The democratic control of PMSCs: a nodal security governance approach

This article scrutinizes how PMSCs are held to account democratically. It elaborates upon the security governance and nodal governance literature to first present a nodal security governance model as a heuristic tool for mapping accountability relations of PMSCs. This tool subsequently guides the empirical analysis of the democratic control of PMSCs by EU-based clients. The article maps via which mechanisms and to whom PMSCs give account for their operations. This analysis reveals that, under the impulse of a desecuritization move and in line with broader shifts in the current (neoliberal) reconceptualization of the state, control over the activities of PMSCs moves away from parliaments to the contracting parties on the one side and to the judiciary and industry associations on the other. The role of parliaments is relegated to the level of metagovernance.