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The Routledge Research Companion to Security Outsourcing

in the Twenty-first Century

Joakim Berndtsson, Christopher Kinsey

Security Outsourcing and Critical Feminist Inquiry

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Maria Stern
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25
S E CUR ITY OUTSOURC ING AND C RIT IC AL
FEMINIST INQUIRY
Taking Stock and Looking Forward

Maria Stern

Introduction
Gender is clearly important in shaping the practices and effects of security outsourcing in the
twenty-first century, and in the provision of security services more generally. Similarly, security out-
sourcing informs the ways in which gender is practised, experienced, and reproduced. That security is
gendered and gender is shaped by security is hardly a novel insight (see Enloe, 2000). Feminist scholars
from a wide array of scholarly homes have been exploring the interconnections between gender and
security for several decades, and the field of Feminist Security Studies has been firmly established
within international relations (IR) (see, for example, Stern and Wibben, 2014). Furthermore femin-
ist and gender studies scholarship boasts a wide and rich body of work that carefully scrutinises the
relationships between gender in/and the military, gender in/and warring (and women in/and war),
as well as gender in/and peacebuilding. Additionally, the policy community – including those at the
‘highest’ echelons of the global security landscape – has certainly embraced the importance of taking
gender seriously. Indeed, the connections between security and gender figure strongly in the United
Nations security purview, as evidenced in several UN Security Council resolutions.1 Furthermore, a
well-publicised debacle involving DynCorp security contractors’ providing security for the US military
and the United Nations (who allegedly were involved in sexual abuse, human trafficking, and illegal
prostitution in Bosnia) spoke loudly of the need to attend to gender in peacekeeping missions and to the
problem of accountability in commercial security contracting (see, for instance, Grimm, 2013; Prugle
and Thompson, 2013). Simply put: gender has firmly ‘arrived’ in the previously gender-blind world of
(studying and practising) security, warfare, and peacebuilding.
Yet in the burgeoning field of private or commercial security studies, the interconnections between
gender and security remain both underexplored and under-theorised. Granted, this field has been,
until recently, a rather specialised area of study and this volume serves to take stock of what has now
grown into a bountiful multitude of scholarship (see the Introduction to this volume).Yet, nonetheless
and without a doubt, there is a considerable gap to be addressed. Lest we discourage, there is a small
but growing number of scholars who have begun to build a body of work that queries the complex
interrelationships between gender and current security outsourcing – often making use of innovative
methodologies and looking in unlikely sites (for example, Eichler, 2015). Both Chisholm’s and Joachim

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and Schneiker’s chapters in this Part, for instance, offer rich examples of how scholars have drawn on
the wealth of feminist and gender studies in related areas to begin asking and answering questions about
gender (race, class, sexuality) and security contracting.
Taking its point of departure in the fledgling field of gender in/and commercial security con-
tracting, this chapter seeks to offer cursory mapping of how one can/does conduct scholarship in
these mostly unchartered, yet still familiar areas. I say familiar because literature on gender in/and
the military, for instance, offers much insight into gender in military security contracting compan-
ies, as we shall see in the examples explored below. Drawing on feminist and critical security studies
more generally, the chapter explores some of the current ways of studying gender and/in security
outsourcing and suggests some possible avenues for future research. The chapter proceeds as fol-
lows. First it reflects on different methodological approaches for studying gender through private
security and private security through gender. To exemplify these approaches, the chapter draws on
recent scholarship in the wider field of security studies and global politics, and in current gender
and private security scholarship. In so doing, the aim is to delineate different lines of inquiry that
are already being pursued, as well as highlight possible ways of asking feminist questions. The chap-
ter then concludes with a discussion on ‘looking forward’ and the growing of feminist (private)
security studies.

