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Abstract

The 19th-century disappearance of mercenary forces within Europe is generally regarded as a cornerstone in the historical sociology of the international as it provided important conditions of possibility for the historical consolidation of the state’s monopoly on violence. Contrary to the claim that mercenaries disappeared in this time frame, this article argues that the mercenary concept was constituted within it. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, it revisits a central dichotomy within this narrative, the soldier/mercenary dualism, exposing the conceptual ambiguity surrounding these terms before the 19th century. Second, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, it turns to an overlooked dimension of the 19th-century transformation in military force, namely a change in the conditions of knowledge and the constitution of the modern subject grounded in the modern state. Last, by investigating 19th-century discourses on ‘effeminacy’ and the formation of the social, it exposes how the mercenary enters into reflective practice as an actor threatening to undo the compact between man and state, by being simultaneously a symptomatic expression of, as well as cause for, the erosion of the masculine principle upon which this compact rests.

Keywords

Mercenaries historical International Relations state formation modernity effeminacy concepts

Introduction

The historical turn in International Relations (IR) has prompted a critical examination aimed at denaturalizing and historicizing taken-for-granted concepts within the discipline (Lemke et al., 2023; De Carvalho et al., 2021). In a recent intervention, Kessler and Leira (2024a) have called for Historical IR (HIR) to expand its engagement with concepts to unsettle received dogmas in IR, specifically those telling stories of historical change. Here, the focus should be placed on investigating ‘systemic conceptual shifts’ (Kessler and Leira 2024a: 4) to show how concepts assume specific meanings and the constitutive effects thereof. This article responds to this invitation by revisiting a central narrative of change within the history of the international, namely that the 19th century saw the widespread disappearance of mercenary forces (Avant, 2000; Kinsey, 2023; Percy, 2007; Posen, 1993; Singer, 2006 [2003]; Thomson, 1994; Tilly, 1990). The importance attributed to this change cannot be overstated, as replacing mercenaries with armies composed of citizens is ‘conventionally identified as the main strategic innovation in early contemporary history’ (Cusumano and Kinsey, 2022: 8), as it provided important conditions of possibility for the historical consolidation of the states’ monopoly on violence. And this monopoly, ‘[f]or IR, political science, and historical sociology . . . is the essence of the state-force-territory relation, underpinning sovereign power’ (Barkawi, 2016: 207). As such, it is unsurprising that the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ (Avant, 2000; Percy, 2007) is of great interest to students of international politics. First, because the end of mercenarism is narrated as an integral part of the historical process of state formation (Davis and Pereira, 2008; Thomson, 1994; Tilly, 1990), and second, because the present ‘return of the mercenary’ in the guise of the private military contractor is read as undoing this process by hollowing out the state’s monopoly on coercive force (Cusumano and Kinsey, 2022; Percy, 2007; Singer, 2006 [2003]).

This article challenges this narrative of disappearance, and conversely ‘return’, by placing against it a narrative of constitution. Contrary to the claim that mercenaries disappeared at the turn of the 19th century, this article argues that this period laid the conditions of possibility for the concept of the mercenary to become legible. As such, I do not claim that before the 19th century, we cannot find actors fighting for a polity other than their own in exchange for remuneration, but that it is only at the time of its supposed ‘disappearance’ that the concept of the ‘mercenary’ is constituted as an ‘object for thought’ (Foucault, 1988). In this, I am following earlier works on mercenaries that have shown how the criteria making up the concept of the mercenary (i.e. ‘foreignness’ and ‘self-interest’) are infused with modern assumptions (Ettinger, 2014; Olsen, 2022; Riemann, 2021).

I advance this claim by drawing on Foucault’s genealogical method. Genealogy attempts to question and destabilize seemingly transhistorical concepts, such as the mercenary, by exposing a concept’s discontinuous development and revealing the conditions of possibility that made its emergence possible (Hansen, 2006). What is particularly important for this article is genealogy’s attentiveness to changes in the condition of knowledge and its potential to uncover ‘previously important representations [that] have been silenced and written out of the discourse of the present’ (Hansen, 2006: 70). The selected material encompasses diverse sources, including classical political tracts, military manuals, encyclopaedias and parliamentary debates published in Latin, English and German to trace a discursive framework in operation in Europe at the turn of the 19th century. The selection process was guided by Tatum’s (2018) suggestion of ‘opting for a logic of selection that aims at randomness’ as ‘[r]andomness provides a means of ensuring representativeness of texts in historical arguments . . . and particularly those of genealogy’ (p. 345). While ‘randomness may reveal some intertextualities and obscure others’, it ‘is complementary to one of the main goals of genealogical analyses: making visible previously hidden structures of knowledge’ (Tatum, 2018: 355).

My genealogical investigation shows how the concept of the ‘mercenary’, in its embryonic contours, emerges out of the interplay of three discourses. First, an epistemological change leading to the emergence of modern subjectivity (sovereign man). Second, a socio-political change in the emergence of society as a specific domain in which the modern subject understood as ‘sovereign’ man can be sovereign (Ashley, 1989). Third, the constitution of society was accompanied by debates about ‘effeminacy’, a trait threatening to undo key aspects of the foundational principles (masculinity, reason, autonomy) upon which modern subjectivity was erected (Richter-Montpetit, 2018; Weber, 2010).

This article makes three contributions. First, historicizing a key concept informing accounts of state formation contributes to HIR’s call for deepening the engagement with concepts deployed by IR (Berenskoetter, 2017; Kessler and Leira, 2024a). Second, showing how mercenary and state are relationally constituted adds to HIR’s growing interest in the co-constitutive role of non-state forms of violence in the formation of the modern state (Davis and Pereira, 2008; Erlenbusch-Anderson, 2018; Rossi, 2024; Scheipers, 2015; Shirk, 2022; Thomson, 1994). Third, a focus on concepts reveals how the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ narrative reproduces statist assumptions in IR, thereby providing an additional empirical contribution to other works of poststructuralist conceptual analysis that challenge state centrism and state essentialism (Bartelson, 1995; Leira, 2019; Walker, 1993 [1992]).

The argument unfolds in four steps. First, I outline different explanations for the ‘shift away from mercenary use’. Second, I turn to the dichotomy between national soldiers and foreign mercenaries that structures much of the literature on mercenary decline (Barkawi, 2017: 81), and show that before the 19th century, the mercenary/soldier dichotomy was not as clear-cut as generally perceived. Third, I outline the epistemic shift during the period associated with the decline of mercenarism by drawing on Foucault’s periodization¹ and Ashley’s conceptualization of the modern subject. Fourth, I outline how society, as a necessary condition for the compact between state and man, emerges during the 18th century and how effeminacy becomes a central problematique within this new domain. Fifths, I show how modern subjectivity and the problem of effeminacy provide the conditions of possibility for the mercenary to enter into reflective practice. The conclusion highlights the importance of this investigation for the study of IR in general and concerns about the ‘return’ of the mercenary in particular.

