Is someone’s mercenary another’s contractor? American,British,and Russian private security companies in US and UK parliamentary debates

Parliaments and the anti-mercenary norm

Since the beginning of the constructivist turn, international norms have played a prominent role in security studies. Scholars have identified both prescriptive norms, like the responsibility to protect, and prohibitory norms forbidding belligerents from resorting to chemical weapons, anti-personnel mines, and unrestricted submarine warfare. ¹⁴

Recent scholarship has explained the gradual disappearance of private providers of violence from the state system as the outcome of a process of norm diffusion. ¹⁵ The study of the anti-mercenary norm has gained momentum since the publication of Sarah Percy’s book, which departs from the premise that ‘for as long as there have been mercenaries, there has been a norm against mercenary use’. ¹⁶ To reconcile the existence of the norm with today’s increasing use of private security contractors, Percy argued that PMSCs’ employees cannot be considered mercenaries because they rarely provide direct combat and mostly operate under state control, but acknowledged that they ‘do not avoid the anti-mercenary norm entirely’. ¹⁷ Follow-up research has concurred in noting that PMSCs may fall under the regulatory scope of the anti-mercenary norm because they are motivated by profit and insufficiently controlled by states, but only when they engage in the provision of direct combat. ¹⁸

Legal scholars have also extensively discussed whether PMSCs fall under the definitions of mercenarism outlined by the Fourth Additional Protocol to the 1977 Geneva Convention, the 1985 African Union Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa of 1985, and the 1989 UN Convention Against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries. While most studies acknowledge that PMSCs’ employees rarely fulfill all the conditions attached to legal definitions of mercenarism, several scholars did nevertheless maintain that contractors might be construed as mercenaries if they directly engage in hostilities. ¹⁹ Hence, IR scholars and lawyers agree that PMSCs may or may not fall under the definition of mercenaries depending on the activities they perform. Contractors providing direct combat services are seen as falling under the scope of the norm and therefore considered to be mercenaries. By contrast, unarmed providers of military support and armed personnel carrying weapons solely for defensive purposes are framed as legitimate service providers. The scholarship on the anti-mercenary norm serves as the basis for our first hypothesis:

Politicians’ portrayal of PMSCs, however, may not necessarily derive from an objective appraisal of contractors’ activities and whether they actually fulfill the definition of mercenaries under international law. As held by a long strand of scholarship, decision-makers’ views are often distorted by misperceptions, biases, and parochial interests. Several studies noted that MPs often have limited knowledge of security and defense: time constraints, limited access to information, and lack of expertise on military operations reduce parliaments’ ability to effectively scrutinize foreign and security policies. Limited knowledge and information are likely to exacerbate the role played by cognitive biases in distorting politicians’ perceptions of foreign policy issues. Nationalism has been identified as an especially important source of cognitive bias among electorates and politicians alike. ²⁰

Even when not directly affected by individual and group bias, the portrayal of actors like PMSCs may be incentivized by politicians’ attempt to pursue and safeguard the national interest. As held by various scholars, parliaments tend to rally around the executive on foreign and security issues. ²¹ Criticizing national foreign policies for personal political gain may be seen as unpatriotic by electorates and fellow party members and should therefore lead politicians to endorse or at least condone the activities conducted by their national armed forces and PMSCs alike.

Since, as noted by private security scholars, the term ‘mercenary’ carries a strong derogatory meaning, nationalist bias, irrational sentiments against enemy countries, or instrumental considerations may incentivize politicians to relinquish the use of this label when discussing their own contractors and weaponize it against foreign opponents. ²² These dynamics should shape the rhetorical strategies of politicians regardless of whether they belong to ruling or opposition parties. British and American politicians across the political spectrum should therefore portray Russian contractors in a much more negative light than their own PMSCs, only evoking the stigma attached to mercenaries when denouncing the Kremlin’s foreign policy. This expectation can be summarized by the following hypothesis:

If this hypothesis holds true, politicians should develop glaring double standards when discursively upholding the anti-mercenary norm, stigmatizing foreign competitors’ resort to PMSCs as a norm violation while downplaying or condoning the use of security contractors by their own government and allies. Discursive inconsistencies surrounding the portrayal of PMSCs, however, may not necessarily derive from nationalism. Scholarship on cognitive bias in foreign policy has long highlighted the role played by ideological belief systems in shaping decision-makers’ positions. ²³ Recent scholarship on parliaments’ involvement in foreign policy has increasingly questioned the claim that politics stops at the water’s edge, showing growing polarization on foreign policy issues and the powerful impact of ideology and sets of preferences on the formulation of national security policies. ²⁴

Politicians’ approach to PMSCs is often shaped by politico-economic preferences, which inform different approaches to civil-military relations, and a looser or more restrictive interpretation of the state monopoly of violence and the anti-mercenary norm. ²⁵ Following this argument, we should expect liberal and social democratic politicians, who are warier of market forces, to stigmatize both foreign powers and their own government’s use of PMSCs. By contrast, conservative politicians embracing a market-friendly agenda should replicate their broader preference for privatization to defense policies, thereby endorsing the outsourcing of security and military support. ²⁶