Feminist2 Approaches to Studying Commercial

Security Contracting
There are many ways to ask feminist questions about commercial security contracting or private
security. Below I outline four broadly defined approaches that are prevalent in the literature: ‘Asking
the “Woman/Man Question” ’; ‘Producing Gender’; ‘Gender as Productive’; ‘Gender as Produced
and Productive’.3 In doing so, I do not claim to offer a comprehensive categorisation of approaches.
Instead, I sketch a roadmap that can be useful for surveying the different sorts of feminist scholarship
on commercial security contracting already published and for inspiring future research endeavours.
The examples of research that I discuss are by no means exhaustive; instead of offering a comprehensive
‘state of the art’, they serve to illustrate this roadmap. The approaches outlined are often employed in
tandem or for different purposes in a research project. Hence, when drawing upon specific research in
the following discussion, I do not intend to firmly place one article, or author as representative of one
approach above all others; instead, the examples should be read as glimpses into how certain kinds of
feminist questions about private security can be explored.

Asking the ‘Woman/Man Question’

Often, especially in policy settings, a focus on gender4 is reduced to be a focus on women and girls.
While such reductionism is arguably highly problematic (see Stern and Zalewski, 2009), we can learn
many things about gendered power relations as well as a host of other intersecting power relations
and political practices through paying attention to those who are often marginalised or rendered
invisible in dominant accounts of security (Stern, 2005; Wibben, 2011). Cynthia Enloe’s now clas-
sic work, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1990/2000), forged a path for feminist IR by simply posing
what has been called ‘The Woman Question’ (Zalewski, 1994). By asking ‘Where are the women?’
Enloe developed a methodology that allowed her to explore global politics from a wealth of angles –
angles that rarely appear in the prevailing literature. Following Enloe’s lead, we can ask ‘the woman
question(s)’ (and add to it the ‘man question(s)’, Zalewski and Parpart, 2008) in order to explore
the privatisation of security.

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Taking this approach could mean focusing on the experiences, roles, actions, behaviours of women/
girls (and men/boys) in relation to commercial security contracting. Additionally, one could query
how certain security discourses, practices, companies, technologies, and so on affect women/girls
(and men/boys). For example, one might ask how the behaviour and actions of private military secur-
ity contractors in particular settings affect the girls and women in these settings (see Higate and Henry,
2004). One might also inquire into what these effects can tell us about the politics of security as well
as other related issues, such as democratic oversight or legal accountability. Sperling (2009/2015),
for instance, queries the relations between peacekeepers, contractors, and women living in the areas
where transnational military/peacekeeping missions are located. She places the questions of account-
ability in focus, but does so through rendering visible security actors’ (including UN military peace-
keepers, civilian UN personnel, and civilian contractors) engagement in sex trafficking, prostitution,
and exploitation of women and girls (see also Grimm, 2013).
Another, and related, line of questioning could be to query how commercial contractor’s behaviour
may undermine the goals of their security work through rendering visible how the women/girls and
men/boys experience them (see also Higate and Henry, 2004). In exploring the use of private secur-
ity guards in Swedish development missions in Afghanistan, for instance, Berndtsson and Stern (2013)
discuss how some missions might suffer from the association with armed private military security
contractors and their performance of certain types of militarised masculinities. In the text, we explain
how a Swedish International Development Cooperation Association (Sida) representative spoke of pri-
vate security consultants hired by USAID, who lack a ‘gender awareness’ and behave ‘poorly’ and in a
‘macho’ manner, thus undermining the goals of the mission (Berndtsson and Stern, 2013, p.73; see
also Schulz and Yeung, 2008, p.4). Further inquiry into how the specific people who come into contact
with such security consultants experience such ‘macho’ behaviour would be a well-needed and fruitful
avenue for further research. I will return to this point in the concluding section.
Another line of inquiry might focus on where women/girls and men/boys are and what they are
doing (and not doing) in relation to commercial security contracting. Relatedly, one could pay atten-
tion to the prevailing expectations (as defined in established gender discourses) that are attached to
the activities and bodies of women/girls and men/boys. One might ask, for example, what kind of
(private) security work is deemed appropriate for women? How are woman as potential clients or
as potential threats addressed in marketing strategies and labour regulations? Who, for instance, is
legally allowed in border security work to conduct body searches on whom, and where (Berndtsson
and Stern, 2011; Wilcox, 2015)? What can such gender-specific sites and tasks tell us about predom-
inant gender norms; what can they tell us about how (in)security is perceived? Erikson et al. (2000),
for instance, trace gender integration and segregation in the Toronto security industry. They map the
kinds of security work that men and women engage in in the two main sectors of security work: labour
intensive (private investigation and guarding) and technology intensive work (different types of sur-
veillance and alarm systems) (Erikson et al., 2000, p.300). Their nuanced tracing renders visible how
the Toronto security industry reproduces prevailing gender norms (where, for example, protecting is
coded as male, and service elements, coded as female; Erikson et al., 2000, p.301) through the gender
specific security work that men and women engage in. Importantly, they also show how ‘gender bend-
ing’ work, which allows for ‘gender atypical’ assignments (for example women conduct male-coded
security work in female-coded sites or in relation to female clients; Erikson et al., 2000, p.309), both
entrenches and unsettles these gender norms.
A focus on the presence of women/girls or men/boys and the gendered attributes attributed to
them is highly prevalent in policy interventions designed to render security forces gender equal, or
to ‘feminise’ them in order to render them more effective (see, for example, Hendricks and Hutton,
2008). As Eriksson Baaz and Stern have argued elsewhere (2011) Security Council Resolution 1325 is

