Abstract
In a case study of Nepalese Gurkhas working for Western private military and security companies (PMSCs), this article develops feminist global political economy understandings of global labour chains by exploring how the ‘global market’ and the ‘everyday’ interact in establishing private security as a gendered and racialised project. Current understandings of PMSCs, and global markets at large, tend to depoliticise these global and everyday interactions by conceptualising the ‘everyday’ as common, mundane, and subsequently banal. Such understandings, we argue, not only conceal the everyday within private security, but also reinforce a conceptual dualism that enables the security industry to function as a gendered and racialised project. To overcome this dualism, this article offers a theoretically informed notion of the everyday that dissolves the hegemonic separation into ‘everyday’ and ‘global’ levels of analysis. Drawing upon ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis of PMSCs’ websites, the analysis demonstrates how race, gender, and colonial histories constitute global supply chains for the security industry, rest upon and reinforce racialised and gendered migration patterns, and depend upon, as well as shape, the everyday lives and living of Gurkha men and women.
Highlights
Over the last two decades, security provision has been subject to privatisation, marketisation, and commodification; processes that manifest in the outsourcing of state security functions to private actors
By engaging in feminist Global Political Economy (GPE) analysis and drawing upon the Gurkha experience—men with a 200-year history with the British military and actively contracted by private military and security companies (PMSCs), we argue that private security reproduces gendered and racialised hierarchies through the industry’s globalised recruitment strategies and associated labour migration patterns for security work
Synthesising the critical gender research on PMSCs with feminist GPE analysis and drawing upon the everyday experiences and representations of Gurkhas offers an example of how private security markets, like other global markets, follow a colonial gendered and racialised
Summary
Over the last two decades, security provision has been subject to privatisation, marketisation, and commodification; processes that manifest in the outsourcing of state security functions to private actors This has resulted in the growth of private military and security companies (PMSCs) which are increasingly overtaking airport security, logistical support to militaries, security training, static guarding, consultancy services, and close protection globally. Conventional research on this newly emerging private security industry has so far remained focused on strategic, legal, policy, and ethical implications of outsourcing and continues to be western-centric in analysis (Avant, 2005; Kinsey, 2006; Krahmann, 2008; Singer, 2003). By examining the gendered practices of contractors on the ground (Chisholm, 2010, 2014b; Higate, 2012) as well as PMSCs’ marketing strategies (Joachim & Schneiker, 2012, 2015), it was shown that the industry is not just a masculinised space but (re)produces a variety of hierarchically positioned masculinities
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