Private military veterans

The global market in protective services and technologies is fundamentally reshaping the policing and security landscape established by the modern state.  Long-standing distinctions between domestic and international, public and private, crime and war, police and military, and civilian and soldier are collapsing in the presence of multinational corporations such as G4S whose operations cut across and make new connections between these territorial, jurisdictional and functional domains.  In response, security governance scholars – writing primarily within the disciplines of criminology and international relations – have started to construct ‘decentred’ or ‘polycentric’ maps of the policing and security landscape in order to explore how this transformation impacts upon democracy, equality, justice, human rights and other core goods.  The purpose of this project is to contribute towards this mapping process by investigating an as yet unstudied actor who stands at the forefront of this transformation: the private military veteran.

The private military veteran is a recent phenomenon whose origins lie in the post-9/11 War on Terror.  Coalition military and peacekeeping operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been conducted using an unprecedented number of private military contractors engaged in a range of activities from frontline counter-insurgency to backroom logistics.  This shift in the conduct of warfare and peacekeeping operations has generated a sizeable literature on the dynamics of contractors, exploring their strategic, legal and moral implications in hostile environments.  Notably absent throughout this literature is the question of what happens after the conflict.  With the drawdown of coalition military operations, many of these contractors – like many soldiers – are transitioning back to civil society and forging new identities as private military veterans, yet we have almost no knowledge of this process.  Against this backdrop, the research is the first to address key questions about their physical and mental condition, where they go, what they do next, and their impact upon economy and society.

Supporting Research Grant

The Demobilisation of Private Military Contractors

Awarding Body: Gerda Henkel Foundation Research Fellowship

Amount: €64,470

Publications

White A (2019) Soldier, contractor, trauma: The governance of post-traumatic stress disorder in the private military labour market. Illness, Crisis, and Loss, 27(4), 274-292.

White A (2018) Beyond Iraq: The Socioeconomic Trajectories of Private Military Veterans. Armed Forces & Society, 44(3), 387-407.

White A (2018) Mercenarism, norms and market exchange: Reassembling the private military labour market. International Sociology, 33(4), 523-540.

White A (2018) Private Military Contractors: A Criminological Approach. In Wadham B & Goldsmith A (Ed.), Criminologies of the Military (pp. 81-94). Hart. 

White A (2016) Private Military Contractors as Criminals/Victims. In McGarry R & Walklate S (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War (pp. 191-209). Palgrave Macmillan.