Executive Outcomes

Executive Outcomes
was a private military company founded in South Africa by former Lieutenant-Colonel of the South African Defence Force Eeben Barlow in 1989. It later became part of the South African-based holding company Strategic Resource Corporation.

Executive Outcomes (EO) provided military personnel, training and logistical support to officially recognized governments only. They were however often accused of providing the military strength for corporations to control natural resources in failed states or conflict-ridden areas. Where assistance was given to corporations in conflict areas, EO claims to have had the host government’s approval to provide such assistance.

These claims have been highly contested, however. Scholar James Ferguson has demonstrated how murky the political/social/economic space organizations like the EO occupy is in practice. It is often unclear. He quotes an Amnesty International report which wonders, "what legal framework, if any, [these companies] are operating within ." For example, the EO provided the military force to back the ARRC's (Africa Rainforest and River Conservation) efforts to raise its own money through trading diamonds dug up in "its" conserved territory, a practice which is certainly "paralegal" and not at all conforming to the NGO's own purported mission in the Central African Republic. As recently as 2002, Bruce Hayse, founder of the ARRC, was quoted as saying "Diamonds looked like a way to develop the project with some kind of secure financial foundation, and to provide a more equitable means for the local people to sell the diamonds they pick up." The EO case is not necessarily unique, Ferguson argues, as such "paramilitary" private militias have been employed all across the continent since IMF and World Bank reforms, which encouraged the "disengagement" of the state in favor of the "free market," left governance open to contestation among NGOs, warlords, and private firms which were able to capitalise on the newly deregulated market and rapidly deteriorating state authority.