Other ideological factors may also play a role. For instance, some European conservative parties like Hungary’s Fidesz, France’s Rassemblement National, and Italy’s League have developed close ties to Russia and endorsed Vladimir Putin’s defense of traditional values. While US and UK parties are not entirely immune to these tendencies, nationalism and the politico-economic preferences described above should be the most important ideological factors shaping their approach to national and foreign PMSCS. This translates into the following expectation:

Of course, politicians’ portrayal of PMSCs may not necessarily derive from firm ideological convictions or preferences, but simply reflect rhetorical expedients triggered by partisan domestic political dynamics. Opposition politicians may therefore leverage the contentious nature of PMSCs’ activities to criticize incumbents and their foreign and defense policies, but turn a blind eye to the same practices if the government privatizing military support is the expression of their own party. As MPs’ agenda is often guided by media and public attention, ²⁷ the frequent scandals surrounding the activities of PMSCS in Iraq and Afghanistan should provide convenient opportunities for opposition politicians to discredit the executive. ²⁸ The existence of these domestic political dynamics translates in the following expectation:

Research design

Our content analysis of US Congress members and UK MPs’ discussions of PMSCs allows for a comprehensive assessment of our four hypotheses. ²⁹ By probing how the portrayal of PMSCs varies according to contractors’ activities and nationality, as well as politicians’ ideology and membership of incumbent or opposition parties, our research design provides systematic insights into the politics of security privatization and the varying propensity to criticize the use of PMSCs and stigmatize their employees as mercenaries.

Results and discussion

Results

Tables 1 to 4 present our results. Table 1 highlights how many times contractors working for a specific firm were called mercenaries relative to all paragraphs containing a reference to the same company, and the percentage of negative references on the total number of references. Results show that American and British politicians engaged in some criticism regarding their own companies, as negative references fluctuate from 10% to 60% of the total. However, contractors working for domestic PMSCs were rarely criticized on moral grounds and seldom called mercenaries, a term only used in a small minority of references (0%–7%). Members of both parliaments adopted a similar approach when debating their own and their allies’ companies: American politicians’ statements were imbued with a comparable amount of negativity when addressing US and UK PMSCs, and so do their British counterparts. By contrast, negative descriptions skyrocketed when politicians’ focus shifted to Russian contractors. Most notably, Wagner Group employees were stigmatized as mercenaries almost each time they were mentioned irrespective of the activities they conducted.

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Table 1.

American and British parliamentary debates, 2001–2019.*

PMSCs	Debates
	American debates		British debates
	Contractors called mercenaries (%)	Negative references (%)	Contractors called mercenaries (%)	Negative references (%)
Blackwater (US)	4.5	57.2	4.7	42.8
CACI (US)	0	57.1	0	50.0
Dyncorp (US)	1.8	45.4	6.7	13.3
MPRI (US)	0	48.9	–	–
Halliburton (US)	2.1	51.2	0	56.6
Titan (US)	0	57.5	0	33.3
Aegis (UK)	–	–	0	28.6
ArmorGroup (UK)	0	52.5	0	0
G4S (UK)	0	0	0	56.6
Wagner (RU)	76.2	95.3	85.7	89.9

*

The symbol ‘–’ indicates that there are less than 5 references.

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Table 2.

Differences across political parties.

Parties	Debates
	Negative references (Western PMSCs) (%)	Negative references (Russian PMSCs) (%)	Contractors called mercenaries (Western PMSCs) (%)	Contractors called mercenaries (Russian PMSCs) (%)
US Democratic	64.2	94.5	1.9	70.0
US Republican	27.8	96.0	0	81.8
UK Labour	43.3	100	2.9	86.8
UK Conservative	23.5	84.6	0	84.6

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Table 3.

Most common criticism across all negative references.

Parties	Debates
	Western PMSCs	Russian PMSCs
US Democratic	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 77.1%	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 69.5%
	Ineffective – 20.6%	Immoral – 30.5%
	Immoral – 2.3%
US Republican	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 55.5%	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 63.6%
	Ineffective – 45.5%	Immoral – 27.3%
		Ineffective – 9.1%
UK Labour	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 72.4%	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 52.0%
	Ineffective – 24.1%	Immoral – 48.0%
	Immoral – 3.5%
UK Conservative	Ineffective – 100%	Unregulated/Unaccountable – 81.8%
		Immoral – 18.2%

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Table 4.

Differences across the government-opposition divide.

