Summary

• Does the increasing power of non-state armed groups and their willingness to challenge states fundamentally undermine the international system? The answer is both yes and no.
• The monopoly on the use of force is often more theoretical than real. Some states have voluntarily outsourced their powers of coercion and there are also areas of coercion (such as cyberwarfare) where a state monopoly has yet to be effectively established.
• Most importantly, “states” have been fundamentally complicit in the privatization of weaponry and have often also tended to exploit private circuits of violence (commercial as well as non-commercial) for their own purposes.
• The implication of states in the privatization of the means of violence takes three forms: i) states trade their monopoly of coercion in pursuit of geopolitical and other objectives; ii) states actively (if covertly) sponsor non-state armed groups as tools of repression or proxies; iii) private actors alter the “strategic balance” by wresting control over the instruments of force from states.