Reported events involving private military and security companies grew steadily from 1990 to 2012 across all three regions, consistent with the widely held view that the private security industry has expanded since the end of the Cold War.
· N=1288
Avant & Neu (2019) "The Private Security Events Database" — introduces PSED, the first event-based dataset on private military and security company (PMSC) involvement in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, 1990–2012. Provides the event taxonomy (event type, client type, service type), descriptive findings on industry composition and abuse allegations, and a replication of Akcinaroglu & Radziszewski (2013) showing PMSC government-event counts predict shorter civil wars and attenuate the apparent effect of PMSC competition.
Reported events involving private military and security companies grew steadily from 1990 to 2012 across all three regions, consistent with the widely held view that the private security industry has expanded since the end of the Cold War.
The most frequently reported PMSC event type is routine work, followed by crime events; violent events are a smaller share overall though substantial in Africa and Southeast Asia.
PMSC clients are dominated by national governments (about 22% of events) and local commercial actors (about 26%); transnational commercial clients and rebel groups (about 9%) are less common, with substantial regional variation in client mix.
Domain: Private Security and Conflict
PMSC behavior in dated, located events and its relationship to conflict outcomes (duration, lethality, abuse allegations, governance). Distinct from contract-level PMSC analyses by examining what PMSC personnel actually did, in whose service, and with what consequences.
Temporal scope: 1990-2012 (PSED v.Feb-2019); extension planned through 2016 | Population: Reported events involving private military and security companies in international and regional English-language news sources
Reported events involving private military and security companies grew steadily from 1990 to 2012 across all three regions, consistent with the widely held view that the private security industry has expanded since the end of the Cold War.
The most frequently reported PMSC event type is routine work, followed by crime events; violent events are a smaller share overall though substantial in Africa and Southeast Asia.
PMSC clients are dominated by national governments (about 22% of events) and local commercial actors (about 26%); transnational commercial clients and rebel groups (about 9%) are less common, with substantial regional variation in client mix.
Site security is by far the most common service performed in PMSC events, followed by operational support; advice and training, intelligence, and logistical support are rarely captured, likely reflecting media-attention bias toward visible armed activity.
Most reported PMSC events do not involve human-rights abuse allegations, but the share of events with allegations has risen unevenly over time and varies sharply by client type — national-government and local-commercial clients are most associated with allegations, transnational-commercial clients least.
Reports of PMSCs hired by governments and involved in events are associated with shorter civil wars: each one-unit increase in the count of government-hired PMSC events raises the hazard of war termination by approximately 30%.
When the count of government-hired PMSC events is included alongside Akcinaroglu & Radziszewski's PMSC competition variable, competition loses statistical significance while events remain significant — challenging the claim that market competition among PMSCs is the operative mechanism shortening conflicts.
name: private-security-events-database version: 1.3.0 pax_type: paper author: Avant, Deborah; Neu, Kara Kingma license: CC-BY-4.0 published_by: Praxis Agent domain: private_security_and_conflict constructs: - pmsc_event_count - pmsc_event_type - pmsc_client_type - pmsc_service_type - pmsc_abuse_allegation - pmsc_competition - pmsc_government_event_count - pmsc_rebel_event_count - civil_war_duration - conflict_episode - gdp_per_capita - ethnic_fractionalization - ethnic_wars - conflict_intensity - mountainous_terrain - polity - proportion_of_forces - support_rebels - support_government - conflict_terminated engines: counts: constructs: 20 findings: 7 propositions: 2 playbooks: 3 sources: 2