Research and projects

In my research on “clean hands” warfare and delegated violence, I examine how states involved in Middle East conflicts use private military companies to wage war while preserving a formal image of restraint. I am particularly interested in the paradox between the state’s claimed monopoly over legitimate violence and its growing reliance on private actors to carry out coercive tasks. In this project, I trace specific episodes in which governments chose PMCs instead of regular forces, and I ask what this tells us about responsibility, plausible deniability and the political management of reputation.

My aim is not simply to describe where PMCs operate, but to understand why they are chosen and how their use is framed to keep official hands “clean.” By reconstructing decision‑making and public narratives around PMC deployment, I show that outsourcing violence can be a deliberate state strategy, rather than just a symptom of weakness or institutional failure. This work feeds directly into my broader PhD project, where I explore how the classical idea of the monopoly of violence is being reshaped through the use of private military actors in the Middle East.

In a second line of research, I look at private military companies through the lens of principal–agent theory. Here, I treat states as principals who contract PMCs as agents to perform highly sensitive tasks in complex Middle Eastern war zones. My focus is on the tensions, misunderstandings and outright failures that emerge in this relationship: moral hazard, agency drift and the difficulties of monitoring armed contractors who operate far from home and often in legal gray areas.

I compare different cases to see how contract design, oversight mechanisms and regulatory environments influence PMC behaviour on the ground. This allows me to explain why some delegations of force “work” as intended, while others lead to excessive violence, scandal or political backlash. For me, this project is a way to connect the big question of why strong states use PMCs alongside their armies with the micro-level mechanisms of control and loss of control, giving my dissertation a more rigorous analytical backbone.

My third project focuses on law, regulation and the legal gray zones in which private military companies operate in the Middle East. PMCs are neither traditional mercenaries nor regular soldiers, and the rules that govern them are fragmented across national legislation, soft‑law instruments and uneven enforcement. I am interested in how these gaps and ambiguities are actively used by states and companies, rather than treated as mere technical problems.

In this research, I map and compare different regulatory approaches in the states that send PMCs and those that host them, and I link these frameworks to concrete conflict dynamics: how PMCs are deployed, how accountable they are, and who ultimately bears responsibility for their actions. By putting legal context at the centre of the analysis, I show that regulation – and deliberate non‑regulation – plays a crucial role in shaping contemporary warfare and in redefining the boundaries of the state’s monopoly of force. This project complements my broader PhD by highlighting the institutional and legal conditions under which violence can be outsourced in the Middle East.