{"product_id":"9780333733875","title":"Mercenaries: Scourge of the Developing World","description":"Mercenaries have been employed as auxiliaries since early times, but in the post-1945 world they have operated, almost exclusively, in weak Third World countries. From Columbia to the Congo, Angola to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia to Nicaragua, they have appeared: training the drug cartel armies, assisting rebellions or civil wars, acting as the agents of the major powers. In the Congo crisis (1960-1965) they earned an especially unsavory reputation for greed, brutality and racism; it is a reputation that has stuck to the mercenary and on the whole justly. During the 1990s a new phenomenon has emerged in the form of the mercenary corporations such as Executive Outcomes or Sandline. These corporations offer a range of military expertise and weaponry, have the covert support of governments in the countries from which they come and are rapidly becoming a power to themselves, ultimately far more dangerous than the individual freebooters of the past.","brand":"Palgrave Macmillan UK","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47010754625776,"sku":"9780333733875","price":185.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780333733875_p0.jpg?v=1763685059","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780333733875","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}