Parties	Debates
	Negative references (Own PMSCs) (%)	Negative references (Russian PMSCs) (%)	Contractors called mercenaries (Own PMSCs) (%)	Contractors called mercenaries (Russian PMSCs) (%)
US Government	59.5	94.3	1.1	72.2
US Opposition	55.8	96.0	1.8	80.5
UK Government	36.7	94.6	3.3	84.6
UK Opposition	50.0	85.8	0.8	95.8
US Dem – Gov	70.7	93.5	1.7	65.0
US Dem – Opp	61.6	98.7	2.0	85.5
US Rep – Gov	38.7	99.2	0	83.9
US Rep – Opp	5.9	93.3	0	79.8
UK Lab – Gov	35.2	–	3.7	–
UK Lab – Opp	76.9	100	0	86.8
UK Con – Gov	40.0	84.6	0	84.6
UK Con – Opp	16.7	–	0	–

Table 2 shows divergences across political parties in terms of relative frequency of negative references and instances in which contractors are called mercenaries. While Democrats and Labour Party members were more critical of the use of contractors by their government and their allies than their Republican and Conservative counterparts, politicians at both sides of the spectrum engaged in a much more vehement stigmatization of Russian PMSCs. Important differences also emerge from Table 3, which presents the most common rhetorical frames that politicians employed when criticizing PMSCs.

When discussing their national PMSCs, liberal and social democratic politicians mainly focused on problems of accountability and violations of domestic and international law. Their conservative colleagues, by contrast, mainly focused on companies’ insufficient efficiency and effectiveness. These partisan divergences subsided when the debates concerned Russian PMSCs. In those cases, politicians across the spectrum criticized both the unregulated and unaccountable nature of Moscow’s PMSCs as well as their immoral nature, consistently stigmatizing the greed, ruthlessness, and criminal behavior of Russian contractors and the tragic implications of their activities. Liberal and social democratic politicians, however, tend to emphasize the inherent immorality of mercenaries more frequently than their conservative colleagues, who mainly focus on Russian contractors’ violations of international law.

Finally, Table 4 concerns differences across the government-opposition divide. In this context, results suggest that politicians’ rhetorical attitude toward PMSCs did not significantly change when they were part of the government or the opposition. Indeed, the only party that showed a relevant increase in negative references when in opposition was the Labour.

The framing of domestic PMSCs: a limited self-criticism

Parliamentary discussions of Blackwater’s activities in the US are illustrative of some key patterns, as this PMSC was involved in several major scandals. These include the 2004 Fallujah ambush, in which Iraqi insurgents killed four private security contractors, forcing the US marines to launch the largest and deadliest battle in the Iraq war, and the abovementioned Baghdad’s Nisour Square incident. ⁴² After these scandals, American politicians thoroughly scrutinized the use of Blackwater and PMSCs at large.

For instance, in October 2007, Democratic Representative Maloney built on the incident to question the cost-effectiveness of security in Iraq, arguing that ‘Blackwater guards are highly trained and, in some cases, have been brave, yet they make six times more than our own military’. She therefore rhetorically asked: ‘why are we using this service, contracting out, privatizing our military to an organization that has been aggressive and, I would say in some cases, reckless in the handling of their duties?’ ⁴³ This criticism was also shared by Republicans politicians like Representative Duncan, who raised concerns that contractors’ high salaries could create grievances among soldiers, undermining their morale.

Republicans, however, rarely stressed the insufficient regulation and accountability of PMSCs, an issue highlighted almost exclusively by Democrats. In 2011, for instance, Democratic Representative Schakowsky claimed: ‘Operating under a culture of recklessness created by its founder, Erik Prince, Blackwater employees have been implicated in a wide range of alleged misconduct since 2004’. ⁴⁴ Blackwater was the main but not the only target of American politicians’ accusations. For instance, already in 2005 Democratic Senator Dorgan attacked Dyncorp for their overbillings to the US DoD, ⁴⁵ while Democratic Representative Bass accused Halliburton of being involved in human trafficking in Iraq. ⁴⁶

As epitomized by these quotations, American politicians did engage in criticism against domestic PMSCs. Nevertheless, as shown by the results above, negative references and iterations of the word ‘mercenary’ amounted to a small minority of all quotations, almost exclusively targeting Blackwater. Moreover, this criticism frequently coexisted with praise. For instance, even in the wake of the Nisour Square incident, Democratic Senator Durbin invited the Senate to acknowledge the bravery and dedication of Blackwater contractors. ⁴⁷ Democratic Representative Lynch also acknowledged that ‘Blackwater employees did a very, very good job. [. . .] They are brave employees, brave Americans in a hostile environment’. ⁴⁸ Republican politicians like Representative Shays went even further, praising praised Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder, by stating: ‘you have had men who have risked their lives and who have been killed fulfilling their mission, and they have succeeded 100 percent, and I just want to be on record as thanking you for an amazing job that you do’. ⁴⁹

As already mentioned, politicians debated about PMSCs almost exclusively in the wake of major scandals. Yet, contractors were rarely stigmatized as immoral, ruthless individuals fighting solely for financial gain and eroding the state monopoly of force, but almost solely criticized for specific incidents. Accordingly, politicians expressed their concern for PMSCs’ excessive cost, limited effectiveness, and insufficient accountability and regulation. Even major human rights violations did not create a diffuse moral aversion toward PMSCs. The Abu Ghraib scandal is a case in point: in April 2004, CBS News reported the involvement of CACI and Titan contractors in tortures against Iraqi prisoners. ⁵⁰ Nonetheless, American politicians rarely criticized these firms and formulated their accusation on moral grounds by employing the mercenary label or other expressions carrying strong stigma.

