Abstract
The article sets out to answer two closely related questions of why western states do outsource and why they display a variance. Hypotheses will be drawn from historical and sociological institutionalism and probed in two cases: Germany and the US. Historical institutionalism argues that the current contractor support is in keeping with the historical trend. Sociological institutionalism instead argues that states organise their militaries according to a globally shared template. However, the extent to which it is implemented is strongly influenced by the ideational foundations the states are built upon. Comparing these explanations, this study argues that patterns of military privatisation result from globally shared standards and the ideational foundations of the state rather than from historical trajectory and material benefits.
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Notes
I would like to thank James Pattison, Alexandre Wilner, Jörg Broschek, Bettina Helbig, David Kühn and Aurel Croissant for their helpful comments. The German Academic Exchange Service provided funding for my research.
This is not to say that civilians always outnumber military personnel in general, though in some countries this is actually the case (Miller, 2007: A9). I use this term to describe that the current mix is more civilian heavy than the former.
In this paper, I use the terms ‘privatisation’ and ‘outsourcing’ interchangeably.
Outsourcing to allies might have also been a possible alternative. However, this would have meant integrating different armed forces in the sense of fusing them with the result of losing sovereignty. Fusing might have curbed the ability of the armed forces to serve as a warrantor of state's sovereignty.
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Petersohn, U. Military Privatisation: Changing the Military-Civil Force Mix. Eur Polit Sci 10, 146–156 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2011.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2011.3