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Prince’s latest venture has been security contracting in weak countries, primarily Haiti and Peru. He has carved out a niche for himself by offering a market-based option for functions typically performed by sovereign states—in particular, the exercise of violence for both domestic order and operations abroad. In Haiti, Prince’s services have been retained to combat rampant gang violence near Port-au-Prince, where opportunistic non-state actors have all but taken over territories surrounding the capital city. In Peru, Prince’s company Vectus Global recently signed a contract worth $10 million a year to eliminate criminal networks that threaten the country’s gold mines. Governments too strained to monopolize violence within their borders engage Prince, who brings the organization, discipline, and technology that local security forces lack. While Prince’s reputation took a hit in the wake of the Iraq War, he is now back in favor with the US government. The brother of Betsy DeVos and occasional swimming partner of Pete Hegseth, the tycoon has maintained close ties with the Trump administration. Prince has pitched the White House a $25 billion contract for mass deportations, with a plan for privately run processing camps as well as the transportation and manpower necessary for such operations. On the matter of Trump’s deportation goals, Prince commented that “if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector” support. His vision of contracting out mass deportations shows how the same logic of privatized violence migrates seamlessly between domestic and foreign spheres, where state functions are delegated to private companies. One can imagine Prince having similar proposals at the ready for overseas endeavors should Trump desire to don “the imperial hat.”

Mercenaries have long been derided as disloyal and undisciplined, with Niccolò Machiavelli designating them “useless and dangerous” in his serendipitously titled The Prince. To rely on hired arms, Machiavelli argued, was to put oneself at risk of either incompetence or mutiny. This danger was realized quite recently by Evgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated march to Moscow with his Wagner Group, the mercenaries on whom Russia relied in Ukraine, Syria, and throughout northern and central Africa. Despite Machiavelli’s warnings, governments have long depended on private actors to supplement state capacity: Queen Elizabeth I engaged privateers to cripple Spanish command of the seas, Hessians were employed to suppress American revolutionaries, and, notably, joint-stock companies ran the business of empire. Historian Philip Stern popularized the term “the company-state” in his eponymous 2011 book to capture the public–private hybridization that characterized imperial projects from the mid-16th century onward. Stern focuses on the innovation of the chartered joint-stock corporation, an organizational form notable for the merchant imperialism of the British Empire. The paragon of this form is the East India Company. Originally formed to manage trade in the East Indies, the Company would later account for half of the world’s trade in the 18th century and govern the Indian subcontinent with an army twice the size of the British military. Alongside the East India Company were other shareholder-owned enterprises granted monopolies over trade in various parts of the globe: The Muscovy Company monopolized trade between England and Russia, while the Hudson Bay, Virginia, and Plymouth companies directed trade and colonization in North America.

Cooperation with private capital allowed the British to expand their political influence and control without exhausting state resources to maintain a far-flung empire. In India, the East India Company performed the dirty work of imperial extraction as a private actor. To do so, it assembled a pseudo-state to administer and coerce. The British Army was not needed to protect the property of European merchants. The Company had its own incentives to maintain order and created a private army to do so. It was this delegation to private actors that enabled the relatively weak British state to transform a minimalist “trading post empire” into the territorial domination of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, it would be a mistake to view such public–private relationships as purely one-directional. Narratives that cast the state as simply “outsourcing empire” obscure the blurred boundaries between public and private. In the 1770s, nearly a quarter of East India Company shares were held by members of Parliament. As the Company expanded British commerce and power overseas, it also redirected state policy toward shareholder interests and away from the public good. This was not mere delegation of empire’s dirty work. Rather, it was the erosion of the state for private gain. Empowering private actors to wield violence and extract revenues from subject populations creates entities that perform the functions of a sovereign state without the legitimacy that comes from accountability to the people in whose name they rule. The state’s acquisition of territory and its exercise of violence were not directed by the public good but by private profit. Edmund Burke, advocating for more oversight of the Company, argued that Parliament “had not a right to make a market of our duties.” In short, the state had endowed a private entity with a power that was not the state’s to give away.

