Public or private? Blurring the lines through YouTube recruitment of military veterans by private security companies

Jutta Joachim,Andrea Schneiker

doi:10.1177/14614448211047951

Abstract

Private security companies (PSCs) blur the lines between the public and the private sector through the provision of services to state militaries. Based on a multi-modal qualitative content analysis of YouTube recruitment videos aimed at veterans, we show how PSCs also challenge these boundaries through their hiring practices. By relating to veterans’ past as hero warriors and by envisioning their future as corporate soldiers, the companies appear as ‘like-military’ and as allowing ex-militaries to ‘continue their mission’. The findings contribute to scholarly debates about the privatization of security. They illustrate that similarly to the public sector, the private is also re-constituted through the military values that veterans introduce. The study adds to the literature on the visualization of war showing how video-based platforms allow security actors such as PSCs to construct their corporate identity in ambivalent ways by appealing to different emotional levels and by giving rise to different narratives.

Highlights

Since the end of the Cold War, Western militaries increasingly contract private security companies (PSCs) for the provision of services ranging from people and compound protection to reconnaissance or rescue and humanitarian missions as well as combat
In the case of the PSCs we examined, and as we show below following the discussion of methods, their recruitment videos give rise to a new cast of soldiers, that is, corporate ones, but they further blur the line between the private and public security sectors
We examined two YouTube recruitment videos primarily aimed at veterans and respectively issued by CACI and DynCorp International

Summary

Introduction

Since the end of the Cold War, Western militaries increasingly contract private security companies (PSCs) for the provision of services ranging from people and compound protection to reconnaissance or rescue and humanitarian missions as well as combat. At the same time as the recruitment videos of CACI and DynCorp obfuscate the line between public and private by identifying with veterans’ pasts on the basis of narratives as well as myths otherwise associated with the military, sectoral boundaries are blurred by visualizing for ex-militaries their future ‘rewarding careers’ (CACI, 2020a) as corporate soldiers. Both PSCs promise to help veterans resettle in the private sector and ‘to turn the page [and] start a new chapter’ (DynCorp, 2012: 1.31–1.34). This is contrary to elsewhere in the corporate world where the social identities of the business manager and the soldier are decoupled (Bulmer and Eichler, 2017)

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion