Repositioning of war: the ambiguous language of private military and security companies

This article argues that war as an institution of the modern state order is repositioned by the ambiguous language used by private military and security companies (PMSCs). We suggest that in order to get an analytical grip on the ongoing repositioning of war as an institution, it is useful to study language and discursive practices of PMSCs. This includes capturing emergence of new recombined vocabularies connecting PMSCs to multiple societal domains usually unrelated to war. To do so, our theoretical approach builds on sociological new institutionalism and on organizational discourse analysis, and we analyse terminology on the websites of PMSCs cooperating with the European Union (EU). Based on data from a new survey of 564 PMSCs connected with the EU, we generated a corpus of text retrieved from 22,000 webpages. To identify core themes in PMSC discourse, we use principal component analysis (PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and perform topic classification and dimensionality reduction, and show patterns of recombined vocabularies across multiple domains. We complement this by illustrations of PMSCs recombined practices in the field showing that language-based repositioning of war is also complemented by its practice-based repositioning.