Glimpses to women’s political agency in post-conflict Nepal: female ex-PLA fighters

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Guest Blog post by Dr. Hanna Ketola

I am very excited to join the ‘Military to Market’ project as a Research Associate. My own curiosities with conflict, gender and (in)secure economies resonate with Amanda’s work.

In this blog post I offer glimpses into my own ethnographic research that explores women’s political agency in the context of peacebuilding in Nepal and how this research compliments in many ways the work Amanda is doing for the project “Military to Market”.

I see two main lines of connection between my work and the Military to Market project:

  • A feminist curiosity about how subjectivities that are supposedly confined to the ‘local’ or the ‘non-political’, e.g. being an ex-PLA fighter or being a family member of a security migrant labourer are in intricate ways connected to global discourses and relations of power, e.g. in the context of peacebuilding or the security industry
  • A commitment to unlearning and shaking up entrenched understandings of who and what matters in global politics via drawing on postcolonial theory, e.g. rethinking notions of ‘women’s agency’ or the figure of the ‘security contractor’

What my project is about

My research is about women’s political agency in the context of peacebuilding in Nepal, specifically, about understanding how the post-conflict moment may generate avenues for expressing agency from the margins of power. In my project, I foreground experiences of women who are not at the centre of policy discourses nor authorised to speak and participate as ‘experts’ – women who enter the realm of peacebuilding as ‘target groups’.

I focus on women who fought in the Maoist army and women who lost their husbands during the war and are engaged in a victims’ struggle. I show how women act ‘politically’ in myriad ways that are not reducible to resisting regulatory gender norms or indeed to resisting peacebuilding; how political agency remains ambivalent. It can manifest as a shift towards collective mobilisation as well as a withdrawal from such activities.

My work rethinks how we conceptualise ‘women’s agency’ and ‘subaltern agency’ and intervenes into critical- and feminist literature on peacebuilding and into scholarship on agency within feminist and postcolonial IR.

Two significant practices of politics feature in my interviews with women who had fought in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) during the decade long conflict (1996-2006).

The Politics of sacrifice and when contribution goes un-recognised

The women I met had spent time in the PLA cantonments that had been set up as part of the peace agreement between the Government of Nepal and the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) in 2006. The cantonments were located in strategically important, remote locations, and overseen by the CPN-M with a very limited monitoring role for the UN. Due to the contested nature of the question of army integration and the power struggle between the political parties, the cantonment of the PLA continued for nearly seven years. At the time of our meeting in 2013 the cantonments had been closed approximately a year ago.

The women I met had taken ‘voluntary retirement’ and had started building their lives, often in a completely new location rather than returned to the remote rural districts from where they had first joined the Maoist movement.

Anger, frustration and disappointment towards the party and the ‘leaders’ over how the army integration process had been handled and how the ‘ex-PLA’ had not been ‘provided for’ and had been ‘discarded’ were the underlining themes in every informal conversation.

Rupa who had been a low-level commander during the war and whom I met in Banke explained:

‘When I was wounded, I was making bombs and grenades in the jungle. My leg was bleeding and swelling. They used to carry me to the jungle at morning and fetch me back to village by night. We struggled that much. When I remember those events, the retirement money is nothing.’ (Interview, Rupa, Banke, 29th November, 2013).

Asmita who had joined the Maoist movement through its student wing and had been verified as a combatant in the UN process talked at length about her friends who had been ‘disqualified’ or ‘tagged as minors’.

‘We fought for the nation and its people even though we were not a professional army, we fought the war our way. After the peace the government sent us for verification, that’s okay. But they tagged some of our friends as minors, we didn’t feel good about it at all.’ (Interview, Asmita, Nawalparasi, 23rd May, 2013).

What I explore in my project is how the women who fought in the PLA do not simply ‘shake off’ the political subjectivities they had crafted through experiencing the war as fighters but rather how these identities mould into something new in the post-conflict context. The continuation of these military identities, forged through conflict, also resonates with Amanda’s work on Gurkhas martial race in private security. In both cases, we are compelled to examine the ways in which militarised identities are constructed and reshaped through the broader political structures such as neoliberalism, capitalism and post-conflict economies for which these men and women are situated.

