RT Article
T1 Private security and national security: The case of Estonia
JF Theoretical criminology
VO 26
IS 4
SP 664
OP 683
A1 Light, Matthew
A2 Singh, Anne-Marie 1967-
A2 Gold, Josh
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1823686389
AB Most studies of private security postulate exclusively internal, primarily economic, causes of the industry's growth and regulation. In contrast, based on the case of post-Soviet Estonia, we investigate how a state's external security environment influences private security. Estonia's tense relations with neighbouring Russia and related pursuit of EU and NATO membership have generated several policies through which private security evolved from a lawless, politically contested industry to a modest, lightly regulated one: (1) the exclusion of public police from private security and an effective campaign against organized crime that together enabled an autonomous and non-criminalized security industry to emerge, (2) free-trade policies that permitted western companies to acquire Estonian security firms, and (3) an ‘all-of-nation' approach to national security that promotes comprehensive state-civil society security cooperation. Estonia thus clarifies how high politics shapes private security, while also revealing the factors that make the industry relatively uncontentious in most industrialized democracies.
K1 security management
K1 Russia
K1 Private Security
K1 police and policing
K1 Organized crime
K1 Military
K1 international crime
K1 Europe
K1 cyber crime
K1 Comparative criminology
DO 10.1177/13624806221099930