Abstract
In this chapter, the authors give an introduction to military outsourcing as a gendered and racialised process. First, they provide an overview of the research field of critical gender and postcolonial studies on military privatisation. Second, they demonstrate the contributions of this research to the gender-sensitive analysis of war and military institutions. Third, they argue for a feminist political economy approach to the study of private military and security companies. Drawing upon their own research, they theorise private military security as an issue of labour, which deeply affects the everyday lives of men and women in the industry’s recruitment sites in the Global South.
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Notes
- 1.
Martial race was, and continues to be, an ambiguous racial logic and practice that allowed colonial armies to categorise indigenous labour in hierarchical terms. It claims that some indigenous people, such as the Sikhs, Kamba, Maori and Gurkhas are more naturally suitable for military service. For detailed descriptions of how martial race worked in practice in military operations and more currently, in private security see Enloe 1980; Ware 2010; Chisholm 2014a, 2015, 2016.
- 2.
Gurkhas are a group of Nepalese nationals with over 200 years of military service with the British military, the Indian army, the Brunei Saltan’s army and the Singaporean police. For a detailed history of them see Coleman’s A Special Corps (1999).
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Chisholm, A., Stachowitsch, S. (2017). Military Markets, Masculinities and the Global Political Economy of the Everyday: Understanding Military Outsourcing as Gendered and Racialised. In: Woodward, R., Duncanson, C. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51677-0_23
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