operate in those in-between spaces that are characterized by contested juridical, social and cultural norms and rivalling political and economic interests and thus invite an actor-centered approach that is particularly interested in how military professionals generally considered as outlaws were “able to link their individual fate to the paramount reorganization and/or rupture of politics and society“ (Isabella Löhr) during the second half of the 20th century.