From my research being ‘ex-PLA’ emerges as a way of being political that was characterised by a prior contribution and sacrifice and by grievances around the non-recognition of these by the UN, by the government and most prominently by the leadership of the party. What I found striking was how this form of subjectivity seemed to crystallise during the cantonment time and was expressed through inhabiting the very categories that had been employed by the UN agencies involved in the ‘verification’ and ‘rehabilitation’ process in Nepal, such as ‘verified’, ‘disqualified’ and ‘minors’. It is these kind of entanglements – between subaltern expressions of political agency and discourses and practices the remit of which is international – that my work continues to be occupied with.

What to do when confronted by: ‘I am tired of politics’

When starting the fieldwork, I had assumed that I would be researching forms of collective struggle – informal or formal ways of organising that had emerged in the post-conflict context as avenues to express grievances in relation to the party, the UN actors or the government. Yet, I hit a wall when trying to find out about ways in which the women I met were ‘involved’ in activities that were associated with the party or activities that involved other ex-PLA combatants. Expressions such as ‘I have contributed enough’ ‘I am tired of all that’ emerged in some form in all the first interviews I conducted.

At first I found myself wondering whether I was talking to the ‘right people’, where were the women who were more ‘involved’? Relinquishing the desire to find what I was looking for, I started to explore what was at stake in these comments – in the dynamic I have come to call ‘withdrawing from politics’.

When I met with Anar who had been a platoon commander during the war for the second time I asked her to tell me a bit more about what she meant by being ‘tired of politics’. She responded with a long, detailed story about her involvement/non-involvement in politics of which this is a short excerpt:

‘My husband thinks that we need to be involved in politics. After all we have spent so much time and effort in yesterday’s war, and how can we just leave it like that and stay home. Life itself is politics. So he feels that it is important to be involved. But I disagree and always tell him to leave politics. We have not gotten anything out of it. I don’t think we have a future in politics … But me, personally I am tired of politics, although my husband is not yet. He has this strong will of getting into politics and has a dream of doing something in the political sector. For me, in comparison to politics I chose business and entrepreneurship and taking care of my family. That is my opinion.’ (Interview, Anar, Nawalparasi, 10th December, 2013)

In the policy discourses of ‘gender and peacebuilding’ in Nepal (and beyond) there is an answer at the ready regarding what is at stake when women ex-combatants move away from active involvement in politics: re-strengthening of regulatory gender norms and women’s concomitant ‘return’ to domestic duties and the private sphere. This narrative of ‘return’ that official discourses of gender and peacebuilding in Nepal (re)produce constitutes women ex-PLA combatants primarily as ‘conflict affected women’: as ‘affected by’ what seems to be an inevitable ‘backlash’, that is, stigmatisation and strengthening of societal gender norms. Within the narrative of return female ex-combatants are positioned as ‘affected by’ the policies of the Maoist party and more broadly by the ‘politicisation’ of the process of army integration and rehabilitation.

Yet the narrative of return fits uneasily with the stories that the women I met, including Anar, shared with me. And importantly, it is a reading that they were painfully aware of and explicitly resisted. Sarika who had been a low-level commander called out this reading, growing frustrated about my ill-conceived questions in our first interview. When Sarika explained that she no longer contributed to party activities I asked whether ‘women’ faced any difficulties in being involved in politics, specifically, if having had children made it more difficult to continue being involved, she responded:

‘Nothing can stop us. When there was war we used to carry two children along with rifle and bag, one child in front and one child on the back. We can work in any situation; we have examples of going on fighting when we were pregnant and giving birth to children. Now, children have grown up, we can be better fighters now.’ (Interview, Sarika, Nawalparasi, 23rd May, 2013)

I argue that if confronted by: ‘I have done enough for politics’, ‘I am tired of politics’, feminist analysis of post-conflict responds by holding on to the narrative of ‘return’ not very much new enters the picture. Rather, we risk perpetuating precisely the kind of gendering that the women I met vehemently rejected, that is: as women they had exercised agency during war through their participation and this form of agency is constrained in the post-conflict context to various extents – and it is the constrains that need to be foregrounded in the analysis.

What if instead of constrains to a preconceived form of ‘women’s agency’ we foreground the following question: what has happened to ‘politics’ in the post-conflict context? Has the meaning of politics shifted – from a ‘struggle’ to ‘career’ or a ‘sector’ as Anar described? Or the location of politics geographically from the rural to the urban/the capital? Who in the post-conflict context has access to what kinds of politics?

