The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (13 page)

Multinational corporations employ PMCs, especially the extractive industries. For example, mining giant Freeport McMoRan employs Triple Canopy to protect its sizable mine in Indonesia, Chevron hires Outsourcing Services in the Niger delta, and G4S guards are practically ubiquitous. Often, these PMC personnel are armed with clubs and not guns. International shipping lines are increasingly turning to armed guards to combat pirates, a very medieval problem, off the coast of Somalia, the Strait of Malacca, or the Gulf of Guinea. Maritime PMCs such as Special Tactical Services and Armed Maritime Security place armed contractors on freighters and yachts traveling through these dangerous waters.

Multinational corporations even provide private governance in lieu of weak states, creating overlapping authorities and allegiances. In 2002, the United Nations announced that it had “abandoned” its efforts to rely on governments in weak states to stop the HIV/AIDS epidemic and turned to multinational corporations to provide antiretroviral drugs. This shift in policy was “an acknowledgment that companies have the resources to find health solutions where governments and NGOs are overstretched or failing”
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and endowed multinational corporations with political authority in the process. That multinational corporations can and do fill in vacuums of sovereignty is a clear indication of their power and the development of neomedievalism.

Illicit groups such as global terrorists, insurgents, drug cartels, and international criminal organizations are a third type of transnational actor on the rise. What makes them illicit is not just their blatant violation of laws but also their wanton use of violence to advance their agendas, whether politics or profits or both.

Terrorism today embraces a neomedieval agenda. In the twentieth century, when the Westphalian system was at its zenith, revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong in China, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Fidel Castro in Cuba, and Che Guevara in Bolivia fought to take over states. In the post–Cold War era, groups such as al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa, Boko Haram in West Africa, and al-Qaida worldwide fight to leave the state system altogether, abandoning the Westphalian order. Their vision of the future does not entail UN membership but rather a stateless caliphate and society based on their particular vision of Islam. Such a threat is not trivial, and the United States even declared a “war on terror” against such groups, representing a clear departure from the Westphalian threat model of strong states and stronger militaries.

Unlike terrorist groups, which are nominally motivated by ideology, international criminal organizations seek profits and resort to violence—often bloody and horrific—to make their bottom line. Transnational criminal organizations are not new and were a serious threat in the Middle Ages. During the reign of Edward III (1312–1377), robber barons such as Thomas de Lisle, Bishop of Ely, and Sir John Molyns exploited their aristocratic power to run criminal networks that openly engaged in robbery, extortion, and murder in the face of state authorities. Gangs led by noble families such as the Folvilles and the Coterels had free rein over large swaths of England and committed crimes with impunity. In 1326, the Folvilles and their confederates murdered Sir Roger Bellers, a baron of the exchequer. A few years later, they abducted Sir Richard Willoughby, later chief justice of the king’s bench, and ransomed him back to the king for thirteen hundred marks, an exorbitant sum at the time. In the heterogeneous political environment of the Middle Ages, the king’s law often competed with the robber baron’s law rather than subduing it.

A similar situation is developing today. Like al-Qaida, international criminal organizations such as MS-13 in Latin America and D-Company in South Asia are self-governing, operate in a borderless manner, have the capacity to threaten strong states, and are independent political actors in world affairs. Some are so strong that they even co-opt states. Take, for example, the “narco-state,” controlled and corrupted by drug cartels. Since the early 1990s, the trend of drug cartels co-opting states has grown, with the Tijuana and Gulf cartels in Mexico and Central America; warlords in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and the Golden Crescent area; mafias such as the Arkan gang or the Rudaj organization in the Balkans; and South American cartels operating in West Africa. Narco-states are a neomedieval phenomenon, emerging as the Westphalian order declines and correlated with the rise of transnational criminal organizations and other neomedieval threats.

Take, for example, the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau. It is the fifth-poorest country in the world and rife with corruption, making it an ideal transit hub for drugs moving from Latin America to Europe. Western officials estimate that $150 million of cocaine flows through it per month, equal to the country’s annual GDP. This phenomenon is not unique to Guinea-Bissau. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, cocaine seizures in all of Africa rarely exceeded one metric ton a year. Now cocaine transshipments in West Africa range between 60 and 250 tons, yielding wholesale revenues of $3 billion to $14 billion.
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The profits from cocaine transshipment dwarf the subregion’s official resources. Illicit actors have generated a parallel global economy made up of contraband that competes with—and at times is at war with—the legitimate political economy of Bull’s society of states.

Unconstrained political rivalries, the proliferation of warlords and mercenaries, weak states, weaker rulers, cowed populations, and little or no rule of law created the maelstrom that was northern Italy in the high Middle Ages. In the absence of a competent civil authority, rulers became tyrants, and people became prey. Florence and Ravenna developed into fortresses, villages grew walls (
castelli
), and the hilltops were adorned with castles to protect the powerful. Bloody vendettas between families such as the Montefeltri and the Malatesti lasted centuries and claimed countless lives, even though no one could recall why there was a vendetta in the first place. The ceaseless wars between states, city-states, the church, and anyone else who could rent or raise an army left the countryside destitute, hungry, and frightened. While passing through hell, Dante is approached by a particularly infamous warlord called Mastin Vecchio, who asks the traveling poet whether his homeland of Romagna is at peace. Dante replies: “Your Romagna is not and never has been without war in the hearts of its despots.”
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As in Dante’s
Inferno
or medieval Romagna, life in a modern failed state—Somalia or Haiti—can be hell, and incidences of state disintegration seem to be on the rise since the Cold War ended. Since Bull’s day, entire countries have disappeared, some quietly (Czechoslovakia) and some not (Yugoslavia). Dozens of country rankings exist, and they all agree that the majority of the world’s states are weak, failing, or failed.
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Today about 1 billion people live in a failing or fragile state, and trends indicate that this number will likely increase in the future.

