Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Foreword: Listening to a Gurkha Wife
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction – Bringing Gurkhas to Market: Race, Gender and Global Economies of Security Workforces
- 1 Colonial encounters, militarism and affect in global security
- 2 Bringing Martial Race to Market: Imperial Encounters, Militarism and the Making of Gurkhas
- 3 Locating Love in the Gurkha Security Package
- 4 The Happy Gurkha Housewife: Reproductive and Affective Labour in Global Security Households
- 5 Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Feeling Secure
- Conclusion – Slow Death and Failure in the Life Building of Gurkha Communities
- References
- Index
Introduction – Bringing Gurkhas to Market: Race, Gender and Global Economies of Security Workforces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Foreword: Listening to a Gurkha Wife
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction – Bringing Gurkhas to Market: Race, Gender and Global Economies of Security Workforces
- 1 Colonial encounters, militarism and affect in global security
- 2 Bringing Martial Race to Market: Imperial Encounters, Militarism and the Making of Gurkhas
- 3 Locating Love in the Gurkha Security Package
- 4 The Happy Gurkha Housewife: Reproductive and Affective Labour in Global Security Households
- 5 Race, Gender and the Political Economy of Feeling Secure
- Conclusion – Slow Death and Failure in the Life Building of Gurkha Communities
- References
- Index
Summary
In September 2012, I was asked to speak at a conference on private military and security companies (PMSCs) in London, UK. I presented my research on Gurkhas, a group of men from Nepal with a 200-year colonial military history with the British, who were working as security contractors in Afghanistan. Using the Gurkhas’ own words, originating from my interview transcripts, I described these men’s struggle to find work to support their families, their desires for more economic opportunities and their frustrations over the ways PMSCs treated them differently from their white Western colleagues. During the ‘Question and Answer’ section of my presentation, a director of a large security company stood up and, in response to claims attesting to the poor treatment of Gurkhas, pronounced ‘but that’s the market’. For him and a large portion of the audience, this statement was akin to a common-sense declaration, which spoke of the naturalness of the labour and recruitment practices that constitute the overall working conditions of Gurkhas by the private security industry. (Fieldwork entry, 2012, Royal United Service Institute, London)
I wrote the above journal entry a decade ago and I am still drawn back to my feelings of frustration. I experienced this feeling of out-of-placeness due to the seemingly shared sentiment amongst the audience of the unfortunate but inevitable market logic. For me, this logic obscured the concrete violence, the colonial histories and the affectively lived lives of Gurkhas, and other men from Global South countries, who participate in the security industry as racialised contractors.
This book locates its analysis in the context of the lives and experiences of Gurkhas and their families: a militarised community from Nepal with over 200 years of military service with the British that now participates in global security markets as racialised contractors and families. The book understands the global security market as one rooted within concrete social relations that structure experiences and conditions the possibilities for those who come to participate in it as security contractors. Gurkhas are valued as contractors through racial and gendered logics that consider them naturally amenable to performing (cheap) military labour.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Gendered and Colonial Lives of Gurkhas in Private SecurityFrom Military to Market, pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022