Relatedly, what if we take a step back and ask what is at stake when women ex-PLA combatants ‘withdraw’ from politics. Could the withdrawal be a negotiation in relation to the party? A way of withdrawing contribution till the time is right or till the contribution is indeed recognised? In short, I argue that withdrawing from politics needs to be explored as a possible site of political agency. To get to such a line of questioning it is necessary for feminist analysis to leave the perhaps more comfortable ground where ‘women’s political agency’ is from the outset tied with a specific goal: resisting and transforming regulatory gender norms.

These are the kinds of questions I sought to pursue in my project and no doubt continue to be occupied with for years to come. The rich fieldwork underpins mine, and Amanda’s, curiosities with the ways in which politics gets redrawn in transitions, blurred boundaries of military to market and conflict to post-conflict.

I cannot wait to get started in analysing the fascinating material Amanda has generated through her ethnographic research and to embark on a new research agenda that so closely echoes my previous research interests and allows me to continue to explore the politics of post-conflict Nepal. I’m curious for example, at the ways in which military identities and relations to the state differ between the martial raced Gurkha and the ex-Maoist female combatant. In what ways do intersections of race, gender, sexuality, age and caste embody political and economic subjects—from Gurkhas, to unarmed foreign security contractors, to female ex-fighters.

Hanna Ketola has recently completed her PhD from Kings College London. She is currently the research associate for “From Military to Market”.

The Faces and Places of Security Migration: A Multipart Blog Series

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I’ve been living out of my suitcase for the past 10 months now researching the various people and sites that govern Nepali (and the broader global South) workforces into the private security industry. In fact, my academic work to date has focused largely on how labour is organised and managed in the production of global security and how we produce knowledge about security experts/professionalism and value,with specific focus on the private security industry and Gurkhas.  This research include location sites of Afghanistan, UAE, Qatar, UK and Nepal. It also comprises of interviews with security professionals/practitioners (defined by the security industry as highly skilled management and low skilled global South workforces), security company directors, global recruitment companies, local manpower providers (in Nepal), government officials, labour activists, academics and security migrant families.

a post interview photo with Hindi (pseudonym), a wife of a foreign security worker in Qatar. She has not seen her husband is 1.5 years and is looking forward to his 1 month off in 6 months time. They have one daughter who is 2 years old and she lives with her family in Jhapa district, Nepal.

Below is a brief (and developing) visual ethnography of the different people and places that make up global security migration. This particular post mainly focuses on recruitment processes and pathways young Nepali men (and sometimes women) venture through in becoming foreign security workers–be it Gurkhas or unarmed security contractors. In both cases, the motivations are largely centred around unequal economic geographies and the hopes and militarised fantasies of what foreign security work can offer them and their families.

a Gurkha training centre billboard in Kathmandu. Recruitment advertisements like these are littered throughout cities in Nepal.

This recruitment poster to the left is from a company who has only been operating for 2 years.  Training centres and recruitment images such as this one are scattered throughout the cities of Nepal. I managed to talk to some of the training centre recruits in Kathmandu, Pokhara and Dharan. Most of the recruits pay 30-40 thousand Nepali Rupees for their preparation training. This includes physical fitness, english and math skills and interview preparations.

Sameer, a recruit with a Kathmandu based training centre, comes from a village in Kathmandu Valley and knew nothing of Gurkhas until he moved to Kathmandu.  Captivated my the militarised masculine imaginings depicted in the training centre advertisement image, and the financial and social mobility becoming a Gurkha could bring, he asked his parents for the money needed to take the training course.

Gurkha training centre recruits finishing up their morning physical fitness. It starts with a 5am run and is followed by a series of static strength tests.

This image to the right is of young Nepali men from a Kathmandu based Gurkha training centre.  There are 50 of these young men registered now but as August approaches, and the annual recruitment for the British army begins to take place, more than 200 recruits will come to this particular training centre.

In total, there is an estimate of 12-14 thousand young men that try out for the British Army and Singaporean Police every year.  On average, only 600 men are accepted. When I presented these odds to the potential recruits I talked to, and asking them what makes a man successful at becoming a Gurkha, I was repeatedly told: hard work, dedication and luck. Most recruits had no back up plan if they were not successful.

Talking to young Nepali men in Dharan who registered with one of the local Gurkha recruitment training centres. They are in their English class and practicing their language skills as I ask them questions.

