Bottom-up lawmaking and the regulation of private military and security companies

Abstract

The increased contracting of private military and security companies on a global scale creates a regulatory issue due to the weaknesses in clearly applying existing international humanitarian and human rights law, as well as the intrinsic control deficiencies inherent in delegation. This article assesses the issue of the formation of regulatory policy as it relates to the sector through the application of the theory of Bottom-Up Lawmaking to the professional associations related to the industry. It points to a change in the classic state-centric model, where instead of the formation of policy to be internalized in practice, the analysis demonstrates an organic process centered on the norms created by practitioners being externalized to the state level through content aggregation.