Notably, the overwhelming majority of criticism against American PMSCs came from Democratic Representatives (90.9%), and most accusations (61.1%) were raised during the second term of the George W. Bush presidency (2004–2008), when Democrats were in opposition. Many quotations show that Democrats exploited PMSCs’ misconduct to criticize how military operations in Iraq were carried out, or to censure the Bush administration and its decision to wage a global war on terrorism.

For instance, in 2007 Democratic Representative DeFazio claimed that while Americans and Iraqis has suffered too much from a useless conflict, Halliburton ‘has benefited tremendously — over $25 billion of no-bid contracts which has probably boosted Vice President Cheney’s portfolio quite a bit’. ⁵¹ The widespread use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan continued after 2008, when the White House turned Democratic, notwithstanding Barack Obama’s claim as a senator that ‘we cannot win a fight for hearts and minds when we outsource critical missions to unaccountable contractors’. ⁵² Even if the Obama Administration pledged to take steps to ‘reduce the number of support service contractors’, the resort to PMSCs in Afghanistan actually increased in relative terms, surpassing the ratio of 2 contractors per soldier. ⁵³ As shown in Table 4, however, Democrats maintained a relatively high percentage of negative references to contractors even when they were the incumbent party. Overall, as illustrated by the word cloud in Figure 1, while terms revealing a negative assessment of contractors’ activities like ‘killing’, ‘criminal’, and ‘misconduct’ were sporadically used, Congress Members’ discussions about US PMSCs mainly consisted of neutral, non-derogatory terms.

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Figure 1.

Word Cloud – US debates on American and British PMSCs.

The debate over PMSCs in the UK followed similar patterns. In some instances, politicians criticized both American and British companies. During a 2004 debate on the war in Iraq, Liberal Democrat Baroness Williams accused Blackwater and Aegis’ employees of ‘illegal behaviour towards Iraqi prisoners’, and complained that they ‘have not been tried in any way’, thereby highlighting PMSCs’ lack of accountability. ⁵⁴ In 2007, Labour MP Starkley argued that in Afghanistan and Iraq PMSCs like ArmorGroup ‘commit human rights abuses and breach international law with impunity’. ⁵⁵

Nevertheless, these accusations amounted to an even smaller minority of total references than in the US case, and were often complemented with positive acknowledgments. In 2009, Conservative MP Holloway stressed that PMSCs like Blackwater ‘filled gaps that militaries could not cover’. ⁵⁶ Moreover, the use of the mercenary label and other expressions charged with stigma against UK and US-based PMSCs was almost absent: even in the wake of major scandals involving British and American PMSCs, MPs hardly used the word mercenary. Hence, while criticized in the wake of specific incidents, the extensive use of PMSCs by the British and American governments in conflict and unrest scenarios was ultimately accepted as a legitimate practice.

As illustrated above, criticism of PMSCs in the British Parliament mainly came from Labour MPs (69.1%). Like Democrats in the US, Labour politicians leveraged PMSCs’ misconduct to question the privatization campaigns launched by Conservative Governments, criticize British participation in the Iraq War, and sometimes censure US foreign policy under George W. Bush. ⁵⁷ For instance, in 2009 Labour MP Cohen argued that ‘Blackwater and all the other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war. [. . .] No investment, no accountability, astronomical profits’. ⁵⁸

When the British Government turned Conservative in 2010, Labour MPs’ negative references increased, as shown in Table 4, although the majority of such negative accusations (65.5%) were made while Labour was the ruling party. At the other side of the Parliament, Conservatives consistently behaved like US Republican. Accordingly, they rarely questioned the lawfulness and normative appropriateness of security privatization policies that resonated with their pro-market preferences, but only expressed occasional doubts about the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of specific contracts. The word cloud on Figure 2 summarizes the terms most frequently iterated during UK discussions about British and US PMSCs, mainly consisting of neutral, non-derogatory descriptors.

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Figure 2.

Word Cloud – UK debates on American and British PMSCs.

The framing of Russian PMSCs: contractors or mercenaries?

