Military Markets, Masculinities and the Global Political Economy of the Everyday: Understanding Military Outsourcing as Gendered and Racialised

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.