Mercenary versus Terrorist. Private Security Fighting Nigeria's Boko Haram

Private Military Companies (PMCs) steadily grew in the early nineties of the 20th century in sub-Saharan Africa within the context of the so-called "New Wars", the spread of neo-liberalism and the crisis of nation-state. PMCs claim to provide "integrated security packages" to national governments with major internal security troubles and some are able to recruit mercenaries willing to fight in the battlefield. In parallel, corporate private security began to proliferate also elsewhere, as witnessed by a large number of contractors recruited by the US Army to perform security and ancillary tasks for the military during the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Developments in one of the a major crisis in Africa - the uprising of the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria - involved the 2015 intervention of Specialized Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection (STTEP International Ltd), a South African PMC, which is the goal of this work. The origins of PMCs are highlighted before an in-depth analysis of the mercenary intervention against Boko Haram is performed with an eye on previous major PMC interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa, such as South Africa's Executive Outcomes (EO), included in a network of minerals and gems international corporations, which intervened in Angola (1993) and in Sierra Leone (1995). On the one hand, the paper emphasizes the unprecedented use of PMCs against Islamic extremist groups, but on the other reveals that PMC interventions have not changed much: for instance, as for previous private security involvements, the results of STTEP intervention were short-living and did not contribute to conflict resolution. Finally, the article will try to assess STTEP's intervention in light of the current debate on private security involving those who advocate its use and regulation and those who question the legitimacy of PMCs as a tool of conflict resolution.