Becoming a Gurkha is rooted in a long tradition in Nepal of over 200 years of military service with the British (and Indian) armies.  If successful, these men have a chance to significantly uplift their families out of poverty and substantially increase the material possibilities for themselves and their local communities.  The stake are very high.

What I found striking when talking to these very young men is that their desire to be a Gurkha was not for general militarised imaginings of army life. In fact, most did not have any detailed understanding of what the day-to-day military life would be like. Instead, they repeated told me they wanted to be Gurkhas for the life opportunities being located in Britain (and Singapore) could offer them and their families. Recruitment into the British and Indian Armies and Singaporean Police as Gurkhas is still very much a man’s journey.

a photo of young Nepali women who successfully completed preparation training with a Gurkha training centre in Pokhara

In 2007 the British army did trial a pilot programme designed to encourage Nepali women to try out.  However this initiative was abandoned and, after talking to numerous stakeholders in Nepal, no official explanation was given. This was particularly disappointing to the many women who had trained for months in preparation for this opportunity that historically has only been open to men.

one manpower company out of the currently 841 registered companies who operate in Nepal. Not all provide opportunities to work in foreign security.

Of course foreign service with the British and Indian Armies and the Singaporean police are just one route out of poverty and increasingly material status. Nepali men (and now sometimes women) are venturing into foreign security work in the unarmed security industry. The pathway to this security work is through manpower providers. These providers act as the gatekeepers for foreign security companies accessing Nepali labour. To the left is an image of one such manpower company’s office, who recruits into Saudi and Qatar. Nepali unarmed security workforces generally travel to Malaysia, Qatar, UAE and Saudi for security work.

Achieving foreign security employment into the unarmed industry brings with it different challenges than armed security. Much of the discussion about labour violations, human rights violations, long work hours and poor working conditions of other global industries are certainly echoed in unarmed security.

Ganga (pseudonym) and his family in Itihari. Photo taken in front of their home. Ganga works in Afghanistan as a security contractor.

The pathways into foreign private security work are vastly different depending on whether you qualify for armed security or unarmed security. Armed security continues to privilege men who have former military and police service, generally as Gurkhas who have served in foreign militaries. However, the increased permanent migration of retired British Gurkhas to the UK, after their right to settle was granted, has opened up private security opportunities to Indian army retired Gurkhas and Nepal army retired soldiers.

Ganga is one such man who qualified for armed security work. I met with Ganga and his family in Eastern Nepal. Ganga has an extended family now that he has to look after since his brother passed away and there was no one else to take care of his brother’s children. As usual in the motivations to work in conflict zones, retired Gurkhas often feel compelled for financial motivations. When they retire from military service, their children are generally in higher education which costs a significant amount.  To maintain their lifestyle they transition into private security work.

Ganga works in Afghanistan as a security contractor. He is a retired Indian army Gurkha who has been working in private security for the past 6 years. His security income, along with his army pension, pays for his children’s education and household expenditures.  Because of the extended family, Ganga and his wife cannot afford to save much and their are still working though how they will afford retirement, when Ganga can no longer work in the private industry.

Ritesh (pseudonym) working as access control for a facility in Qatar

Ritesh (photo to the left), was recruited into the unarmed security industry while in Kathmandu undertaking a degree at the local university. He, like all of the other cohorts of his I interviewed in Qatar, paid a considerable amount of money to recruitment agents and a local broker in order to obtain security work in Qatar.

Migrants paying significant amounts for foreign work is common practice despite Nepali and Qatar laws the prohibit excessive amounts being charged to migrants. Ritesh’s parents helped finance the fees necessary for him to work overseas. Unlike Ganga, Ritesh only needed to speak English, be a minimum of 5 feet, 8 inches in height, and have a good level of physical fitness.

As far as accessing foreign work goes, Ritesh is rather lucky. While he and his family had to pay a hefty amount for foreign work, he managed to land a fairly good contract in Qatar. His salary, good working conditions and regular training are in part because of the client’s particular labour standards demanded as a contractual condition, and the ad hoc, and unpaid, regular training he receives by his direct manager. Because of this, Ritesh is content with his work. The finances he receives is able to help him save to build a house back home in Nepal and hopefully make him financially suitable for marriage.

