Italy: Keeping or Selling Stocks?

While Italy is often thought as a country basically unrelated to security commercialization – especially by Italians – several pieces of evidence prove that assumption wrong. However, it is true that the phenomenon is developing quite slowly, sometimes informally, and it is seldom related to armed PMSCs. For all these reasons, Italian security commercialization is hard to track and allows for the preservation of a tight public discourse on the limited role granted to private actors. Appearances notwithstanding, the room of manoeuvre progressively gained by commercial practices is not irrelevant, as their impact on the engagement in Afghanistan shows. This chapters aims to shed some light at the often under-recognized process of Italian security commercialization and on its implications.