This is an important new book on the globalisation of private security and its implications for politics and international relations theory. The authors start by questioning Weber's premise that the state maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as a result of globalisation. They use the private security industry as a lens to interrogate the ways in which sovereignty and power are being restructured and respatialised under, and are constitutive of, globalisation.

A key concept developed in the book is that of ‘global security assemblages’, through which (in)security is effected around the world. These assemblages bring together private and public, global and local actors to govern and securitise territories and spaces. The book details empirically the scale of the global private security industry and the multiple sectors in which it is involved, from detaining asylum seekers in Australia to controlling money dispensed from ATMs. Using Bordieu's theory of economic, symbolic and cultural capital, it shows how the private security industry is able to draw on discourses and registers of security and the public interest to increase its symbolic and material capital. While security is often held to be the last domain of public interest administered by the state, it shows how new nodal networks of governance have emerged in this field over the last number of decades.

The book is based on case studies and extensive fieldwork in four African countries – Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Sierra Leone. The Nigerian case explores (in)security in the Niger Delta, the main oil-producing region of the country, while the Sierra Leone one examines urban security and the regulation of the diamond fields. While some of the broad details from the other cases will be known to Africanists, the South African case is particularly illuminating. The authors argue that as a result of democratisation in 1994 the private security industry went from being an upholder of the (unjust) status quo to being viewed with deep suspicion by the new government. However, an attempt to pass a law that stated that all private security companies in South Africa had to be national was defeated after intervention by the minister of finance. The authors trace this decision to the broader political economy of neo-liberalism in South Africa: the belief that protectionism would have damaged the country's attempt to be seen as an ‘investor friendly’ destination. Thus security is not separate from other forms of state and economic restructuring. The exclusions of the new security system and regime are also explored in the book, with Securicor staff in Cape Town moving beggars along, for example – a form of class apartheid.

This is a theoretically and empirically rich book, with broad implications for international relations and globalisation theory. It is exceptionally well written and will be of interest to scholars of these fields and also African Studies.