Making a Killing: How and why corporations use armed force to do business
Ottawa Citizen: The English non-fiction category, also worth $2,500, was won by veteran journalist Madelaine Drohan for Making a Killing: How and why corporations use armed force to do business.

Ms. Drohan's book from Random House of Canada details historical and contemporary examples of corporations, some of them Canadian, that employ killer mercenaries to further their business interests in Africa.

Making a Killing has also been nominated for the $10,000 National Business Book Award, which is to be announced today. The political and business writings of the Ottawa-based Ms. Drohan from around the world have appeared during the past two decades in the Citizen, Globe and Mail, Financial Post and Maclean's.o"

......Ms. Drohan said she started researching Making a Killing in the mid-1990s after a Canadian company, DiamondWorks, hit the headlines for its connections to a group of South African mercenaries.

"Up to that point, it had never occurred to me that a company would include the use of armed force in their business plan. I wanted to see if there were others doing this. And of course I found lots of examples all over the world of companies who were literally getting away with murder.

"I found it strange that while people were scandalized when companies were stealing their pensions or cooking the books (Enron, WorldCom, etc.), there was much less of an uproar when companies were killing people, or allowing them to be killed on their behalf. Perhaps because it was happening on the other side of the world, it allowed people to turn the other way."
- posted by Sophont @ Sunday, April 25, 2004