Russian contractors like those working for the Wagner Group grabbed the headlines in the mid-2010s for their involvement in the conflicts in Eastern Ukraine and Syria, or their support to autocrats and hostile rulers like Maduro in Venezuela. ⁵⁹ More recently, Wagner contractors were also accused of supporting General Haftar’s offensive against the UN-recognized Tripoli’s Government of National Authority during the civil war in Libya. ⁶⁰

Both American and British politicians reacted to Moscow’s resort to private military contractors with vehement, bipartisan outrage. Indeed, parliamentary debates over Russian PMSCs in the US and the UK show significant similarities. In the US, during a 2019 debate about the civil war in Syria, Democratic Representative Engel argued that the conflict was exacerbated by ‘mercenaries operating in a military capacity inside Syria for or on behalf of the Government of Syria or the Government of the Russian Federation’. ⁶¹ The following month, Republican Senator Scott focused on Venezuela by stating that ‘Russian mercenaries protect Maduro because he can’t trust his own troops, [. . .] to intimidate the United States and other countries in the region’. ⁶² Similarly, during a Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, Republican Representative Kinzinger claimed that ‘Russia’s use of armed mercenary groups like the Wagner Group to secure their interests and support brutal dictators like Assad and Maduro is another example of their low-cost, high-reward strategy to hinder our interests’. During the same discussion, Democrat Congress Members followed through. Representative Keating spoke about the ‘corrupt nature’ of ‘mercenary groups’ like Wagner, seeking oil, gold, and other natural resources in Syria, Sudan, and Venezuela. ⁶³ Finally, in late 2019, a bipartisan group of Democratic and Republican Senators proposed a bill referring to Wagner’s mercenaries as a ‘national security threat’ and holding them responsible for a number of crimes. ⁶⁴

Figure 3 highlights in a word cloud the most frequent words emerging from the American debate on Russian firms, showing that Russian contractors were systematically called mercenaries. The stigma attached to this term was reinforced by a host of other derogatory terms, including ‘atrocities’, ‘immoral’, ‘bloody killers’, and ‘criminals’. These rhetorical constructions clearly highlight how politicians leveraged the strong stigmatic power of the mercenary taboo to attack Russia’s foreign policy at large.

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Figure 3.

Word Cloud – US debates on Russian PMSCs.

In the UK, during a 2017 debate on UK-Russia relations, Conservative MP Djanogly blamed Russian ‘mercenaries and criminals’ for political instability in Eastern Ukraine. ⁶⁵ One year later, Conservative Lord Risby noted that ‘in the Donbass, which has effectively been dominated by Russian mercenaries, there has been death and destruction, the shooting down of a passenger plane and cyberactivity in disinformation on a massive scale’. ⁶⁶ Relatedly, when debating the political crisis in Sudan in early 2019, Liberal Democrat Lord Chidgey denounced that ‘Russia’s mercenary army – the Wagner – fresh from atrocities in Syria and Ukraine, is now seen on the streets of Khartoum, presaging an escalation of peaceful protest into bloody violence’. ⁶⁷

In 2019, Conservative MP Beresford expressed concern for the ‘dubious forces behind General Haftar, including, I understand recently, 100 mercenaries from Russia’. ⁶⁸ Similarly, Labour MP Moon commented with apprehension the presence of Wagner’s ‘mercenaries’ in Libya. ⁶⁹ Finally, Conservative MP Williamson argued that ‘the clandestine use of proxies, mercenary armies, like the infamous and unaccountable Wagner Group, allows the Kremlin to get away with murder while denying the blood on their hands’. ⁷⁰

Figure 4 presents the word cloud for British debates about Russian PMSCs, highlighting the widespread use of the word mercenaries. Indeed, the plethora of accusations against Russian PMSCs iterated by US and UK politicians resonate with the old-fashioned, principled criticism of mercenaries formulated during the Renaissance or the Cold War, and clearly illustrate the instrumental use of the stigma attached to mercenaries to more vehemently criticize Moscow’s foreign policy and Vladimir Putin’s rule. ⁷¹ Unlike criticism of national PMSCs, attacks against Russian contractors enjoyed widespread bipartisanship. As Wagner contractors’ involvement in conflicts abroad grabbed the headlines, Republican and Conservative politicians joined their counterparts in the Democratic and Labour parties in stigmatizing Russian PMSCs, framing their activities as immoral mercenary operations.

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Figure 4.

Word Cloud – UK debates on Russian PMSCS.

Parliaments and the anti-mercenary norm: key findings

Our content analysis reveals that US and UK politicians’ portrayal of Russian military contractors starkly differed from the framing of their national PMSCs. Even if most parliamentary discussions on national PMSCs occurred in the wake of scandals revealing abuses and misdemeanors, British and American contractors were hardly stigmatized to a similar extent as their Russian homologues. Congress Members and MPs have rarely portrayed their own governments’ use of PMSCs as problematic on normative grounds, but systematically referred to Wagner employees’ as ruthless and greedy mercenaries.

In most cases, this criticism is consistent with the findings of anti-mercenary norm scholarship underlying H1. As Wagner group contractors in Syria, Ukraine, and Libya have engaged in direct combat, their activities fell under the scope of the anti-mercenary norm and were denounced accordingly. The stigma attached to anti-mercenary norm violations is illustrated by the fact that this term was often associated with and reinforced by a variety of other highly derogatory terms, such as ‘immoral’, ‘atrocities’, ‘bloody killers’, and ‘criminals’. As shown in Table 3, the use of terms suggesting the immorality of contractors and their activities is much higher during the discussion of Russian PMSCs. US and UK contractors providing security and support services, by contrast, received much more nuanced criticism.

