The literature on modern mercenary companies - also known by the less colourful name of private military companies - has grown fast in recent years. Many articles have been inspired (if that is the right word) by the scale and ubiquity of interventions by the South African originated firm Executive Outcomes and the scandal generated by its sister-company, Sandline, after the latter was caught breaching a United Nations arms embargo on Sierra Leone and promptly embroiled the British Foreign Office in the affair. 

This generally well-researched and thoughtful collection is a further contribution. The two editors work for the London based Centre for Democracy and Development and the book's nine chapters are fairly equally divided between work by activists, journalists and academics. Among the most informative essays are Kevin O'Brien's general overview of private military companies in Africa in the 1990s, Johan Peleman's piece on Jean-Raymond Boulle and his attempt to create a mineral-and-mercenary empire in Congo and the chapter by Abdel-Fatau Musah, which is the best account of politics in Sierra Leone after the 1997 coup which this reviewer has seen. 

As with most writing on private military companies, the general tone is condemnatory. Most studies, perhaps because they so often concentrate on the extraordinary story of Executive Outcomes, suggest that such companies have grown during the 1990s. One of the virtues of O'Brien's essay is to point out that private security companies also flourished more discreetly in Africa throughout the 1970s and 1980s and that it would be wrong to regard them as a uniquely post-Cold War phenomenon. Sierra Leone was home to a private security organisation in the diamond business almost forty years before Executive Outcomes was born. Although J. 'Kayode Fayemi allows that mercenaries are very hard to define, conceding that current definitions could include, say, Africans fighting for the liberation of a country not their own, the discussion in this volume is very much of white mercenaries. It would be interesting to see some research on, for example, the role of Burkinabe mercenaries in wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

 For those who do not think that African states are on the verge of re- establishing effective monopolies of violence, the most profound conceptual problem is to imagine how security could be defined in new, non-state-centred ways (recommended by Fayemi) and to explore the possibilities of harnessing the technical expertise of the most experienced private military companies in fields such as logistics and mine clearance to combinations of sovereign forces and international peacekeepers (recommended by some authors, although not in this collection). The general implication of the papers gathered here is that the presence of foreign mercenaries should be countered through legislation and the development of African regional Security mechanisms. That, however desirable it may be, does not seem to offer much hope of success.