Citizenship and the contracting out of military work: from national conscription to globalized recruitment

The emergence of private military and security companies (PMSCs) is one of the most important developments in warfare over the past two to three decades. Employing a critical feminist perspective, this paper argues that the privatization of military security is not so much about the weakening of the state's monopoly over legitimate force as it is about the transformation of how military work is organized and tied to citizenship, and by extension to race, class, and gender. Focusing on the USA, my argument is twofold: first, that the remaking of militarized citizenship through the termination of male conscription was instrumental in paving the way for the increased privatization of military security, and second, that the outsourcing of military security functions to private companies allows for a global rescaling of recruitment that geographically extends the spatial and social determinants of who works for or in support of the military. In particular, US PMSCs operating in Iraq and Afghanistan have heavily relied on racialized workers from the global South. Recruiting workers beyond the boundaries of the US citizenry relies on, and reinforces, the global inequalities of citizenship that simultaneously intersect with gendered, racialized, and classed inequalities.