Private security and national security: The case of Estonia
| Author | Matthew Light,Anne-Marie Singh,Josh Gold |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221099930 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Private security and national
security: The case of Estonia
Matthew Light
University of Toronto, Canada
Anne-Marie Singh
Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
Josh Gold
The Canadian International Council, Canada
Abstract
Most studies of private security postulate exclusively internal, primarily economic, causes
of the industry’s growth and regulation. In contrast, based on the case of post-Soviet
Estonia, we investigate how a state’s external security environment influences private
security. Estonia’s tense relations with neighbouring Russia and related pursuit of EU
and NATO membership have generated several policies through which private security
evolved from a lawless, politically contested industry to a modest, lightly regulated one:
(1) the exclusion of public police from private security and an effective campaign against
organized crime that together enabled an autonomous and non-criminalized security
industry to emerge, (2) free-trade policies that permitted western companies to acquire
Estonian security firms, and (3) an ‘all-of-nation’approach to national security that
promotes comprehensive state-civil society security cooperation. Estonia thus clarifies
how high politic s shapes private security, while also reveal ing the factors t hat make the
industry relatively uncontentious in most industrialized democracies.
Keywords
Comparative criminology, cyber crime, Europe, international crime, military, organized crime,
police and policing, private security, Russia, security management
Corresponding author:
Matthew Light, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, 14 Queen’s Park
Crescent West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3K9, Canada.
Email: matthew.light@utoronto.ca
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2022, Vol. 26(4) 664–683
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806221099930
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Estonia’s private security industry from ‘Wild West’to
European standard
On the northeast Baltic shore, Estonia, one of Europe’s smallest countries, has enjoyed
remarkable success since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. A
stable democracy and one of the richest post-communist European states, Estonia is
famed for its high-tech sector and ‘e-government’innovations. Having joined all three
of the Global North’s key international clubs (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) and the European Union (EU) in 2004, and the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2010), Estonia has clearly ‘arrived’. Yet the
Soviet past remains present in the country’s adversarial relationship with its neighbour,
Russia. Even the stationing of NATO troops in Estonia has not dispelled anxiety over
Russian aggression. In 2007, Estonia experienced the world’sfirst politically motivated
cyberattacks against a sovereign state: after the relocation of a Soviet war monument led
to rioting in the capital, Tallinn, three weeks of cyberattacks targeted government,
banking, and media websites. Estonia is also an espionage hotbed, and unlike most
European states, it publicly unmasks Russian moles, sometimes in high positions. In add-
ition, the Russia–Estonia border is one of the tensest in Europe. In 2014, an Estonian
internal security service officer was abducted from Estonia into Russia, possibly with
help from Russian organized crime (Whitmore, 2015). As a result, Estonia retains mili-
tary conscription and promotes citizens’involvement in a nationwide civil defence
programme.
Indeed, Estonians’awareness that that their republic is tenuous shapes all aspects of
their society. Here we analyse how the country’s geopolitical environment influences
domestic policing institutions, particularly private policing. In Singh and Light (2019),
noting that most studies of private security in Anglosphere countries focus on internal
political influences on the industry, we suggested that major internal and external
threats to regime survival should lead to a greater state role in shaping private security.
While this need not mean more restrictions on private security companies, it presumably
would mean greater state involvement in their development and regulation, including
in Estonia. Yet our research yielded surprising findings. On the one hand, the Estonian
industry is of modest size and its current regulatory regime resembles those of other
EU countries. On the other, the industry also features a chequered post-communist
history in which a swashbuckling early phase gave way to a staid contemporary reality.
Below we argue that the extant literature neglects the influence of national security
factors on the industry’s development. We then introduce Estonia’s recent political trajec-
tory and lay out how, in this highly securitized society, the private security sector today is
relatively small, lightly regulated, and uncontroversial, whereas in the early 1990s, it was
lawless and politically contested. This trajectory contrasts with most other post-Soviet
countries, where the industry remains linked to organized crime and coercive state insti-
tutions. We identify several factors that have tamed Estonia’s private security industry:
1. the strict separation of public and private policing, combined with a successful
anti-organized crime campaign, which together enabled an autonomous and non-
criminalized private security industry;
Light et al. 665
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