Outsourcing War and Peace How Privatizing Foreign Affairs Threatens Core Public Values and What We Can Do About it Laura A. Dickinson

Over the past decade, states and international organizations have shifted a surprising range of foreign policy functions to private contractors. But who is accountable when the employees of foreign private firms do violence or create harm? This timely book describes the services that are now delivered by private contractors and the threat this trend poses to core public values of human rights, democratic accountability, and transparency.

The author offers a series of concrete reforms that are necessary to expand traditional legal accountability, construct better mechanisms of public participation, and alter the organizational structure and institutional culture of contractor firms. The result is a pragmatic, nuanced, and comprehensive set of responses to the problem of foreign affairs privatization.

More about this title

Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs is the winner of the 2011 IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law/Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

Laura A. Dickinson is the Foundation Professor of Law, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University.

“Anyone involved with humanitarian law should read the book of Laura A. Dickinson.”—The Global Journal