The ‘shift away from mercenary use’

Mercenaries are conventionally understood as a universal historical occurrence (Percy, 2007). IR literature on state formation (Posen, 1993; Spruyt, 1994; Thomson, 1994; Tilly, 1990) has specifically been interested in these actors, as their elimination from the European battlefields ‘is generally narrated as the progressive modernization of states and armed forces towards the so-called Westphalian model of the sovereign national state possessing a monopoly on legitimate violence’ (Wilson, 2020: 12). The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are seen as the infliction point for this change and ‘widely hailed as the decisive breakthrough to modernity, in which ‘every citizen must be a soldier, and every soldier a citizen’, leading to mass armies and ‘total war’ (Wilson, 2020: 12). To explain this shift, IR scholars have put forward different theories that can broadly be divided into four groups.

The Realist/Materialist argument rests on the assumption that states compete for survival in an anarchic international arena (Percy, 2007), forcing states to act in a manner that guarantees their security within this system. Following this view, the 18th century was characterized by various transformations that required states to adopt policies that would ensure their security in relation to these transformations. First, Europe witnessed substantial population growth (McNeill, 1984: 145), allowing states to extensively recruit soldiers from their citizenry (Percy, 2007: 96). As a result, European armies grew ever larger, forcing states to maintain large standing armies for their protection. Second, new military technologies, such as the advancement of firearms, reduced the required length of training and ‘[t]hus, large numbers of soldiers could be more readily acquired by the conscription of citizenry than by outside hiring’ (Singer, 2006 (2003) 30). Third, new tactics like skirmishing required troops to fight independently without constant supervision, which was necessary for mercenaries (Posen, 1993). The adoption of national armies is therefore interpreted as being caused by material changes, which altered the conditions for achieving security within the international system to which the use of mercenaries was an inadequate response.

In opposition to the claim that material changes were responsible for the decline of mercenary forces, the intellectual history-based account places emphasis on the role of ideas by arguing that states regarded their own citizens as militarily more effective than mercenaries (Avant, 2000; Singer, 2006 [2003]). States began to ‘think’ this way after the exogenous shock of military defeat. Prussia, for example, after the defeat at Jena and Auerstedt (1806), identified the main reason for French victory in its citizen army. Prussia, therefore, changed its force structure and adopted a citizen army because of the idea that citizens fight more effectively. This change’s successful implementation helped defeat French forces in 1815 and thereafter became an international model that other states copied.

For the normative approach, neither material factors nor ideas are responsible for the ‘shift away from mercenary use’, but it was caused by a specific ‘anti-mercenary norm’ (Percy, 2007). This norm, which has been in operation since the 12th century, caused states to prefer citizen armies to mercenary forces hired from abroad. Contrary to the intellectual history account, states did not opt for citizen armies because they believed citizens would fight better but because ‘they began to believe that it was the right thing to do’ (Percy, 2007: 120). The change from mercenaries to national armies was, therefore, first of all, a moral change ‘because states began to question the morality of their [mercenaries] use’ (Percy, 2007: 165).

Last, the historical sociology argument, put forward by Thomson (1994), attributes a significant role to the institution of state sovereignty. Thomson’s (1994) main argument is that the formation of state sovereignty resulted from a process in which the heteronomous medieval system, in which ‘violence was democratized, marketised and internationalized’, was transformed into the modern order of a territorialised state system, in which violence was ‘dedemocratised, demarketised and territorialized’ (p. 2). Through this process of territorialisation, which, for Thomson, forms the constitutive aspect of sovereignty, states became responsible for any violence emanating from their territory. This made the mercenary a problematic figure, as states feared that the private actions of their citizens could embroil them within the conflicts where these served as mercenaries. In response, states placed stricter controls on their citizens, whereby the supply of mercenaries dried up.

The turn to Global Historical Sociology and HIR has done much to problematize such teleological explanations of state formation. Departing from work providing a more nuanced historicization of this process (Kaspersen and Strandsbjerg, 2017; Spruyt, 1994), contributions challenged a key assumption animating accounts such as those outlined above, namely, framing the relation between state and violent non-state actors in the state formation process in zero-sum terms. Instead, scholars have shown how state and non-state are mutually constitutive (Bartelson, 2014) through an analysis of figurations such as the pirate (Shirk, 2022), the privateer (Colás and Mabee, 2010), the ‘company state’ (Srivastava, 2022), the unlawful combatant (Scheipers, 2015), or the mafioso (Rossi, 2024). Following in their footsteps, this article challenges the above accounts for the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ by similarly situating the mercenary as co-constitutive of modern statehood. As such, it argues for the need to take this concept as the endpoint of the analysis rather than an unquestioned premise from which investigations depart. Doing so, in a first step, necessitates destabilizing the concept of ‘the mercenary’, which I will do below by historizing the ‘soldier’/‘mercenary’ dichotomy that lies at the heart of the mercenary decline narrative.

Problematizing the mercenary/soldier dichotomy

Although the four accounts discussed above differ in the reasons identified for being responsible for mercenary decline, two assumptions permeate the debate. First, in assuming that mercenary armies were replaced by armies composed of citizens, it is presumed that the mercenary preexisted this transformation. In the words of Varin (2015): ‘Mercenaries pre-date soldiers’ (p. 5). Scholarship in IR (Ettinger, 2014; Olsen, 2022; Riemann, 2021, 2022) and other disciplines (Wilson, 2020), however, has posed a significant challenge to the essentializing logics informing the concept of the mercenary and exposed how it depends on modern achievements. Historians specifically have been cautious in applying this concept to pre-modern actors as ‘[o]ur contemporary understanding of the term mercenary did not develop before the 18^th Century’ (Corvisier and Childs, 1994: 502).² Second, it is assumed that there was a clear division between mercenary and soldier before the 19th century. That is to say, both are distinct, or at least, that ‘the mercenary’ was already an established category. This categorical difference rests on the assumption that the mercenary, as a non-citizen, invariably needs to be foreign. Exemplary for this understanding is Percy’s work on the anti-mercenary norm. In her analysis of Thomson’s (1994) argument that the institution of state sovereignty caused the shift away from mercenary use, she states that such a proposition ‘cannot explain the decision to abandon the practice of hiring foreign soldiers’ (Percy, 2007: 113). For Percy, the mercenary is foreign. Indeed, as Ettinger (2014) has shown, statist notions of ‘foreignness’ are integral to mercenary definitions in such diverse disciplines as History, IR and Law. In opposition to this claim, I show that the two assumptions underpinning literature on the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ had not been conditions of possibility before the 19th century. First, a clear distinction between mercenaries (understood as foreigners) and soldiers (understood as citizens) had not yet emerged, and second, that mercenaries are foreign was far from clear.

