HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION OF MILITARY COERCION: FROM CITIZEN-ARMIES TO PRIVATE MILITARY COMPANIES

Date

2026-8-25

Author

Kaya, Mehmet Yaşar

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This thesis examines the contemporary privatization of military coercion from a relational historical-materialist perspective. Instead of treating public coercion as an ahistorical characteristic of the modern state and interpreting privatization primarily as its retreat or weakening, the thesis historicizes the relationship between the modern state and military coercion by examining its formation through changing class relations and political struggles. It develops the concept of republican coercion to capture the historically specific and contradictory relationship among military coercion, citizenship, and class struggles that emerged with the bourgeois republican state. The thesis argues that the contemporary privatization of military coercion should be understood as part of the neoliberal transformation of this historical form of the capitalist state. Its main world-historical theoretical argument is that the trend towards military privatization both manifests and may itself constitute a fundamental transformation in the historical form of the capitalist state. Empirically, the thesis examines private military and security companies across three distinct but historically connected settings: post-Cold War African civil wars, the occupation of Iraq, and the war in Ukraine. It argues that, despite their considerable differences, these cases constitute successive moments in a continuous historical process in which military coercion is exercised through the commodification of military labor by private military and security companies. It thus connects transformations in military organization to broader changes in the forms through which social relations are mediated under contemporary capitalism.

Subject Keywords

Military Privatization, Republican Coercion, Capitalist State, Neoliberalism, Private Military and Security Companies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120568

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis