War Machines

The emergence of privately organized extraterritorial force, the private military and security industry that supplies the governments with a range of core services.

Major military powers outsourcing such intimate state functions as the executive branches of foreign policy programmes

Crime: mushrooming of both formal private security companies and informal Community Police
groups and vigilantes operating outside the control and recognition of the public police to provide protection against crime.

Use of international private security companies (PSCs) in the delivery of “humanitarian” assistance.

Armed rebel groups taking over “governing processes” in areas like the Congo

Mbembe’s War machines: armed groups acting ‘behind the mask of the state’ against armed groups that have no state but control distinct territories. Liberated from its subordination to state ideology – though the state may have means for transforming its power into violence for its own ends, it is free to be fluid, liquid, deterritorialized. The war machine combines a plurality of functions. It has the features of a political organization and a mercantile company. Both Alien and Predator, it operates through ‘capture and depredations’ and can even ‘coin its own money’.