I was fortunate enough to meet with his parents.  They were frustrated with the amount they had to pay to facilitate his overseas work but felt they could at least hold the local broker accountable should anything bad happen to Ritesh overseas. Knowing the terrible work experiences, which include bonded labour and visa confiscation amongst other issues, that plague many foreign workers, they are comforted to hear about Ritesh’s work conditions.  His mom expressed particular relief.  This does not mean that Ritesh has an easy job. it is hard work and he has little time for leisure.  He works 6 days a week and on his day off he mostly sleeps.  The labour camp he lives in, while very good in comparison to others, if far from the city centre and getting into the city to explore Doha is expensive.

advertisement for unarmed security contracting work In Qatar. While the one caption reads: free visa, free ticket, this rarely happens in practice.

This post is just a small glimpse into Nepali labour recruitment into the global security industry. In the next blog post I will explore more about the process from other key actors who shape the broader governing practices of foreign security labour management.

Everyday Political Economies in Global Private Security

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security guard in Qatar

Cynthia Enloe begins her article Mundane Matters with the statement: the everyday, by definition, is banal, unimportant and inconsequential. She’s right. What does the everyday offer to politics and the study of global private security. How does paying attention to the families who cook and clean for the security leaders and business directors possibly improve our analytics on the industry? In what ways do the ritualised and tedious office tasks of emailing, the banter during coffee room breaks and pre-meetings actually matter? The everyday is pre-political, uninteresting and routine.

And yet, as Enloe goes onto convincing argue in this same article, the everyday is profoundly political. In fact, Enloe’s life work is all about connecting everyday in global politics. Other feminists and critical political economists take up Enloe’s politics. They remind us that states, militaries and markets all take vested interest in the everyday in order to sustain broader geopolitical/economic practices. Critical military scholars such as Joanna Tidy, Victoria Basham, Alex Hyde and Linda Ahall have highlighted how the everyday is an important space/temporal imagining where militarism, war and violence get practiced, normalised and seen as unfortunate but necessary. This involves both soldiers and civilians and occurs not only in the military ranks, but in the household, during protests and spaces of military remembrance.

Political economy feminists like Marsha Henry, Genevieve Le Baron, Juanita Elias and Adrienne Roberts, Amanda Chisholm and Saskia Stachowitsch, Matt Davies and Anna Agathangelou have pointed to how the everyday is a space continually acted upon in global gender and capital relations. They have shown how neoliberal market relations and state restructuring of social services has significantly impacted the household—and the woman who continue to face a double (sometimes triple) burden of managing care/reproductive work in the home, caring for elderly/ageing parents, and seeking often precarious, flexible work outside the home. These feminists have demonstrated the diverse ways in which everyday continues to shape and make possible exiting gendered capital social relations. They have also convincingly highlighted how gender, class, and colonial relations underpin these global/everyday divides.

Taking the everyday seriously in global private security, I argue, improves our analytics of where we locate security operations and how we track its movements. It broadens who we understand as security actors and accounts for the profound ways the industry is shaping our lives. The current scholarship on private security is preoccupied with the global. Private Security is between states and market actors. It is where agreements on transparency, regulations and accountability measures get drawn up. It is the laws that condition the market engagements. The people we locate in these global practices are the privileged, often white, and mostly men. They are the company directors and state leaders. It is a space/time where the tough decisions are made—where ingenuity and the big deals occur.

Post interview with a wife of a Gurkha security contractor

Alternatively, the everyday is where the banal and the residual occur. It is the negation of global politics. It is a space were mostly women (as mothers, wives, nannies, sex workers, cleaners) reside. It is their mundane rituals of housecleaning, child rearing, sexual pleasuring and food shopping occur. Similarly, the everyday it is also about the ritualised encounters between the directors and their colleagues, the elevator conversations pre/post meetings and the coffee/pub chats. It is a space/time that must be constantly flexible, to endure the changes and movements of the global security market.

This divide, as feminists remind us, is by political design. It is neither natural nor inevitable. Feminism has trained us to ask: who benefits from this divide? In the security industry the divide between global and everyday allows us to de-politise the very households/family architectures, which render the global extraction of labour possible. Hyde describes how similar divides allow the female spouses of British soldiers to become the reserve-reserve force of the British army with their household labour-silenced yet indispensable to how the UK military functions. How are the households expected to shape their lives around the global security market?

