The key purpose of this article is to critically assess the extent to which auditing and certification to quality assurance and risk management standards containing human rights-related requirements are an adequate and effective means of ensuring that private security companies internalize their responsibility to respect human rights. Based on participant observation, interviews and publicly accessible data, it concludes that in the absence of the adoption of specific assurance measures in the certification and oversight processes, the constructivist ‘tipping point’ resulting in the internalization of the corporate responsibility to respect may not be attained when there is inadequate norm compliance or, worse yet, norm regression.

Promoting Private Security Company (PSC) self-regulation has become a key focus due to high profile scandals during the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Related efforts include the Montreux Document, the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), American National Standards Institute/ASIS certification, and the new International Standards Organization (ISO) Management System Standard for Private Security Operations. Implicit in industry self-regulation, however, is the assumption that the consumers of private security services will help facilitate and enforce professional standards by shifting their custom to PSCs which have signed up to these codes of conduct or certification schemes. This article investigates the validity of this assumption with regard to government contracting. To what degree are public agencies able – and willing – to let professional standards guide their contracting behaviour? To answer this question, this article develops a general framework for the analysis of public consumer influence through choice, voice, and exit which draws on insights from microeconomics and Albert Hirschman’s classical treatise Exit, Voice, Loyalty. Taking the United States government as an illustrative example, the analysis observes several obstacles to encouraging security industry self-regulation through consumer power.

This article argues that attempts to regulate the private military and security industry have been stymied by a tendency to be constantly ‘regulating the last war’ or responding to the challenges of a previous manifestation of private force rather than dealing with the current challenges. It argues that states ought to more clearly consider the direction of the industry rather than regulate in response to crises, an approach that has left regulation unequipped to deal with two fields of PSC growth: the use of PSCs against piracy, and to deliver and support humanitarian aid.

The legal framework pertaining to the use of private armed guards protecting merchant ships from Somalia-based piracy is complex, sometimes ambiguous, and currently in a state of flux. Against the background that commercial shipping increasingly relies on Private Maritime Security Companies and that various regulatory projects on the subject matter are underway, this article sketches out what domestic and international rules govern the use of force and firearms by private armed guards on board merchant ships today. It concludes that at this juncture an effort to coordinate this legal framework is necessary, both regarding the interpretation of existing rules and the creation of new norms.