Beginning with questions of ‘foreignness’ and going back to the 17th century, we find the following statement in Hermann Conring’s (1663) widely circulated Discursus politicus de militia lecta, mercenaria et socia; ‘we may subdivide mercenary troops into those who are hired at home, or those who are brought from abroad’ (pp. 6–7). Similarly, in a work published 30 years later, Andrew Fletcher (1737) argued that ‘every country is obliged to defend itself in time of war, and maintain its reputation by the force of money; that is by mercenary troops, either of their own, or of other countries’ (pp. 80–82). German lawyer Johann Samuel Stryk (1705) makes the identical distinction: ‘mercenaries are those hired for pay at home or abroad’ (p. 2). We see the same expressed by Johann Gottlieb Heineccius (1742), arguing that an army ‘is mercenary, when soldiers, even foreigners, are listed for money’ (p. 186). William Thornton (1753), attacking the British government’s mismanagement of funds in 1753, similarly showed that the mercenary is not by definition foreign, claiming that ‘public treasure’ was squandered ‘in vain attempts to obtain from foreign and domestic mercenaries what a militia only can supply’ (p. 8). That this was not solely a matter of academic thinking is exemplified by a debate held on the 9th of December 1754 in the British House of Commons. Here, discussing whether the Mutiny Bill, which concerned the governing, regulating, provisioning and funding of the British Army, should be extended to North America, it was argued that ‘such rigorous punishments as are to be inflicted by this Bill upon our British mercenary soldiers’ should not be extended to religious and honourable men in the American colonies (Cobbett, 1813: 377). These disciplining measures were fit only for ‘British mercenary soldiers’ who ‘are usually composed of the very lowest and most abandoned of our people’ (Cobbett, 1813: 377). From these selected examples, we can infer that mercenaries need not be foreigners and could equally be nationals.

This is further evidenced by various statements affixing the adjective ‘foreign’ to their description of mercenaries. The most famous case is the American Declaration of Independence, where we read: ‘He [King George III] is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny’ (quoted in Simpson, 2010: 38) Hence, if the foreign status of a mercenary would be an ontological precondition, the need to specify ‘foreignness’ would not arise. Furthermore, the status of being foreign did not refer to nationality until the end of the 18th century, as

it was not until Bentham coined the phrase international in the late eighteenth century that foreign came to be firmly associated with the different character of other nations. . . . [until then], foreign served to indicate the distance, unfamiliarity, and alien character of those people outside of one’s immediate household, family, or region but still inside the political community that would later comprise a state. (Campbell, 1998 [1992]: 27)

Indeed, the modern figure of the foreigner is constituted after the French Revolution, as

[b]y inventing the national citizen, and the legally homogenous national citizenry, the Revolution simultaneously invented the modern figure of the foreigner. Henceforth, citizen and foreigner would be correlative, mutually exclusive, exhaustive categories. One would be a citizen or a foreigner; there would be no third way. (Brubaker, 1989: 43–44)

As the above examples expose, being foreign was not a constituent element of pre-19th-century conceptualizations of ‘the mercenary’.

To complicate matters further, and turning to the soldier/mercenary dichotomy, it becomes apparent that before the 19th century this dualism had yet to be constituted. First, though the term soldier emerged in the 14th century and began to replace the more common term miles from the 16th century onwards, its meaning was in flux until stabilizing in its characteristically modern form during the period of mercenary decline (Kümmel, 2006; Linch and McCormack, 2013). Second, the term mercenary (in a military context) was mainly used as an adjective before emerging as a noun in the 17th century (Etymonline.com, n.d.). Exemplary is Machiavelli, presumed chief entrepreneur of the ‘anti-mercenary norm’ (Percy, 2007), who solely uses the term in an adjectival form (soldati mercenarii) (Simpson, 2010: 119). Third, being a recent noun, it is unsurprising that entries defining the mercenary within encyclopaedias of the 18th century ‘were short and rather basic’ (Krüger and Levsen, 2010: 10). Moreover, as Rink (2010) shows through an analysis of German and French encyclopaedias, ‘in the mid-eighteenth century these terms (mercenary and soldier) were identical’ (p. 20). Exemplary is Zedlers (1743: 415) Universal-Lexicon, where soldier and mercenary are discussed under the same entry (Soldat, Soldner oder Söldner). Thinkers have, of course, known different forms of military organization like the militia, but the national soldier (who is the basis for a citizen army) and the ‘mercenary’ had by the end of the 18th century not yet been decoupled. Adam Ferguson’ writings are indicative, as he ‘uses ‘Professional Soldiers’ and ‘Mercenary Soldiers’ as synonyms’ (Simpson, 2010: 94). Even as late as 1816, German historian Carl Von Rotteck (1816: 56) still conflates mercenaries and soldiers when setting these in opposition to national warriors (Nationalkrieger). Only by the mid-19th century is a categorical distinction between mercenary and soldier established (Krüger and Levsen, 2010: 10). The Neues rheinisches Conversations-Lexicon (Gelehrten, 1835), for example, distinguishes ‘Soldaten’ (soldiers), who ‘are natives, that defend their fatherland, even though they receive pay’, from ‘Söldner’ (mercenaries), who ‘do not care for the cause they are fighting for’ (Gelehrten, 1835: 997).

As we can determine from the analysis above, our contemporary understanding of the mercenary was not yet formed and only in the process of constitution during the period leading up to the ‘shift away from mercenary use’. Mercenaries could certainly be nationals, and a mercenary/soldier dichotomy had not yet been established. We, therefore, find ambiguity and contingency within the period preceding the 19th century in opposition to the conceptual unity explanations for the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ put forward. Below, I will turn to three factors that provide the conditions of possibility for the mercenary concept: an epistemological shift, the emergence of society, and the surfacing of discourses on effeminacy.

The modern episteme

Explanations for the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ have provided invaluable insights into the material, constitutional, ideational and normative factors contributing to the establishment of national armed forces, which constituted a key factor in establishing the state’s monopoly on violence following the Age of Revolutions. What has not found entrance into this debate so far is that these revolutions not only affected socio-political change but also engulfed the world of concepts and knowledge (Foucault, 2002 (1969)). Co-occurring with the transformation in the composition of armed forces was an epistemic change that rearranged the ‘entire socio-political vocabulary’ (Kessler and Leira, 2024a). The constitution of the soldier/mercenary dichotomy underpinning accounts of state formation, I argue, is an effect of this. To engage with this change, Foucault’s work on epistemes provides an entrance. Following Foucault (2002 (1969), epistemes are the conditions of possibility for knowledge that guide what can be thought within specific temporal modalities (also Jahn, 2017). Foucault (2002 (1969)xxiv–xxvi) identified three historical periods marked by different epistemes – the Renaissance episteme (ending in the 16th century); the Classical episteme (17th–18th century); and the Modern episteme (beginning in the 19th century). Of specific importance for this study is the change from Classical to Modern knowledge that temporally correlates with the perceived ‘shift away from mercenary use’.

According to Foucault (2002 (1969), modernity is marked by the appearance of ‘man’, ‘as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows’, making man the maker of history and grounding this figure within the modern state. Drawing on Foucault’s work, and bringing it into the field of IR, Ashley (1989) termed this subjectivity ‘sovereign man’ or ‘the heroic figure of reasoning man’ (p. 265). A figure that should not be understood by reference to individuals alone but also incorporates ‘the form of the ‘domestic’ order, the social relations of production, the various subjectivities to which they give rise, the groups (such as women) who are marginalized in the process, and the boundaries of legitimate social and political action’ (Campbell, 1998 (1992): 63). Sovereign man can, therefore, not be understood without reference to the modern state (Weber, 2010). In Ashley’s (1989) words: ‘modern discourses of politics hold that the legitimacy of the state’s conduct is ultimately to be grounded in a kind of compact between the ‘reasoning men’ of a domestic population and the state’ (p. 268). Within this ‘compact’ ‘each rational person comes ultimately to support a set of territorial and juridical limits as those necessary for the function of reason’ (Franke, 2001: 148). Man, for example, draws the boundaries within which social and political action is legitimate, delimits the space for individuals to interfere in the affairs of others, and legislates these limitations inside the state, forming the coercive and juridical framework that guarantees the stability and security of these limits and boundaries. This space of domestic society, characterized by reason, order and peace, is not a natural given but rather produced by practices of statecraft that set the domestic in opposition to an outside (Ashley, 1989). This space of exteriority is anarchical and marked by ‘historical contingency and chance that refuses to submit to reason’ (Ashley, 1989: 268). In their relation, man and state are therefore opposed by the domain of anarchy. But the outside is constitutive of the relation between man and state, as it is through narratives of external danger that the ‘sovereign presence of reasoning man’ is centred within the state (Campbell, 1998 (1992): 66). Man and state, therefore, ‘must acknowledge an ‘inside’ in order to survive the enduring anarchies ‘outside’ (Luke, 2015 (2003) 106).

This acceptance constitutes an autonomous, always already, active imperative, compelling any domestic society to submit to its state, directing every state to organize its society to nurture rational men as its citizens, and empowering rational men to control anarchy through war, or preparing for war, by states bolstered by anarchy-avoiding domestic society. (Luke, 2015 [2003]: 106)

For this reason, sovereign man necessitates the state to secure his reason and autonomy within the limits inscribed by the state. However, the state equally depends on man. Sovereign man is secured by the modern sovereign state, which in turn is secured by sovereign man willing to defend the sovereign state and ‘conduct its violent business’ (Tagma, 2009). Crucially it is the very ‘deployment of violent means to bring an external ‘anarchy’ under control’ that secures ‘the conditions of sovereign man’s autonomous and reasoning being within domestic bounds’ (Ashley, 1988 295). Therefore,

[t]he primary problem of modern statecraft – a problem never finally resolved – is to stabilise the sovereign grounds of legitimate violence in modern politics by enframing and inscribing the domestic domain of ‘sovereign man’ which the state can be understood to represent. (Ashley, 1988: 256)

And here, a state’s armed forces fulfil a prime function. Though Ashley has less to say about the military aspects underpinning sovereign man (Hooper, 2001 [2000]), Coker (2001) has highlighted how, during the onset of modernity, ‘the fighting spirit of a people was crucial in legitimising the role of the state’ (p. 94). Indeed, though ‘[s]ervice in the army was an ontological commitment, for war – or the preparation for it’, it is a key condition ‘for the production, maintenance and reproduction of a virtuous community through which subjectivity could be experienced, existentially for the citizen, collectively for the State’ (Coker, 2001: 94). As such, it is ‘not that “man” makes war, but rather that war makes “‘man”’ (Hooper, 2001 [2000]: 107).

To see how this aspect forms the mercenary’s conditions of possibility, we need to turn to another aspect of which Ashely has less to say. Sovereign man and the anarchic international, as feminist and queer scholars have pointed out, contain specific sexed, gendered and/or sexualized biases whereby the former is rendered in hegemonic masculine terms and understood as the basis for political subjectivity and rational action, while the latter is framed as a figuration representing the dangerous, perverse, savage, uncivilized, feminine or homosexual ‘Other’ that justifies not only the very reasonableness of the former but also legitimizes its use of violence (Richter-Montpetit, 2018; Weber, 2016). The inclusion of sex into the analysis of sovereign man provides an additional frame of reference into this figure’s attempts to fix itself and the corresponding international in binary terms. Below, I show how the presumed danger of ‘effeminacy’, a problematique accompanying the creation of domestic society, threatened ‘sovereign man’s’ binary logic, as effeminacy was simultaneously an expression of domestic or civil society and a threat to the masculine principle sustaining figurations of ‘sovereign man’. In the attempt to arrest ambiguity and to reinstate a binary logic, Enlightenment discourses fused debates on civil society and military organization to fix this plural logic within binary terms.

In what follows, I show how, within such epistemic conditions, the construction of the mercenary played an important function within this discourse. I will begin by outlining how domestic, or civil society, emerged during the 18th century as a necessary condition for the compact between state and man. I will then proceed by illustrating how the problematique of effeminacy enters into and informs debates on the condition of civil society. Third, I will show how the mercenary concept emerges by showing how it functioned as an expression of the general effeminacy characterizing civil society, how it was constructed as a figure threatening the compact between man and state, and how it informed a discourse that created militarized masculinity as the normative regulative ideal.

The emergence of society and the dangers of effeminacy

This section will look at the emergence of domestic, or civil society, which, as I have shown above, forms a constitutive aspect of ‘sovereign man’. IR has recently expanded its investigations into the constitution of this domain at the turn of the 19th century (Leira, 2019; Neocleous, 2013; Owens, 2015). Such investigations, however, much like concerns for changes in epistemic conditions, have not yet found entrance into debates on the ‘shift away from mercenary use’. Below, I first provide a brief account of the emergence of society and then turn to the problem of effeminacy that surfaces as a troubling element accompanying the constitution of this new domain. Following this outline, I show how the mercenary begins to represent that which escapes the solution to counter the feminization of society; that is, the creation of a military organization that guarantees sovereign man’s masculinity by keeping his martial spirit alive, therefore protecting the masculine bond upon which the compact between state and man rests.

It is at the end of the 17th century that we detect early traces of a surfacing discourse that begins to delineate a new domain called society (Foucault, 2007), before coming forcefully to the fore at the turn of the 19th century (Leira, 2019). The emergence of this new domain of governance needs to be understood in response to the increasing penetration of the state into the lives of subjects and through a change in the conditions of knowledge. Prior to the modern episteme, Foucault (2007) reminds us, governing was tied to a specific form of rationality; Reason of State. This form of governing increasingly penetrated the lives of subjects. It did so, as Reason of State was guided by the premise to increase the strength of the state and within this logic of governing even the smallest ‘things’ should not escape the sovereign’s gaze. The totality of all ‘things’ in their smallest details needed to be controlled and managed (Foucault, 2007: 96–193). This need led to the emergence of political economy as a new form of knowledge, which, however, gradually reveals that overambitious control produces negative effects. Rather than increasing the strength of the state, control shows itself to be harmful to the state as it interrupts the potential of the economy. For this reasons, political economy, ‘established the idea of a domain of human activity, the marketplace, wherein government must minimize its intervention if it is to achieve its potential’ (Kiersey, 2010: 67). By adopting a laissez-faire approach, the state limits its controlling gaze but ultimately increases its strength (Dean, 2013 (2010): 139). Releasing its subjects from the externally imposed constraints on commercial activities allows subjects to unlock the economy’s full potential and increase the strength of the state (Owens, 2015). Although the state’s ability of control is constrained, political economy as a domain of knowledge was still firmly rooted within the ideology of Reason of State. It is from within this domain of knowledge, that a liberal critique of Reason of State begins to establish itself.

Where Reason of State framed ‘state and civil society as interchangeable terms, identifying the welfare of the ruler, the state, and the subjects as one and the same’ (Neocleous, 2006: 27) Ferguson’s (1767) Essay on the History of Civil Society and Smith’s (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations mark society out as a distinct entity separate from the state. Instead of seeing the pursuit of private commercial interests as an engine for the state’s prosperity, these thinkers frame commercial interest as the very ground for society’s constitution (Gordon, 1991: 22). Although egotistic, economic interests function as a centrifugal force that draws men apart, the centripetal forces of their non-economic interests draw them naturally together, forming societies (Gordon, 1991: 22). This understanding portrayed society as a natural entity governed by autonomous laws, leading to a shift from ‘raison d’état’ to ‘raison de la société’ (Owens, 2015: 106). As society is the end of government and the domain to be governed, man requires participation in the governmental process to ensure that government does not impose unnecessary interventions. Hence, government, from the American (1776) and French Revolution (1789) onwards, needs to be derived from the consent of the governed.

From now on political legitimacy derives from the fact that the legislator and the addressee of his commands (the legal subject) are one and the same. The essence of political freedom is that subjects who make law are also law’s subjected. (Douzinas, 2002: 104)

As men are the collective authors of the law, they also constitute the collective sovereign (Hippler, 2008: 55). Through this process sovereign man and sovereign state begin to mirror each other (Douzinas, 2002).

The rise of this new domain, however, was not without tension. Central to these concerns was the very commercial self-interest that gave birth to society in the first place, as it was thought that the ‘civilizational progress’ Western societies achieved through commerce carried with it the seed of its own demise. It was believed that with ‘the ‘cultivation of the arts of life’ and ‘the gradual refinement of taste and manner’ – those benchmarks of progress – come the risks of effeminacy’ (London, 1999: 60). Ferguson (1767) argued that the commercial arts, which facilitate the pursuit of ‘private advantage’, might lead men to ‘become effeminate, mercenary and sensual’ (p. 374). Abbé de Mably (1709-1785) made a similar point, claiming that: ‘It is at least evident that the intention of the ancient philosophers and legislators was to render men honest and public-spirited, while ours . . . render a nation effeminate and mercenary’ (Mably, 1778: 379). As we can discern from these statements, the adjectives mercenary and effeminate are placed inside the same conceptual realm. Let us consider both accordingly, beginning with the latter.

For Enlightenment writers, effeminacy ‘denoted a degenerate moral, political and social state that opposed and subverted the vaunted ‘manly’ characteristics – courage, aggression, martial valour, strength’ (Wilson, 2013: 146). By undermining these qualities, man acquired feminine traits, ultimately becoming female himself. ‘The root idea’ of effeminacy refers to a ‘male falling away from the purposeful reasonableness that is supposed to constitute manliness, into the laxity and weakness conventionally attributed to women’ (Sinfield, 1994: 26 emphasis added). Two problematiques for the paradigm of sovereign man arose from this. First, as women were understood to be weak (both physically and due to their incapacity to use reason), they ultimately needed to find themselves within a position of dependency. As Madame de Staël (1766–1817) explained: ‘A woman cannot exist only for herself . . . her personality dictates that she is always part of a couple, whereas man has only himself as end’ (quoted in Fraisse, 1994: 113). Effeminacy therefore points towards a state of dependency and a loss of manly autonomy (King, 2008: 154). An effeminate man thus posed a threat to the paradigm of sovereign man, as by being forced into a position of dependence, man ceases to be an autonomous decision maker, ultimately undermining his sovereign position. Here, we find the connection with the adjective mercenary. Man, driven by a ‘mercenary spirit’, loses his autonomy, as a ‘mercenary man’ driven by pure self-interest, becomes dependent on a wage and therefore sacrifices his autonomy by being in a position of servitude to someone else. A ‘mercenary man’ thus, is characterized by an ‘undue willingness to forego self-determination’ (Simpson, 2010: 10). The second problematique that arose from effeminacy was man’s loss of reason, as reason was understood to reside within the masculine alone. This ‘maleness of the Man of Reason’ (Lloyd, 1984: xviii) is of fundamental importance for the paradigm of sovereign man, as it is man’s quality to be able to reason, upon which the compact between man and state rests. Man, therefore, by becoming effeminate, loses this quality and threatens to erase the foundational quality (reason) upon which this compact stands. In summary, becoming effeminate/mercenary, therefore, on the one hand, denotes a state of being in which ‘man’ loses his autonomy and, therefore is turned from a self-determined man into a servile female, while on the other, man loses his ability to reason thereby posing a challenge to the compact between man and state. The concept of society was thus from its onset ‘closely connected to the debate about effeminacy’ (Neocleous, 2013: 105) and ‘concerns about national ‘effeminacy’ had an important military dimension’ (McCormack, 2007: 491) because ‘it signified a populace . . . lacking the ability or will to muster sufficient martial vigor to defend the state’ (Cocks, 2017: 11).

Constructing the mercenary

As I have shown above, society and the accompanying problem of effeminacy threatened the ground upon which the compact between man and state rests. The problematique to which Enlightenment thinkers were determined to find a solution was therefore related to how men were prevented from ceasing to be ‘men’. The answer was found in the revitalizing power of war, as war provided a vaccine for the degenerative disease that accompanied the civilizational progress that society made possible (Bell, 2007: 78). Clausewitz (1780–1831) described this assumption vividly:

Now in our days there is hardly any other means of educating the spirit of a people in this respect, except by War . . . [b]y it alone can that effeminacy of feeling be counteracted . . . which causes degeneracy in a people rising in prosperity and immersed in an extremely busy commerce. (Von Clausewitz, 2010 [1873]: 291)³

War, therefore, constituted ‘a means to maintain moral stature and physical integrity, an anodyne against racial, spiritual and organic degeneracy’ (MacKenzie, 1992: 2). What we thus witness from the late-18th century onwards is a transformation in the understanding of war. Where previously war was conducted in the interest of upholding or re-instating the European balance of power (Foucault, 2007), within the paradigm of sovereign man, however, war becomes the ultimate expression of the anarchic outside that is constitutive of sovereign man and the domestic space in which he can be sovereign. Man, therefore, needs to be understood ‘as an effect of war’ (Ashley, 1989: 298). Adam Ferguson (1767) clearly expresses this sentiment when arguing that ‘[w]ithout the rivalship of nations, and the practice of war, civil society itself could scarcely have sound an object, or a form’ (p. 39). Immanuel Kant (1991) argued similarly, posing the question if without war we would ‘still encounter the same culture, or that close association which promotes the wellbeing of all? Would we still encounter the same population, even that degree of freedom which is still present in spite of highly restrictive laws?’ (p. 232). The answer to this question lies in the East.

We need only look at China, whose position may expose it to occasional unforeseen incursion but not to attack by a powerful enemy, and we shall find that, for this very reason, it has been stripped of every vestige of freedom. (Kant, 1991: 232)

Kant (1991) concludes ‘[s]o long as human culture remains at its present stage, war is . . . an indispensable means of advancing further’ (p. 232). War, therefore, within the paradigm of sovereign man, is the necessary principle that conditions the compact between man and state, as it is the anarchical space of war ‘outside’, which provides the essential difference for envisioning a safe, domestic society ‘inside’, marked by peaceful relations and progress (Ashley, 1989: 290; Walker, 1993 [1992]: 63). This ‘inside’, in which autonomy is possible, however, can only be maintained if ‘man’ does not become effeminate by losing his ‘courage, aggression, martial valour, strength’ (Wilson, 2013: 146). Characteristics best nurtured and taught by military exercises (Hagemann, 1997). William Thornton (1753) thus warned ‘without warlike exercises and other incitements to military ardour in our youth, may in time, sink us into the effeminacy of the Chinese’ (p. 13). As Dudnik (2020: 208–213) shows, Enlightenment thinkers deemed a warlike inclination in the populace necessary to prevent a state of effeminacy. And here, the army became a ‘school of manliness’ (Frevert, 2001: 178) linking manhood, war and autonomy (Mosse, 1996: 43). For this reason, we can observe that ‘central to the development of ideas about liberty, commerce and civil society was the question of military organization’ (Neocleous, 2013: 95).

And it is from within these debates about commerce, society and the military that a distinct discourse emerges that invokes a concept that, in its embryonic contours, begins to resemble the mercenary in its contemporary ‘form’. Henry Kames (1774) argued:

‘Where arts, manufactures, and commerce, have arrived at perfection, a pacific spirit prevails universally: not a spark is left of military ardour, nor will any man be a soldier. Hence in such a state, the necessity of mercenary troops, hired among nations less effeminate, who fight for pay, not for the state they serve’ (p. 4).

John Millar (1793) stated that ‘ancient republics . . . made considerable progress . . . before their effeminacy or industry had introduced the practice of maintaining mercenary troops’ (p. 230). In 1778, Alexander Carlyle made a similar argument, pointing out that ‘it is surely better to be a little less rich and commercial, than ceasing to be men . . . we become so luxurious or effeminate, as to leave the use of arms to strangers and mercenaries’ (quoted in MacGilvray, 2011: 99). What we see repeated in these statements is the close connection between commerce and the danger it poses to ‘man’s’ martial values. Commerce made ‘men’ lose their martial spirit, rendered them effeminate, and, in turn, forced them to employ mercenaries in need for their protection. This placed men in a position of dependence, much like women, with their autonomy and liberty diminishing. Hence, for man to be sovereign, he himself must be obliged to defend his sovereign position within domestic society. ‘Subcontracting’ this duty negates man’s sovereign position as it is the dangers of war, or the potential threat therefore, that protects man from being rendered effeminate. The inevitable conclusion was that citizens needed to become manly soldiers if they valued their independence and liberty (Dudnik, 2020). And here, the French Revolution provided a watershed moment as the revolutionaries of 1789 represented the citizen army as a solution to end the curse of effeminacy. By rhetorically uniting ‘citizen and soldier’ the revolutionaries represented the citizen army ‘as the overcoming of a state of effeminacy and the remasculinization of military and society’ (Dudnik, 2020: 210).

As a result, the mass-conscripted citizen army began to establish itself throughout Europe and becomes the dominant form of military organization in the 19th century. Through this institution, the separation between society and state dissolves, as it is within the mass-conscripted citizen army where ‘the synthesis between the citizen and the state is experienced concretely and any distinction between state and civil society disappears’ (Müller, 2009: 55). The soldier in the mass-conscripted citizen army thus explicitly expresses the compact between man and state. The mercenary, on the other, becomes the incarnation of the threat posed by the feminization of society and emerges as an actor that endangers sovereign man’s compact with the state, by freeing sovereign man from military participation. The figuration of the mercenary, thus, challenged those forms of military organization, which are perceived to be in charge of saving the masculine character of society and the autonomy of sovereign man by assuring his compact with the state.

The concept of the mercenary, however, is still very much in embryonic form. As I have shown above, it is not yet a problematic figuration in its own right, but rather one expression of a broader problem located within domestic/civil society (effeminacy). However, this embryonic form, constitutes the conditions of possibility for the concept of the mercenary to saturate over the 19th century. While an analysis of the evolution of the 19th-century discourse is beyond the scope of this contribution, I want to gesture towards three building blocks that help to constitute the mercenary within the contours we know today.

First, drawing on Ashley (1988), I have shown how practices of statecraft enframe the domestic population by differentiating it from a dangerous ‘outside’ against which the state heroically struggles. It is this struggle that secures the state’s ‘claim to legitimacy’, as the anarchic dangers outside become constitutive of the state’s very ‘claim to legitimacy’. A particularly strong driver in this process of enframing and legitimisation is nationalism, and we can see that after the French Revolution, state-building and nation-building began to overlap. Indeed, sovereign man is increasingly imaged in ‘national’ form, and the nation-state becomes the object and fulfilment of sovereign man’s desires. In Bartelson’s (1995) words, ‘the modern subject and the modern state are linked inside knowledge, and the concepts of nation and community are used to express their unity’ (p. 189). Nationalism thus becomes one of the practices that legitimizes the compact between man and state. This legitimizing practice provides the conditions of possibility to imagine the ‘national’ soldier and, conversely, the ‘foreign’ mercenary, which was not an open possibility before. Rink’s (2016: 68) analysis of French and Prussian forms of military organization around the French Revolution shows that the multitude of manifestations and intermediate forms between conscripted duty-bound individuals and recruited soldiers that existed at the time scarcely allow for speaking of a strict dichotomy between conscripted ‘national armies’ on the one hand and mercenary troops on the other. Indeed, as I have shown above, a conceptual distinction between mercenary and soldier was not yet established, as indicated by the relevant lexicons using both terms synonymously. After a quarter century of wars of nation-state formation, however, both concepts are detached from each other, whereby the soldier, as a ‘defender of the homeland’ is placed within the domestic realm of the state (inside), and the mercenary, as a ‘foreign prince’s servant’ (Rink, 2016: 68), is located in the unruly and inferior ‘outside’. As such, creating a conceptual distinction between soldier and mercenary goes hand in hand with the modern consolidation of the international and the domestic – the inside and the outside (Walker, 1993 (1992)) – as two distinct realms. Indeed, as Leira has shown, the concept of the foreign emerges firmly at this juncture (2019) and, I argue, the concept of the mercenary marked by ‘the foreign’ with it.

Second, nationalism, as Conversi (2007) highlights, was accompanied by processes of cultural homogenization wherein the mass-conscripted citizen army was an important practice.⁴ What is more, both were also mutually reinforcing, as ‘Nationalism provided the myths to justify the state’s homogenizing and uprooting practices through military conscription’ (Conversi, 2007: 386). Two factors make this process important for the emergence of the mercenary. First, ‘an important dimension of the process of homogenization’ was ‘the deployment of a national norm and the articulation of its antagonist, the abnormal, the pathological’ (Esteves, 2008: 11). The mercenary fulfilled this function by working as the constitutive other of the soldier who began to embody national identity (Conversi, 2007) and, by extension, sovereign man. Second, homogenisation was accompanied by individuation in the sense that it necessitated the fostering of a self that could adopt a national identity. As Hippler (2008: 29, 125, 203) shows, military thinkers became increasingly preoccupied with the inner workings of the ‘self’, evidenced by discussions about the importance of courage, spirit, responsible behaviour and attachment in explaining success or defeat in war. And here, the soldier in the mass-conscripted citizen army was characterized by ‘self-defence, liberty, autonomy and enlightenment’ while ‘the mercenary . . . was associated with ideas of passive obedience, aggressive war, despotism, heteronomy and lack of responsibility’ (Hippler, 2008: 70). Indeed, what we see emerging is a move away from treating soldiers collectively and towards attention to their individuality and psychology, with a specific focus on their motivation to fight voluntarily in defence of the nation (Simpson, 2010: 8). This opens up the ground for framing the mercenary in terms of ‘self-interest’.

Third, as a consequence of the paradigm of sovereign man, cyclical political narratives began to be replaced by notions of historical progress and development (Bartelson, 1995). This also affected concerns regarding gender and sex. While previously, as I have shown, masculinity could always slide into effeminacy, thus expressing a form of cyclical time, from the early 19th century onwards, the masculine/feminine binary is naturalized and placed outside of time. Masculinity became ‘an “unmarked” category, residing in seemingly gender-neutral concepts like “the people”’ (Dudnik, 2004: 89). Yet, this binary became a marker of progress, autonomy and civilization (Dudnik, 2004). As the Swiss Jurist Bluntschli put it ‘only those peoples in which the manly qualities, understanding and courage, predominate are fully capable of creating and maintaining a national State. Peoples of more feminine characteristics are, in the end, always governed by other and superior forces’ (quoted in Bartelson, 2023). And here, ‘(a)bandoning reliance on mercenaries’, as Parrott (2012) explains, ‘is part of a civilizing process; the state-controlled army reflects the achievement of moral and political maturity’ (p. 6). And as civil society was increasingly imagined in terms of stages of civilization (Ashenden, 2015), what we see during the 19th century is that the connection between effeminacy and mercenaries is relocated to the European outside. William Cooke Taylor’s (1840) The Natural History of Society is exemplary when pointing out how after

‘the immense losses at Marathon, Salamis, and Platza, . . . [t]he Persians almost immediately ceased to be a race of warriors, and sunk into luxury, debauchery, and effeminacy; they intrusted the defence of their empire to bands of mercenaries, just as the Turks in later times’ (p. 52).

As such, just as it still does today (Riemann, 2022), the concept of the mercenary allowed to temporalize contemporaries.

Conclusion

This article contested a foundational narrative of change in IR, namely that mercenaries ceased to be a constitutive part of European armed forces in the 19th century. Inspired by Kessler and Leira (2024b), it did so by shifting the focus onto the formation of concepts, which allows ‘us to recast the question of continuity and discontinuity’ by directing our attention ‘towards the ‘logic’ and rules of the game’ (p. 431). Doing so did not usher in another competing explanation for the debate on mercenary decline, but it engaged with the conditions of possibility for such a debate to take place. By treating the mercenary as an endpoint of the analysis, instead of a point of departure, it challenged the narrative of disappearance that the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ purports by showing how the mercenary emerges as an ‘object for thought’ at the moment of its supposed disappearance.

This article began by questioning and historicizing the presentism inherent in the soldier/mercenary dichotomy. It then outlined the epistemic and socio-political change that occurred during the 19th-century transformation of military force and discussed the emergence of society and the dangers associated with ‘effeminacy’ that were believed to emanate from it. I ended my analysis by outlining how war provided a vaccine to the dangers ‘effeminacy’ posed and showed how the mercenary entered into these debates as an actor that threatened to undo the compact between man and state by being simultaneously a symptomatic expression of, as well as cause for, the erosion of the masculine principle upon which this compact rests. As such, this article overturns a shared assumption in the teleology of the modern state; the mercenary is not a pre-modern phenomenon, which disappears following the emergence of the modern state and the system of states, but its own existence becomes logically possible only within the epistemic conditions of modernity.

