Private military and security companies (PMSCs) are a part of a multibillion-dollar industry with operations taking place globally. To date much of the scholarship on PMSCs continues to be concerned with the profound ways in which these companies are shaping how security operations are being conducted, yet largely ignores the actual men and women who work within the global industry. Drawing upon existing feminist scholarship and on ethnographic research on Gurkhas, men from Nepal with over 200 years of military history with the British, this chapter seeks to broaden existing discussions on PMSCs by asking what can be learned about the privatizing of security when seen through the global political economy (GPE) lens of work? By bringing feminist GPE insights into private security, we begin to see the ways in which the market and the men who participate within it are constituted through global economies of race, class and gender.
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