The Green Ribbon Books

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry

Peter W. Singer
Cornell University Press
2003

A prescient study of the privatisation of warfare, that predates the Iraq War but explores one of the key trends that has shaped that conflict.

Singer uses a number of case studies to highlight the growing range of military services being provided by private companies.

A chapter on South Africa's Executive Outcomes (EO) and its various affiliates illustrates the role of the 'Military Provider Firm', which engages in frontline combat. An intriguing appendix includes a copy of the agreement between EO offshoot Sandline and the government of Papua New Guinea, and a list of the huge array of military equipment involved in the company's abortive plan to suppress the rebellion in Bougainville.

The role of the 'Military Consulting Firm' is illustrated by US company MPRI, which advised the Croatian Army in the run-up to the 1995 'Operation Storm' offensive against the Krajina Serbs.  Another US company, Brown and Roots Services, exemplifies the logistical role played by the 'Military Support Firm.'

As well as providing a comprehensive survey of the privatised military industry, Singer shows that the phenomenon represents a fundamental challenge to established assumptions in a huge range of fields.

This book should be the first port of call for anyone looking for a serious theoretical study of the subject. A ground-breaking piece of scholarship.

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Making a Killing: How Corporations use Armed Force to do Business

Madelaine Drohan
Randam House Canada 2003
Lyons Press edition 2004

Canada's stock exchanges are global centre for resource industries. As a result, financial journalist Madelaine Drohan found herself acquiring an expertise in a subject more exotic than the usual balance sheets and trading reports - the use of armed force by private corporations.

In 1998, Drohan was invited to war-torn Angola by Diamondworks. The company's majority shareholder Tony Buckingham, was a British former special forces officer with links to South African mercenary firm Executive Outcomes, which, Drohan learned, he hired out to weak African governments in exchange for mineral concessions.

Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long?

Tom Garvin
Gill & Macmillan
2004

(Review originally published in the Irish World)

This new study by UCD politics professor Tom Garvin addresses a question that will surely be of interest to many Irish people in Britain.

After all, the continuation of mass emigration was one of the most obvious signs of Ireland’s failure to develop economically in the period between independence and the dawn of the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s. That failure is the subject of this book.

The picture that Garvin presents is conventional enough in its broad outlines.

Ireland pursued inward-looking economic policies in the 1930s and 1940s which were inevitable in the context of the Great Depression and the Second World War, but failed to adapt to the new opportunities of the post-war boom.

Export-oriented economic policies did not emerge until the late 1950s, under the guidance of Sean Lemass and the Secretary of the Department of Finance, TK Whitaker, and did not fully bear fruit until the 1990s.

The key question is why this process took so long.