Reframing the question of mercenary decline away from disappearance to the constitution of concepts has clear implications for IR. One is that the transition to national citizen armies at the turn of the 19th century cannot be explained in terms of a ‘shift’ (from mercenary to national soldiers) as the mercenary emerges as an ‘object for thought’ as part of that transformation. Its emergence is the result of a crucial inflection that was produced in Europe at the turn of the 19th century as a consequence of the emergence of modern subjectivity (sovereign man) brought about by a change in the conditions of knowledge. As the mercenary concept did not precede its supposed disappearance, my findings re-situate the debate over the rise of national citizen armies by moving the focus of the analysis away from the notion of a ‘shift’ and towards the constitution of concepts and subjectivities. Being attentive to such constitutive processes provided a different perspective on the 19th-century transformation of European armed forces by exposing that the mercenary and the state are not mutually exclusive but relationally constituted, thereby lending further strength to IR debates that question the clear separation between the domains of the state and the non-state and the constitutive effects of drawing this distinction (Leira, 2019; Owens, 2008).

Second, this article raises awareness to how the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ narrative helps to stabilize an essentialized version of the form of the modern state. By ignoring the mercenary’s modernity and ascribing a transhistorical nature to it, this narrative ascribes a transhistorical nature to the state, thereby producing a historical continuity of state sovereignty and the state system. By reifying the concept of the mercenary into a sui generis category distinct from the conditions of knowledge under which it occurred, such a discourse affirms the universality of the presentist categories it applies. This is in line with Riemann’s (2021) argument that because ‘the mercenary ‘has always been with us’, this concept can be used to reify claims about other concepts equally perceived to be historical-universalisms (the self, and modern inside/outside distinctions) and to derive transhistorical claims about the nature of political organizations (the state, and the international system)’. Foregrounding this unthought assumption animating literature on the mercenary’s disappearance reveals how these accounts are deeply infused with modern assumptions and an unexpressed commitment to ‘sovereign man’. The Realist/Materialist account finds an answer for the disappearance of mercenaries in the timeless forces of competition and survival, animating states within an anarchical system. They thereby (re)produce the order vs anarchy binary underpinning ‘sovereign man’. Accounts informed by historical sociology engage with the boundary-producing practices enacted by the institutionalization of state sovereignty, thereby (re)producing, in line with the requirements of ‘sovereign man’, a binary logic of state and non-state in which the state functions as the sovereign point of reference. The intellectual history-based account focusing on state ‘choices’ ignores the sexualized logics informing this ‘choice’ and also overlooks that the very notion of ‘choice’ only becomes viable under modern epistemic conditions. Last, the norm-based approach, as poststructuralists have forcefully put forward (Epstein, 2013), takes actors for granted by assuming that only norms and identities are socially constructed, thereby not only overlooking ambiguity in the attempt to construct norms but also the normalizing practices animating ‘sovereign man’ that give rise to various forms of identities and concepts in the first place.

Third, a focus on concepts lets us reevaluate recent discussions on the ‘return’ of the mercenary (Cusumano and Kinsey, 2022). If we understand the mercenary as a conceptual product of modernity instead of a transhistorical being, the assumption that mercenaries are returning today becomes unsettled. As such, we might ponder why current engagements with the phenomenon of mercenarism are framed around the notion of a ‘return’? A possible answer could lie in it being a response to the ‘rapid conceptual changes we are currently seeing’ in terms of ‘evolving forms of authority, climate change, technological breakthroughs et cetera’ (Kessler and Leira, 2024b). In a world in which traditional boundaries are dissolving and in which new forms and means of identity and concept formation become possible, the transhistorical nature of the mercenary concept can offer us certainty. As such, the ‘return’ of the mercenary can be read as an attempt to fix interpretations of sovereign man and (re)stabilize the orders and hierarchies it produces. Indeed, as observed by Weber.

the binaries that order domestic and international relations constantly deconstruct themselves, making them both unstable and (because unstable) unreliable. What this means is that various invested actors – from citizens to states to formal international institutions – constantly attempt to stabilize these unreliable hierarchies and the figurations that authorize them so they appear to be ahistorical, given, and true. (Weber, 2016: 37)

Challenging the assumption of a transhistorical mercenary and the teleological narrative of state formation that the ‘shift away from mercenary use’ endorses raises questions for further consideration. A first direction of enquiry could be placed on finding a corrective to the ahistoricism characterizing literature in IR and military history dealing with pre-modern ‘mercenaries’. Instead of pressing such actors through the grid of our presentist taxonomies informed by modern notions of foreignness and the self, future studies could investigate the assemblage of processes, practices and discourses that rendered these actors problematic within their own historical specificity (see Olsen, 2022; Riemann, 2021, 2022 for initial attempts). Future studies could furthermore expand on the problem of Eurocentrism in mercenary research. Possible routes to break out of these Eurocentric limitations would be to investigate the emergence of the soldier/mercenary binary in non-European contexts, how the world outside of Europe impacted on, or relates to, the mercenary concept, and how conceptual meaning making moves across linguistic boundaries. Related to the problem of Eurocentrism is an aspect that was beyond the scope of this article, namely the racialized aspects of ‘sovereign man’ and how these function in co-constituting military institutions and subjectivities in particular and the international order in general. Special focus here could be placed on how the fundamental raciality and coloniality of ‘sovereign man’ (Shilliam, 2006) shaped the mercenary discourse in the 19th century, for example, in relation to the notion of martial races (Barkawi, 2017), and beyond, for example during the process of decolonization in Africa through which the mercenary became a topic of global political concern (Percy, 2007).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Norma Rossi, Rob Walker, Halvard Leira, Benjamin de Carvalho, Matthew Hoye, Andreas Behnke, Joana Cordeiro, Antonio Cerella and Peter H. Wilson, who made suggestions at various stages of the development of this article, and to the anonymous journal referees whose comments improved this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Malte Riemann

Notes

Author biography

Malte Riemann, PhD, is assistant professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Historical International Relations, International Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies and Global Health. Current projects look at the medicalization of/in global politics, the role of fiction in war and changes in German defence policy. He is co-editor of Security Studies: An Applied Introduction (SAGE: 2024).

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The mercenary concepts conditions of possibility: effeminacy,modernity and the international

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The ‘shift away from mercenary use’

Problematizing the mercenary/soldier dichotomy

The modern episteme

The emergence of society and the dangers of effeminacy

Constructing the mercenary

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References