State transformation, military privatization and gender

In the context of global restructuring and neo-liberal transformations of the state, private actors have become increasingly important in military operations opposite regular state forces. Though war and political violence are considered deeply gendered phenomena linked to the evolution of the modern nation-state, the gendered effects of military privatization and its impact on the state-gender relationship have so far not been systematically researched. In an exemplary case study of the US, the proposed project therefore examines the privatization of military tasks and its gendered implications for societies employing private military contractors. It is assumed that military privatization and deregulation exclude women from newly developing private military labor markets, impede gender equality policies, and confirm traditional gender ideologies. These processes reify the nexus between state- sanctioned violence and masculinity and thus contribute to the remasculinization of the Western state. Historically, a strong nexus is evident between formation processes of the Western nation-state, military institutionalization, and the establishment of hierarchical gender relations and dualistic gender ideologies. Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, however, women`s military integration began to question the role of the military as a male resource of power directly related to the state. Currently, the historical relationship between state, military, and gender is again being transformed in the context of the crisis of the Western state and subsequent neo-liberal policies of deregulation and privatization. This calls for an in-depth analysis of the dynamics inherent in the co-evolution of the state, military institutions, and gender relations in the contemporary period. The project thus explores the gendered effects of military privatization on the levels of 1) gender-specific division of labor, 2) gender policy, and 3) gender ideologies. For this purpose, the study critically evaluates previous research and data on military privatization from a gender perspective and examines primary and secondary sources such as legislative documents, Congressional debate protocols, governmental and Congressional reports, media reporting, and websites of Private Military Companies in a discourse-analytical procedure.