That there are people who draw pleasure from inflicting pain and suffering is undeniable. But cold rational academic theories tend to strip this texture.
Katz (1988:3) talks of switching the focus from the background to the foreground of crime. What would a similar switch look like for PMCs?
Katz (1988) argues that relatively little criminological literature has asked about the feelings, the lived experience, the pleasure that make crime seductive. Instead, the focus has been on finding psychological profiles or social environments that cause crime. In many ways, the same could be said of both terrorists and participants in PMCs. No one really looks at the positive aspects of involvement- not just from a sense of belonging to a group, but from the acts of violence in which they are engaged.
He actually argues for not asking why, but how. Thus his approach isn't incompatible with that advocated by Horgan. Why leads to self-justification, whereas how may nevertheless reveal something of the why - even something unknown to the actor themselves.