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Introduction: From Cowboy Detectives to Soldiers of Fortune: The Recrudescence of Primitive Accumulation Security and Its Contradictions on the New Frontiers of Capitalist Expansion

This article examines the current recrudescence, global expansion, and market concentration of the private security industry. Powered by the revival of an old service for new markets, private security is once again called upon to help conquer new frontiers for capital by assisting with primitive accumulation in a transnational neoliberal project that proceeds largely through “accumulation by dispossession.” After identifying challenges to accumulation and the private security response in three periods of U.S. political economy, we discuss four tendencies of the security industry that, together, increase the likelihood and magnitude of the contradictions of private security in a neoliberal political economy.

private security, neoliberalism, primitive accumulation, security-industrial complex, failed states

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2007): 1-19