In my own research, the everyday begins to render visible the men (and sometimes women), particularly from the global south, who are signing up to 1-2 year long rotations with 1 month leave and for the significantly lower pay grade than their westerners counterparts. It highlights how martial race, particularly of Gurkhas, renders them more amenable to foreign armed security work because of their associated histories with the British military. It accounts for the household emotional/reproductive/life sustaining work in running the family of a migrant worker. How foreign work has improved but also had a social cost to how families are organised and the material conditions of possibilities afforded to them. It also brings to light the localised poverty/lack of development, which renders the security migrant amenable to foreign work in the first place—which conditions their employment conditions and makes them compliant/resilient to market demands.

Taking the everyday as a space/time and a feminist critique seriously accounts for the men and women who actually produce security markets. It sees the market not as a benign space where actors must continually respond, but as a space that is shaped by the social relations between people. It is a space that is productive of the very gendered and raced relations we are conditioned by. It can also be a space of resistance. The everyday allows us to consider the people that shape these politics—those that fix the rules and benefit from them and those that are expected to endure adapt and cope.

These politics manifest in different ways. My co-authored work with my colleague Saskia Stachowitsch’s shows who benefits from the political segregation between the everyday and the global. It argues that such a separation allows the security industry to extract security labour without properly accounting for the unpaid necessary labour of the home—and how militarization of the home, in particular the Gurkha home, has made recruitment much easier.

Accounting for the everyday broadens our understanding of who is shaping and shaped by the security industry and the structures that continue to underpin the industry’s operations. It enables us able to consider how neoliberalism, militarism, race and poverty continue to inform the extraction of a global reserve security labour force. We can ask what work must the family do in sustaining a healthy security worker? How is resilience, in the ability for families to endure, to adapt, to perpetually adjust to migrant work demands, an integral feature of labour extraction in global security? I what ways does depletion and disposability, inform how we come to understand some men and women as disposable and replaceable and others as high value and irreplaceable?

Security Labour Company Clothing and Supply Store

The everyday is not pre-political or inconsequent. It is fundamental to how global economies and politics are sustained. Accounting for the everyday sharpens our analysis and allows us to be mindful of the broader politics that continue to quarantine the everyday as a location of unimportance. Politics of militarism, capitalism and colonialism that (re)produce divides of private/public, local/global, good/bad/disposable labourer. These divides are always political and it is through a feminist curiosity that we are encouraged to continue to question, to make queer, the politics of everyday/global divides. It is these questions that must continue to frame our analysis of the security industry.

Clients, Contractors and the Everyday Masculinities in Global Private Security

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My new article draws upon my previous research on armed security contractors in Kabul, Afghanistan. It focuses on the everyday as a theoretical site in order to account for how we theorize about militarism, masculinities, and war.

Drawing upon the client/contractor security relationship through autoethnography, this article considers the emotional and intellectual investments that go into evaluating our own security and how racial and gendered logics filter through such evaluations. By showing the ways in which security value comes through the racial and gendered encounters between the client and contractor, this article brings to the fore the ways in which the everyday is constitutive of security value in the broader private security industry.

It shows us how military masculinities are reshaped in a market-driven military economies whereby white men are not always the ideal source of security, but can also be a source of insecurity – that security value is very much contextual and geographical. In particular, conversations with those being protected have highlighted how the everyday encounters with security contractors within private and public spaces and temporalities matter in how contractors can be a source of both security and insecurity.

REPOST: 4 Things Feminist Tell Us About Private Security: A Gender Audit of Security

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*Reposted from E International Relations http://www.e-ir.info/2016/11/01/4-things-feminists-tell-us-about-private-security-a-gender-audit-on-security/#.WBmsWhWtlJk.facebook

blog-picPrivate Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) are part of a multibillion-dollar industry supplying both security and logistical services for governments, commercial groups and Non Government Organisations (NGOs). The roles these companies perform include, but are not limited to, security consultancy and armed contracting, recovery of hostages, and logistic support services such as construction and infrastructure support including waste disposal and goods transportation.

Overwhelmingly, the PMSC literature continues to focus on state-centric security concerns involving issues pertaining to these companies’ accountability, transparency and legitimacy in global security operations. Often the industry is treated as either a necessary evil that is re-formable through regulations or an example of the ways in which the neoliberal market successfully meets our needs.