A careful analysis of politicians’ rhetoric, however, suggests that H1 is only partly confirmed. The distinction between offensive and defensive services delimiting the scope of the anti-mercenary norm does not always suffice in explaining such glaring differences in the portrayal of PMSCs. Indeed, the term ‘mercenary’ was systematically applied to Russian contractors irrespective of the activities they performed and regardless of whether they actually engaged in combat or simply performed defensive or unarmed tasks like security or training. For instance, as noted above, several US politicians stigmatized as mercenaries those Wagner contractors providing close protection for Venezuelan president Maduro, even if this activity was clearly defensive in nature, was not conducive to widespread human rights violations, and was akin to tasks like the close protection of Afghan president Karzai, which had been carried out for several years by Dyncorp. ⁷² Likewise, Wagner contractors were stigmatized as mercenaries when protecting extracting sites across Sub-Saharan Africa. While surely problematic in some respects, the use of PMSCs to protect mines and oil fields does not amount to combat, is widespread on the African continent since long before the creation of the Wagner Group, and has been conducted by several Anglo-American PMSCs, including ArmorGroup and G4S. ⁷³

The pervasive stigmatization of Russian PMSCs as mercenaries irrespective of the activities they perform lends support to the argument that – as suggested by H2 – MPs’ portrayal of PMSCs was also affected by nationalism and arguably biased against their geopolitical opponents. The Kremlin’s alleged violation of the anti-mercenary prohibition was therefore used as a rhetorical weapon to stigmatize Russian foreign policy at large. The effects of politicians’ nationalist bias has arguably been enhanced by two factors. First, American and British PMSCs have engaged in extensive self-legitimization efforts, portraying themselves as responsible providers of defensive security services. As information about these companies is scarce, PMSCs’ effort to reframe their activities and signal that they are not mercenaries may have softened politicians’ criticism. ⁷⁴ Second, and relatedly, American and British PMSCs themselves have stressed their allegiance to and identification with their home countries. According to Percy, the belief that the belief that mercenaries are uncontrolled and undermine the role of the state as the primary holder of the monopoly of the use of force is one of the cornerstone of the anti-mercenary norm. Consequently, the fact that UK and especially US contractors showcased patriotism, came from national armed forces, and committed to defending the national has arguably enhanced the effect of nationalism in triggering greater indulgence toward domestic PMSCs. ⁷⁵

The interplay between the applicatory scope of the anti-mercenary norm and nationalism is highlighted by politicians’ portrayal of Blackwater. As noted by existing scholar, Blackwater was known for offering ‘aggressive’ private security services, and came closer than any other American and British firm to the provision of offensive tasks. ⁷⁶ However, even Blackwater contractors were only called mercenaries in a very small minority of cases, illustrating the role played by nationalism in dissuading most politicians from framing the activities of British and American PMSCs as international norms violations.

Neither the scope of the anti-mercenary norm nor nationalism, however, can explain Congress members and MPs’ varying criticism of the use of PMSCs by their own country. While they usually condoned the privatization of security and military support as a legitimate practice, US and UK politicians did criticize the PMSCs used by their own governments, occasionally stigmatized as mercenaries even if unarmed and operating as providers of logistics far from the frontline. For instance, the word mercenaries was occasionally used for Dyncorp’s military and police trainers, and even the providers of logistics and base support services like catering and cleaning working for Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellog, Brown & Root.

Contrary to the hypothesis that accusations against PMSCs are mainly shaped by partisan incentives (H4), our findings show that rhetorical patterns of criticism largely remained consistent, hardly changing when a party went from government to opposition and vice versa. US Republicans, for instance, almost never criticized Obama’s persisting and extensive use of contractors in Afghanistan after 2008. Similarly, the intensity of criticism from Democrats did not significantly change when they went from government to opposition and vice-versa. Likewise, UK Conservatives refrained from stigmatizing the use of PMSCs by British governments when Labour was in power. Indeed, most of the criticism against Blair and Brown’s cabinets use of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan came from within the Labour Party itself. Hence, domestic political partisanship fails to accurately predict politicians’ criticism of PMSCs.

Economic preferences (H3), by contrast, provides more valuable insights in explaining patterns of parliamentary criticism. Liberal and social democratic politicians’ skepticism of market forces and subsequent belief that security in conflict scenarios should not be privatized prompted a stronger suspicion of commercial providers of military support. Indeed, Labour MPs voiced this concern even when they were the incumbent, while Tory and Republican politicians have not done so even when in opposition. Politico-economic preferences shaped both the frequency and the nature of politicians’ criticism of PMSCs. Liberal and social democratic parties tended to more often highlight the allegations surrounding PMSCs’ involvement in crime and misdemeanors, thereby highlighting their insufficient regulation and limited accountability. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, conservative parties showed a stronger trust in military privatization, criticizing companies less frequently and less forcefully by mainly highlighting the excessive costs and occasional lack of effectiveness of their services.

However, economic preferences cannot account for politicians’ much stronger, unanimous censure of Russian PMSCs. Unlike criticism of contractor support to national military operations, the stigmatization of Russian PMSCs benefited from an overwhelming bipartisan consensus. Even the most left-leaning social democratic politicians criticized national PMSCs in a much more nuanced and less forceful fashion than their Russian homologues.

In sum, the offensive or defensive character of PMSCs’ activities (H1) played a meaningful role in the use of the mercenary label and the portrayal of contractors as immoral actors. The frequency and nature of the criticism directed at PMSCs, however, was also enabled or hindered by nationalist foreign policy postures (H2). The strong bipartisan consensus in place when criticizing Moscow’s use of Wagner contractors – systematically labeled mercenaries even when they provided defensive security services – suggests that when national interests are at stake, nationalism trumps any other considerations in shaping politicians’ portrayal of PMSCs’ activities. While partisanship (H4) did not play a meaningful role, politico-economic preferences and ideologies (H3) provide valuable insights into the intensity and nature of politicians’ criticism of domestic PMSCs, showing that politicians’ portrayal of contractors was consistently shaped by their position on the politico-economic ideological spectrum.

Implications, future research, and conclusions

Our systematic analysis of 20 years of parliamentary debates provides novel insights into the study of international norms, PMSCs, and parliaments’ discussions of foreign policy issues. First, our study has meaningful implications for the debate on the existence and robustness of an anti-mercenary norm. Our empirical results support existing private security scholars’ claim that the offensive or defensive nature of the activities provided by commercial non-state actors is crucial to delimiting the scope of the anti-mercenary norm. US Congress and British Parliament’s rhetoric suggests that politicians have been socialized to this prevailing understanding of the anti-mercenary norm and developed their discourses accordingly. Commercial providers of offensive services are therefore systematically stigmatized as mercenaries, while for-profit providers of security and military support are largely viewed as legitimate actors.

As norms ‘leave an extensive trail of communications among actors’, the discursive reaction to violations is seen as an especially important test for their existence. ⁷⁷ Since norm-breaking behavior should always generate stigma, the lack of any discursive disapproval when violations occur has been used as the main indicator of norms’ disappearance or death. ⁷⁸ Since the early 2010s, states like Russia and the United Arab Emirates have increasingly relied of commercial providers of combat services. The fact that the privatization of offensive services continues to be stigmatized by UK and US politicians, however, supports the claim that an anti-mercenary norm still exists, at least among liberal democracies.

However, our study also suggests that the stigmatization of mercenaries is often selective. Derogatory labels carrying strong stigma and international norms violations are often weaponized as tools of rhetorical contestation against foreign opponents. As noted by Krook and True, norms that are vague can ‘be filled in many ways and appropriated for a variety of different purposes’. ⁷⁹ The indeterminacy surrounding the exact scope of the anti-mercenary prohibition has helped Congress Members and British MPs to systematically stigmatize their opponents’ contractors as mercenaries while framing their own as legitimate providers of military support. These findings add to the scholarship on the use of a variety of different derogatory terms, ranging from terrorist and Islamist to populist and ‘rogue’ or ‘failed’ state, as well as the tendency to selectively portray political violence as a coup, a civil war, an uprising or a revolution. ⁸⁰ Future research should therefore examine how the mercenary moniker has been rhetorically weaponized across countries and historical periods, expanding our analysis over a broader timespan and a larger population of countries, parties, and politicians.

More broadly, our work advances the study of how vague norms like the mercenary prohibition can be employed to legitimize one’s own grand strategy. ⁸¹ Supposed infringements of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) taboos have been successfully weaponized to stigmatize opponents and legitimize one’s own national security policies, as epitomized by the US resort to the alleged presence of WMD to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the air strike launched in response to Syria’s 2018 chemical attack. ⁸² As we have shown, violations of the anti-mercenary norm can be turned into rhetorical weapons as well, supporting a wider tendency to frame Russian foreign policy as a threat to the rule-based liberal order. Future research may therefore use this article as a starting point to more systematically study how states denounce international norms violations to delegitimize opponents and further their national interests. Relatedly, our study suggests that norms characterized by vagueness but strong stigmatic power like the mercenary prohibition can be most easily turned into rhetorical weapons against foreign opponents. Future studies may compare different norms in order to investigate which types of prohibitions or prescriptions are more likely to be discursively weaponized for parochial purposes.