Where state governments are weak, nonstate entities have filled in the authority vacuum and imposed their own independent rule, complete with their own monopoly of force. The violent devolution of Yugoslavia into semiautonomous regions after the end of the Cold War is consistent with the neomedieval process of state disintegration and fragmentation into smaller stateless polities. Many of these new authorities resemble warlords with private armies, such as Zeljko “Arkan” Raznjatovic in the Balkans and Mohamed Farrah Aidid in Somalia; other groups are more ideologically driven, such as Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and some al-Qaida affiliates. What they all share is the ability to create law and enforce order, violently if necessary, creating overlapping authorities and allegiances with the state.

The slums of Jamaica offer an optic into this neomedieval world. Caribbean expert John Rapley observes that where the state has failed to provide essential services, local area leaders, or “dons,” step in to supply them, albeit under their independent rule. According to him, Jamaica is not a modern nation-state but a neomedieval one, as he explains:

To forestall this, some states officially permit the limited rule of others within their territory. Political scientists describe this as “legal pluralism,” and it arises when different legal ideas, principles, and systems are applied to the same circumstance within a territory. In Kenya,
kahdi
courts are a discrete legal system for Muslims, applying sharia law where government courts use a legal system based on British law. Kenyan Muslims can choose between state and religious courts to resolve disputes. India and Tanzania have similar Islamic courts to address concerns in Muslim communities. In the Philippines, the government recognizes the customary ways of indigenous peoples in the Cordilleras region, especially in the province of Kalinga, where people use the process of
bodong
, or “peace pact,” to settle disputes. However, such measures taken by states do not avoid neomedievalism, since it simply sanctions rather than resolving overlapping authorities.

As in the Middle Ages, life in fragile states is marked by fragmented and overlapping loyalties to the ethnic group, religious order, political party, individual leaders, and other political authorities that compete with the central government for fealty. The weakest states in the world are marred by civil war and insurgencies that do not recognize state territorial boundaries or the government in general. The increasing tendency toward state fragility, failure, and disintegration remains a major unmet challenge for the contemporary system—a sign not only of the Westphalian order’s decline but of its possible demise.

At its core, neomedievalism describes the clash of sovereignty—not just between states but also among nonstate authorities that are de facto peers of states rather than “substate” actors, as traditional political science views them. For example, in the Middle Ages, the contest between church and state authorities provoked strife throughout the era, as exemplified by the investiture controversy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It began as a dispute between the Holy Roman Emperor and the pope over control of ecclesiastical appointments, or investitures, of church officials such as bishops and abbots but grew into a
wider conflict over authority between a series of popes and kings. Before the conflict, secular authorities had appointed church officials in their lands with the church’s grudging approval.

Pope Gregory VII challenged this in 1075, by asserting the
Dictatus Papae
, a collection of canons, or church laws, which decreed that the church was founded by God alone and that therefore the papacy was the sole universal power. This gave it authority to select or remove clergy, move them from see to see, and even depose kings. Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, ignored the pope’s decree and sent a letter to Gregory VII calling for the election of a new pope. To make his intentions plain, his letter to the pope opens with “Henry, King not through usurpation but through the holy ordination of God, to Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk” and concludes with “I, Henry, king by the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down, and be damned throughout the ages.”
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Thus, war began between factions aligned with the pope and the emperor—Guelphs versus Ghibellines—a conflict that persisted in Italy into the fifteenth century, as portrayed by the dueling Montague and Capulet families in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
. Opportunistic princes also seized the occasion to rebel against their lieges, exchanging the yoke of the emperor for that of the pope and vice versa. The controversy later spread to other corners of Europe, in England between King Henry I and Pope Paschal II, and also in France. After fifty years of war, the Concordat of Worms in 1122 resolved the controversy with an uneasy compromise. The king had the right to invest bishops with secular authority (“by the lance”) in the territories they governed, while the church bequeathed them sacred authority (“by ring and staff”). Consequently, bishops owed mixed allegiances to pope and king.

The investiture controversy is not as archaic as modern readers might imagine, as the clash between sacred and temporal authorities is returning to international relations. For instance, this dueling authority is reemerging in China, which ordains its own bishops for its state-run Catholic church, whom the Vatican then promptly excommunicates. In the words of one Catholic cardinal, “it’s war.”
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The foundation of church sovereignty is based not on territory but on claims to the moral sphere of individuals’ lives.

Nor is the church the only modern actor challenging states; the human rights regime exerts power over states by making universal claims of authority concerning the welfare of individuals. The term
human rights regime
broadly describes the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures accepted by global actors, such as international organizations and NGOs, that regulate and promote human rights. Not coincidentally, human rights is built on the moral edifice of Western Christian notions of natural law and focuses on the well-being of individuals within states, issuing international laws akin to church canons that can
contravene state laws. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the R2P doctrine, and the ICC all claim universal jurisdiction alongside states, as did the medieval church, based on the commitment to the rights inherent in every human. The universal claims of “natural,” “inalienable,” and “human” rights have long been used to curb the authority of states and in some cases rebel against them.
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Now they arguably exist as a global regime.