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only the most prominent of a general global trend in favour of women’s increased participation in core
security sector institutions, particularly so in peacekeeping operations.5 The basic rationale behind such
efforts is that the inclusion of women in security forces is a ‘key to success’. In addition to the idea that
women security workers are often better equipped to address women’s specific vulnerabilities, women
are assumed to be ‘civilising’ presences, who extend their ‘feminine traits’ to the men in their proximity
(resonating with familiar notions of women as beautiful and peaceful souls, notions that have under-
pinned common narratives of peace and war (Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2011, p.567). The promotion
of women’s added value as peacekeepers arguably rests on assumptions about women’s ‘femininity’
(whether socially constructed or inherent). Women are assumed to be ethically regulating presences
who extend their ‘feminine traits’ to the men in their proximity (ibid.).
Following from this reasoning, one could ask how paying attention to and integrating gender (and/
or women) into the security contracting industry can make security contracting both more equal and
more effective. The flip side of such reasoning could prompt one to ask what the failure to adequately
integrate gender/women into the industry might occasion. In their ‘toolkit’ on Security Sector Reform
(SSR), Private Military and Security Companies and Gender (2008), Schulz and Yeung, for instance, address
the ‘gender aspects and challenges’ (2008, p.1) of the privatisation of security in the context of SSR.
Indeed, this toolkit focuses on why it is important to integrate gender in SSR efforts, placing emphasis
on men and women as actors/contractors, and as stakeholders as well as victims of Gender Based
Violence (GBV). It also addresses PSCs as providers and as subjects of SSR. Schulz andYeung argue that
in order for SSR efforts that rely on private security to be successful, gender must be taken into account
and suggest how such integration could/should occur. For operational effectiveness to be achieved,
they explain, the impact of SSR efforts on men, women, girls, and boys in the host country, for instance,
must be addressed. Additionally, gender sensitivity training and the presence of women can help abet
‘aggressive behaviour’ (Schulz and Yeung, 2008, p.4) and increase sensitivity to the gendered cultural
context. Female security workers, they explain, can perform a number of vital functions: they can
serve as positive role models, play a ‘placating role’, perform ‘body searches on women’, and ‘liaise’
with women (Schulz and Yeung, 2008, p.4).

Producing Gender
Studies that place the production of gender at the focus of inquiry usually emphasise asking how (when
and where) gender is produced and to what effect (see Stern, 2016). As noted above, there is now a
well-established body of work on the interconnections between gender and security. Many of these have
placed emphasis on how articulations and practices of security – be they dominant narratives under-
writing militarisation (for example, Enloe, 2015; Kronsell and Svedberg, 2013; Mackenzie, 2015),
military training (for example, Higate, 2003), the acts of violent soldiering (for example, Parashar,
2014) or peacekeeping (for example, Whitworth, 2004) – inform ideals of masculinity and femininity,
and produce gendered subjectivities. Studies that scrutinise the production of violent military mas-
culinity and shed light on the effects of performances of this masculinity in the form of, for example,
conflict-related rape and violence against civilians in different military contexts are increasing in scope
and in number (see Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013 for an overview).
Such lines of inquiry are clearly amenable to the study of commercial security contracting. Taking
such an approach might lead one to ask, for example, how certain security practices (Higate, 2012a;
Higate, 2015) or company self-representations (see the chapter by Joachim and Schneiker in this vol-
ume) produce different notions of masculinity in particular sites. How is the masculine security con-
tractor subject produced? How are gendered subjectivities also produced through racial registers at
play in security work (Chisholm, 2014a; see also the chapter by Chisholm in this volume)?