Furthermore, our findings advance the study of the relationship between international norms and domestic politico-economic ideologies, an increasingly timely subject given the growing ideological polarization of both the US Congress and other legislative assemblies. As long noted by constructivist scholars, norms need to match domestic cultural predispositions in order to be internalized by states. ⁸³ National political cultures, however, are not monolithic wholes. In democratic countries, parties and politicians uphold different ideologies that may affect their interpretation of and compliance with international norms. Private security scholars have cited the rise of neoliberalism as one of the reasons underlying the increasing use of PMSCs over time and leveraged the existence of different ideological approaches to civil-military relations to explain variance in military privatization across countries. ⁸⁴ No study to date, however, has examined the extent to which differences in parties’ politico-economic-preferences may inform diverging interpretations of the anti-mercenary norm, the state monopoly of violence, and the use of PMSCs within the same country. Our analysis shows that different politico-economic preferences play an important role in shaping the intensity and nature of politicians’ discussions of military privatization. While our content analysis shows that an anti-mercenary norm still exists and politicians are socialized thereto, the existence of such selective interpretations and double standards on who is a mercenary suggests that a process of norm degradation is arguably occurring, causing the norm to lose part of its robustness.

Besides being theoretically relevant, these findings have important policy implications. On 22 December 2020, former President Donald Trump pardoned the four Blackwater contractors involved in the Nisour Square incident, who had been convicted for manslaughter by a federal court. ⁸⁵ This controversial decision, criticized by the UN Working Group on Mercenaries as ‘an affront to justice’, highlights the persisting partisan disagreements surrounding the activities of PMSCs, forcefully suggesting the need to study the impact of politico-economic ideologies on the privatization of security. As parliaments are key to drafting legislation, ratifying international conventions, approving defense budgets, and conducting hearings and investigations, studying their role is crucial to understand the use, regulation, and accountability of PMSCs. ⁸⁶ Future studies should highlight whether such dynamics are in place in countries with different political cultures and different levels of ideological polarization as well.

Relatedly, our findings should also be of interest to the scholarship on parliaments’ role in foreign and security policies. Private security research has often presented the resort to PMSCs as an attempt by the executive branch to circumvent legislative oversight in the conduct of foreign policy. ⁸⁷ As this article illustrates, however, parliaments’ approach to PMSCs has been more ambivalent and nuanced than usually acknowledged. While recent studies have shown that parliaments’ oversight of foreign policy has grown more assertive, our article suggests that censure of PMSCs was considerably softened by US and UK politicians’ unwillingness to undermine the conduct of ongoing military missions or taint the reputation of their country. The prevalence of these considerations has policy-relevant implications on democratic control over the use of force, questioning the expectation that parliaments can play a decisive role in holding security privatization policies accountable.

In the case of the US and the UK, politicians’ ability and willingness to scrutinize security privatization has been further limited by industry lobbying and PMSCs’ efforts to reconstruct their identity as providers of defensive services, legitimize themselves as new humanitarians and professional soldiers who continue to serve their nation, as well as their ability to maintain a low profile and blend into the broader business landscape. ⁸⁸ Additional studies of the strategies carried out by PMSCs to deflect stigma by eschewing the label of mercenaries may therefore shed more light into stigma management dynamics among non-state actors.

The aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine raises some caveats, but also confirms our overarching argument. On the one hand, Wagner Group operatives’ involvement in war crimes and abuses against Ukrainian civilians forcefully highlights that Russian contractors do deserve the stigma that is often attached to them. As of December 2022, a large body of evidence shows that the Wagner Group has conducted a prison recruitment campaign and its contractors include far right extremists, have used illegal tactics during combat operations, have perpetrated torture and war crimes in Ukraine’s occupied areas, and even brutally executed deserters within their own ranks. ⁸⁹ These allegations unquestionably illustrate that all the normative arguments made against the Wagner Group are well taken.

On the other hand, however, clear discursive double standards are visible in how Russian contractors are portrayed compared to the foreign fighters who joined Ukraine’s International Legion. While the former are constantly labeled mercenaries despite being citizens of one of the parties in conflict, the latter are almost always referred to as volunteers even if they are foreigners who directly participate in hostility and receive a financial compensation. ⁹⁰ In more recent debates, for instance, MP Bryant has described Wagner contractors as ‘mercenary sociopaths’ who systematically commit war crimes, whereas MP Wallace referred to the Wagner Group as ‘a pain and a pest’. ⁹¹ On the other hand, MP Cleverly has argued that ‘foreign volunteer fighters with the Ukrainian Government’ should be granted ‘all the protections that the international humanitarian law affords’. ⁹² Future studies should systematically assess how the discursive portrayal of these actors is shaped by their own conduct as well as by the nationality and ideology of the politicians debating their activities.

Relatedly, future research may directly compare the portrayal of Russian PMSCs by Western politicians and the discourses surrounding Western PMSCs by the Russian Duma. While, as noted above, we renounced this comparison due to difficulty of access to data, language barriers, and the limitations to free speech that characterize autocratic regimes, follow-up studies conducting an explicit comparison between Russian and Anglo-American discourses on mercenaries and PMSCs may nevertheless yield valuable insights.

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