Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 31, 2020

Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Meeting

Conflict as Business
The Moral Implications of the Privatisation of War

The state monopoly on violence is a core concept of modern public law, wherein only sovereign nation-states may lay claim to the legitimised usage of physical force. In recent years, however, this is commonly outsourced through Private Military Companies. Using Satz’s model and Weber’s definition of modern democracies, we argue that the market of Private Military Companies is a noxious one with severe ramifications in regards to democracy, freedom, and the autonomy of nation-states globally.