Alternatively feminist curiosities take a different departure and subsequently ask different questions. For feminists, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the security industry. Instead, feminists concern themselves with the underpinning gender and racial rationales and logics that render this global business possible in the first place. They ask: what are the gender logics that are called upon in order to sustain divisions of labour within the security industry, how is militarism and masculinities normalized in constructing security companies as viable and legitimate global security providers, whose voices and experiences are made visible and whose are rendered silent and what does this tell us about power?

As such, feminist curiosities about the global industry re-orientate where we located private security, who we see as legitimate security actors and how we produce knowledge about what constitutes security. From the existing feminist research on private security we can take away 4 important points:

1. Gender structures the global security industry: Feminists have illustrated that the security industry is not separate from, but a continuation of gender politics within military settings. Maya Eichler’s 2015 edited volume Gender and Private Security in Global Politics, is the first collection of feminist contributions to the critical study of gender and private security. Throughout the book, she and her contributors show us how gender is constitutive of the institutions, practices and logics that underpin the privatization of security. Contributors such as Chris Hendershot, Paul Higate and myself have highlighted how the practice of private security rests upon heteronormative and miltiarised masculine embodiments of those who provide security. Other contributors such as Valerie Sperling and Ana Vrdoljak have demonstrated the neoliberal market assemblages between state and security market that allow for a circumventing of democratic control over security practices—such assemblages have made it increasingly difficult for feminist activists to hold states accountable for human rights violations which disproportionately affect women.

2. Militarism and masculinities underpins global security practices: Feminists have shown us that in order to understand how PMSCs feature in contemporary warfare, we need to look at the politics of militarism that shapes them as legitimate security providers. For example, Saskia Stachowitch has shown us the ways in which private security allows for a remasculinisation of security. At a time when state militaries are opening up their ranks to women, LGBT and other minorities, security companies are not compelled by the same political channels to do the same. Elsewhere Stachowitsch has demonstrated the ways in which masculinities as a broader logic feature in sustaining the market as a remasculinised space and the state as feminized. Maya Eichler has documented the ways in which global militarism intersects with ideas of citizenship and capital accumulation. By showing these links she is able to demonstrate how security companies can draw upon global South security labour in the support of broader US and other Western state military operations without affording broader political and citizenship rights to these workers.

3. Western men are made visibility whereas women and men of the Global South are rendered invisible: Private security rests upon discursive and material divisions of labour that shape who we see as legitimate actors in global security. Feminists have shown us the politics of military masculinities that fetishize particular men and the men and women who are rendered silent and yet remain indispensible to the global security industry. By looking to the margins of the security industry, feminists have located global South men, labeled Third Country Nationals as an integral part of the global security workforce, the women as reproducers of everyday family life, affective labourers of their husband’s security work, militarized community members that allow for ease in mass recruitment of particular global South workers. By re-orientating to the margins, feminists such as myself, Isabelle V. Barker, Maya Mynster Christensen, and Vron Ware have shown us the gender and racial logics that sustain unequal relations amongst contractors performing security work and how such logics are a part of broader gendered and racial politics within global capitalism.

4. Knowledge production about the Industry is always gendered and political: There is nothing neutral about what we read pertaining to private security. Knowledge production about the industry remains gendered and raced. The researcher is central to the reinforcing and resisting of where we locate security and how we understand its value and legitimacy. I have written elsewhere how the researcher matters in the types of knowledge claims we make and how we as scholars interested in private security need to continue to audit our own practices, the ways we empathise or otherwise relate to the industry, and in thinking of Carol Cohn’s important provocation, how we internalise security logics. Paying attention to these practices tells us a great deal of the pervasiveness of everyday logics the industry continues to rest upon in its own production of legitimacy.

In various ways feminists continue to draw our attention to how gender features as rationale that underpins the political and economics of security and sets the conditions of possibilities for the men and women who participate in the industry

Getting the Logistics in Order

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This “blog post” area of the project sight is intended to get viewers more familiar with the day to day running of the project and the fieldwork I embark upon. The main content will be facts based and showcase imagery (some from my own camera and some from sights/spaces I find particularly interesting). It will also feature short podcasts from the various casts and characters who comprise the governance structures/spaces that constituted the global labour chains of security and logistics.

Right now I am just getting myself sorted to leave for Doha.  I’m all packed and the necessary travel documentations are almost in place.  Watch this space!