On September 16, 2007, a team of private security contractors opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The contractors, a Blackwater team answering to call sign “Raven 23,” fired upon a Kia sedan that failed to yield to their warnings, believing it to be a car bomb. Seventeen Iraqi civilians were killed in the ensuing chaos and 20 more were wounded, with several of the victims shot in the back as they tried to flee. The shooting only stopped when one of the Blackwater guards drew his weapon on a fellow guard who would not stop firing. The Nisour Square massacre prompted a crisis of jurisdiction. A United Nations report on the event concluded that private security contractors were performing military actions, which are forbidden by the United Nations’s 1989 Mercenary Convention; however, the United States is not a signatory. As private citizens, the Raven 23 guards were not subject to the laws of the US military and could not be court-martialed. The Iraqi government demanded that the perpetrators face criminal charges in Iraq, but Order 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority—the governing body of occupied Iraq—specified that private contractors were not subject to Iraqi law. The FBI eventually carried out an investigation, the validity of which was disputed by Erik Prince during a seven-hour testimony before Congress. Four Blackwater employees were convicted of murder and manslaughter charges in 2014. All four were later pardoned by President Donald Trump in December 2020. During the Iraq War, private military contractors outnumbered US military personnel on the ground. When four Blackwater employees were ambushed and brutally murdered in Fallujah by Iraqi insurgents, the deaths of these “private American citizens” led Lt. Col. Gary Brandl to claim that “the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah. And we’re going to destroy him.” The subsequent siege and aerial bombardment of the city led to estimates that over half of its 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines. Blackwater was far from alone. Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, had the largest presence of any US contractor in Iraq, with approximately 14,000 personnel on the ground for logistical support operations. KBR’s actions in Iraq revived a nickname the company had acquired during the Vietnam War: Burn & Loot. The company received over $40 billion in federal contracts during the Iraq War. Private contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc. was found legally responsible by a federal jury for the torture of three Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib in 2004 after 15 years of legal limbo.

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SV [Socialist Left-party] demands that the Oil Fund must withdraw from a number of companies that, according to them, contribute to violations of international law in Palestine. This includes companies such as Airbnb and Tripadvisor. If not, SV refuses to negotiate state budget with the Labor Party.

[...] Sources have told Klassekampen that no form of negotiations or talks are underway.

[...] SV's ultimatum list is based on two sources: a 2024 UN list and a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

There are 16 companies left after the Oil Fund has sold itself out of several companies that can be linked to Israel's international law-rich occupation in the West Bank and warfare in Gaza.

Six of these companies were on SV's original list, including the US company Caterpillar.

The downsales have aroused powerful reactions in the United States. According to NRK, the US Department of Foreign Affairs has contacted Jonas Gahr Støre directly, while Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has said that the decision «will have consequences».

In SV, they think the Labor Party is afraid to trigger even stronger reactions if they agree to SV's demands. The party understands this, but still believes that the right thing is to continue to divest.

At home in Norway, there are more and more people who advocate a complete boycott of Israel. Klassekampen have been told that Labor will not promise SV that a divestment from the companies on their list should come at another time – not even far ahead in time.

SV has negotiated with the Labor Party and secured the government majority for state budget throughout the previous parliamentary period. After this year's election, Støre and Ap are still dependent on SV's support if they are to have a majority for the state budget on their side.

Prior to taking up the post as German chancellor, Freidrich Merz criticized US President Donald Trump’s “America first” doctrine and said he is prepared for the “worst case scenario,” hinting at a future where Washington would no longer be seen as a trusted ally. But Papperger pushed back on political signaling from Merz for Germany to establish “independence” from the US. “Chancellor Merz now will invest the money, and the whole government will invest the money,” added Papperger, on Berlin’s plans to increase defense spending. “So I think that Germany, but also Europe … will grow up to be a reliable partner of the United States.”

Trump’s pressure on Europe to do more for its own security has since led to most NATO allies agreeing to a 3.5 percent GDP defense spending pledge and an additional 1.5 percent GDP on related items like infrastructure. The German government is investing “more than the rest of Europe” and years of underspending in the country’s armed forces before the war in Ukraine has been “fixed” under a Ministry of Finance plan to reach a military budget of €160 billion in 2029, said Papperger. Rheinmetall holds robust industrial ties with US giant Lockheed Martin and strengthened cooperation further this week at DSEI by unveiling a next-generation “missile tank destroyer” technology demonstrator. The land system comprises a 6×6 Fuchs armored vehicle and Hellfire Longbow and Joint Air to Ground Munition (JAGM) missiles. The latest move to join forces builds on partnerships across several other high profile weapon system programs including F-35 fifth-generation fighter jets and the Global Mobile Artillery Rocket System (GMARS) capability.

“We make a Europeanisation of that stuff,” said Papperger. “It’s not that we buy American technology, it’s that we implement American technology into Europe.” Relying on European solutions alone would be counterproductive, he suggested. “If you want to make a R and D [Research and Design] program in Europe to build up everything … you are not [going to be] ready in 10 years,” he said. A total of three F-35A fuselages, being built by Rheinmetall for non US-customers, have so far been produced by the firm at a new production facility in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. A “grand opening” of the site is scheduled in four to six weeks, Papperger explained. In 2023, Rheinmetall stated that “at least” 400 of the fuselages will be manufactured in all.

"Europeanisation" is when you locally manufacture one part, import everything else (including the engine and the delicate electronics which actually make the plane what it is), and then pat yourself on the back for the might of your domestic industry. This is like that deal for Egyptian M1 Abrams production, where in the end they ended up only being able to make like a fifth of the parts and mostly just assembling tank kits imported from the US.