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Paul Higate (2012a; 2014), for instance, has queried the ‘remasculinization’ of private security con-
tracting through, among other things, focusing on the training of student contractors – many of whom
were ex-military – as armed Close Protection Officers. As I have explained elsewhere (Stern, 2016),
Higate draws upon phenomenology and sociological accounts of the everyday as embodied and linked
with the international/geopolitical in order to interrogate how bodies trained in the material con-
text of the military incorporate embedded behaviour (adrenaline, military drill, weapon handling).
Through using participant observation and interviews with armed private security contractors, he asks
how body-subjects become masculinised tools of violence. He thus interrogates the embodiment of
militarised masculinity as inherently connected to and formed by the wider political context in which
the body-subject is conditioned/trained. In a related project, Higate (2014) studies the processes of
remasculinisation among commercial security contractors as both conscious strategy and unintended
outcome of gendered national identities by paying attention to internal struggles around masculine
identity. Through his interrogation of their narratives of masculinity, he discerns how student con-
tractors from different nationalities construct their masculine contractor identity in relation to and
in contrast with their sense of the identity of the other. He explains, for instance, how examples of
condemnatory ‘excess masculinity’ in US mercenary narratives are juxtaposed with stories of ideal
British security contractors as highly skilled security professionals. In yet another related project,
Higate (2012b) queries the ‘Kabul Hazing’ rituals among ArmorGroup employees in 2009 as a way of
constructing a racialised heterosexual masculine ‘fratriarchy’.
Another way of asking questions about how the commercialisation of security produces gender
and to what effect can be found in Barker’s work. By tracing the division of reproductive work on
US military bases, Barker (2009/2015) explores how imperial American masculinity (as a symbol of
American Empire and as an ideal of the national identity of US soldiering) is produced. She argues that
the outsourcing of vital support service work on the bases to poor migrant men reinforces gendered,
racialised and classed lines of distinction. Contracted reproductive work, which sustains the military
bases, is coded as feminine in contrast to the ‘masculine’ security work of soldiering. Moreover, the
redrawing of such familiar lines of distinction also smooth over racial, gender and class differences
among soldiers in the US military (Barker, 2009, p.230). Through such structuring, American sol-
diers who are positioned in Iraq can reinforce their masculinity in the face of the ‘feminising’ work of
nation-building (Barker, 2009, p.332), and symbolically bolster the masculine virility and ‘greatness’
of American foreign policy.

Gender as Productive6
Feminist theory has taught us that gender is not only produced through the social and political world;
it is also productive of that world. Indeed, if we return to Enloe’s path-breaking work (1990/2000)
we learn that gender ideologies underwrite global politics and the global political economy. Notions
about masculinity and femininity serve as ways of ordering the world that – together with other lines
of distinction such as race or class – produce meaning, activities, subjects, and political order. If we
return to the example of militarisation, we can see how notions of women and the feminine as peace-
ful and in need of protection and men and the masculine as violent and protecting have served as a
basic underlying grammar for warring, as well as for our understandings and performance of security.
Importantly, in such approaches, gender may not be the main focus of inquiry, but instead serves as an
important conceptual tool through which to better understand something else (such as the workings
of militarisation).
Focusing on gender as productive allows us to inquire, for instance, how notions of masculinity
and femininity sustain other relations of power, for example racism, and produce practices, processes,

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and institutions (such as private security companies, the state, the military, nationalism, the neoliberal
economy, and so on). Such an inroad interrogates, for example, how the workings of gender (among
other relations of power) produce certain subjectivities, inform governing technologies, inscribe lines of
distinction (such as the public-private divide), delineate zones of inclusion and exclusion (such as vio-
lent soldiering as ‘masculine’ and reserved for men), enable certain practices and imaginaries, as well
as produce social and political relations. Such feminist questions ask, for instance: what does paying
attention to the workings of gender allow us to see (do, hear, feel, understand)?
It is important to note, however, that a focus on the productive power of gender often goes hand
in hand with a focus on gender as produced. Both Higate’s work as well as Barker’s, for instance, also
focuses on how gender is productive. Higate asks how violence is produced and legitimised through
remasculinisation; Barker (2009/2015) points to how gender-coded lines of distinction legitimise neo-
liberal privatisation and reproduce US empire. I will return to this point below.
Hence, the rich possibilities for research afforded through paying attention to the productive power
of gender have not been lost on the burgeoning field of feminist (private) security studies. A growing
number of scholars are indeed addressing the privatisation of security in such a way. For example, sev-
eral have queried how the security contractor subject is produced through gendered registers and to
what effect (Chisholm, 2014a; Chisholm, this volume; Higate, 2012a; 2014; Joachim and Schneiker,
2012; Joachim and Schneiker, this volume). Through discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork,
Chisholm (2014b) explores how the production of Gurkhas as security labourers rests upon (and
actively reproduces) categories of race, class, and gender. She asks how ‘masculine white privilege is
established and sustained through particular performativities of race, gender, and colonial relations in
the production of the security contractor subject’ (2014b, p.199). Joachim and Schneiker (this volume;
2012) also focus on how gender produces commercial security actors. Through a discourse analysis of
text, visuals, and symbols found on PSC websites (their ‘self-representations’), they delineate three
typologies of masculinity (pathologisation, masculinisation, feminisation), which imbue the company
and the contractors with meaning. Through so doing, they are able to query not only the multiple mili-
tary masculinities at play in constructing the PSCs as security experts and security actors, but also how
these masculinities bestow legitimacy on the PSCs (see also Via, 2010).
Similarly, employing a critical feminist perspective that eschews a state-centric focus on security,
Maya Eichler (2014) asks what exploring the ‘margins’ of the private security industry can tell us
about privatisation, the military, and citizenship. Like Chisholm, Barker, and Diva, Eichler queries
the recruitment of foreign labour and the exploitation of marginalised populations. She argues that
the end of general (male) conscription in the US led to a remaking of military citizenship; the private
contractor emerged as a ‘market-based form of militarised masculinity and manifestation of flexible
neoliberal worker’ (2014, p.602). Hence, her gender- race-, and class-sensitive lenses allow her to ask
novel questions about changing relations between citizenship and military work, and ultimately about
transformations in the global social order.

Gender as Produced and Productive

It is also possible to pose the question of gender in ways that enable an inquiry into how gender is both
produced by/in the political and social world and productive of the political and the social world as well
as the subjectivities, practices, distinctions, ontologies, and epistemologies that make these categories
intelligible (see Stern 2016). Following Enloe’s lead (1990), much work within feminist theory and
feminist IR – and importantly, in the fledging field of gender and commercial security contracting –
strives to trace the double move inherent in perceiving gender as produced and productive. Paying
attention to the complexities of such a double move allows students of the privatisation of security to

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pay attention to how gender (subjectivities, practices, ideologies, and so on) and political orders and
effects are mutually constitutive.
Higate, for instance, explores gender as both productive and produced, although his emphasis argu-
ably rests on the production of military masculinities. Nonetheless, in many different ways, he explores
how private military, masculine body-subjects both shape and are shaped by the global development
of the private military and security industry (2012a, p.355), and the effects of such shaping on the
enactment of violence. Similarly, Chisholm’s (2014b) detailed tracing of how the Ghurkha identity is
produced also raises questions about what such productions do; she explores how the private security
industry rests upon and actively reproduces categories of race, class, and gender. She thus problema-
tises the idea that the security market is ‘just a market’ in the sense that it works outside prevailing
power relations (see also the chapter by Chisholm in this volume).
Stachowitsch’s work (2013) offers another example of how one can explore gender relations/orders
and political orders as mutually constitutive. Employing feminist theories of the state to the study of
military security contracting, Stachowitsch approaches privatisation as a gendered process and queries
what she calls the social embeddedness (2013, p.76) and ‘gender implications’ of military privatisation.
She addresses these implications by tracing them in multiple directions in the gender-war-state nexus.
Focusing on the US military sector as an example, Stachowitsch addresses the privatisation of security
(and the consequent remasculinisation of the private security sector) in the context of the neoliberal
restructuring of the state. Such restructuring, she argues, redraws the lines of distinction between the
public and the private and the state and the market. She thus probes the state (as ‘social process’), pay-
ing attention to how the state (as it is manifested in the US military) is structured by gendered practices
and discourses, as well as how gender is (re)structured through the state (2013, p.79). Her analysis thus
allows her to trace how shifts in public-private relationship inform reconfigurations in gender relations
(affecting ‘women’ as well as the ‘gender order’) and vice versa.
Taking a different tact, Hendershoot (2015) explores how gendered and sexualised expectations of
how men and their bodies are to perform inform the ‘tactical, strategic, and sociopolitical processes’
that constitute (post-)conflict spaces (Hendershoot, 2015). Here, paying attention to heteronorma-
tive and ‘penal’ unease allows him to revisit the ArmorGroup hazing incident in Kabul and to use
this incident as a way of critically probing larger processes of commercial security contracting. Such
processes and practices, he argues, are both (re)produced by and (re)produce heteronormativity and
phallo-centrism.

Conclusion: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

In sketching possible paths for asking (feminist) questions about gender and private security, my aim
has been to offer food for thought and inspiration for further inquiry. While the above map does not
pretend to be comprehensive, it does – in very broad brush strokes – paint a picture of some ways in
which scholars already do and could possibly design research projects by focusing on the kinds of ques-
tions they ask. In so doing, we can glimpse not only the kinds of questions that are possible to pose,
but also how such questions have been addressed and answered in particular research projects. In this
sense, it is a methodological map.
While clearly it does not offer ‘how to’ directives, this chapter thus joins a growing body of work
in critical scholarship on global politics that focuses on the importance of paying attention to method
and methodology (for example, Aradau and Huysmans, 2014; Ackerly et  al., 2006; Hansson et  al.,
2014; Salter and Mutlu, 2013). Importance in this sense refers not only to methodological rigour and
theoretical coherence; it also refers to the politics of method and methodology. Aradau and Huysmans,
for instance, explore critical method as ‘devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular

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worlds’, thus foregrounding ‘questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and method-
ology’ (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014, p.596.) In this chapter, however, I do not explicitly address the
politics of asking different types of feminist questions and employing different methods to answer these
questions. Such a discussion is therefore one area that warrants flagging for future exploration.
In a similar vein, further attention to and exploration of the details of the creative ways in which
questions are being (and could be) posed and answered in specific research projects remains a fruitful
area for further engagement. It is clear from the above overview that considerable creativity was neces-
sary to both pose and answer the research questions chosen. Researchers have trained their critical eye
on improbable places (such as the kitchens of military bases; Barker, 2009/2015) to learn about the
privatisation of security and its effects. Ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, discourse ana-
lysis, surveys and interviews, for instance, have all been put to innovative use in the research projects
explored here (as well as elsewhere; for example Eichler, 2015). Many methodological questions, how-
ever, remain. How did specific scholars conduct their work? How did they analyse their material (see, for
example, Higate, 2014 for a fascinating account of his methodological choices)? What kinds of methods
can be and are being borrowed from other related fields of scholarship? What, for instance, could a
feminist research project on the privatisation of security learn from considering how, for instance nar-
rative methodology, process tracing, or attention to materiality are employed in other related research
endeavours?
Furthermore, the abovementioned scholarship draws on a range of theoretical frameworks with
toolboxes that offer an array of tools for conceptualising security, commercialisation, and gender, as
well as much more (such as race, class; the state, the military; security technologies, expertise, fields,
logics, and so on). Postcolonialism, performative theory, theories about masculinity and its relation to
the military, feminist theories of the state, theories about the global political economy, for instance, are
just some of the theoretical framings that are put to work alone or in tandem to help understand the
interconnections between gender and the privatisation of security. Here the possibilities for the cre-
ative borrowing of theoretical frameworks and combinations, as well as theoretical innovations arising
from the empirical study of gender and/in the privatisation of security are limited surely only by our
imaginations.
It is clear that, like in other areas of feminist scholarship, disciplinary boundaries pose little hin-
drance to the creative work emerging – a glimpse of which I have presented here. Nonetheless, the
theoretical frameworks, methodological choices, and analysis in the abovementioned work, as well as
in the possible research questions that this work evokes, resonate with the scholarship upon which it (as
a whole) draws most heavily. The parallels to the robust work on women (and gender) in the military
are particularly evident, as are those to the broader field of (feminist) critical security studies, (fem-
inist) international political sociology, (feminist) global political economy, and (feminist) criminology.
Indeed, studies on commercial security contracting would do well by continuing to glean considerable
insight from this wide body of scholarship.
The roadmap offered in this chapter contains many gaps and implies numerous lines of inquiry not
mentioned here. Indeed, its main purpose is to lay the groundwork for asking further questions. What
are some of these questions?
While the abovementioned scholarship breaks new ground, there remains a considerable, even
glaring, dearth of empirical research that asks the woman/man question in a sustained and rigorous
manner. The follow-up question mentioned above about how the local population in Afghanistan
experience the hyper-masculine performances of commercial security actors is just one example
(Berndtsson and Stern, 2013). We, as scholars engaging in exploring the intersections of gender
and security privatisation, could also further query how gender is employed in the private secur-
ity industry (meaning both how gender is expected to ‘work’, as well as who does what). Indeed,

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if we were to follow Enloe’s lead and persistently ask the woman/man question in likely and
unlikely sites, we would surely be forced to rethink the prevailing ways we think about private
security, ending up with a different picture that not only includes women/girls and men/boys as
gendered, but also reveals the privatisation of security as deeply gendered. Further, in focusing
on the production of gender and its effects, we could usefully widen the repertoire of questions asked.
For instance, we could gainfully hone our critical curiosity to investigate how (private) security
practices, discourses, and technologies (re)produce gendered (and raced, classed, sexualised, and
so on) subjects of security (for example the vulnerable threatened body as feminised; the threat-
ening body as either deviant and subordinately masculine or feminised). This is an area which has
been interrogated in relation to critical security studies more generally, but which remains largely
unexplored in terms of a focus on security contracting. In our focus on gender as productive, we
could further explore how gender imbues notions of (private) policing and security with mean-
ing. How, for instance, does gender coding underwrite the grammar out of which commercial
security is bestowed with legitimacy? How do gender codings enable certain (private) security
acts, technologies, subjectivities, and to what effect? Moreover, to further enrich our library of
knowledge, we could try turning around any question we might ask about production to explore
how gender (and attending notions of race, class, sexuality, and so on) and the privatisation of security are
mutually constitutive.
In conclusion, while the scholarship presented here succeeds in asking and answering exciting and
fruitful questions about the interconnections between gender and the privatisation of security, it also
offers much more. It begs the asking of further questions and calls for promising avenues for future
research that will not only grow the field of feminist (private) security studies, but will greatly enhance
our understandings of the security processes, acts, logics, subjectivities that constitute the socio-
political world in which we live.

Notes
1 This is reflected in a number of Security Council Resolutions such as 1325, 1820, 1860, 1888.
2 For a brief discussion of the term ‘Feminist Security Studies’, see Stern and Wibben (2014); see also Wibben
(2011).
3 I first develop these overarching categorisations of feminist questioning in Stern (2016). I  have borrowed,
largely verbatim, some portions of text describing these overall lines of inquiry from this work. I have not cited
these directly, but instead noted this through indirect referencing.
4 Gender usually connotes the ‘social construction’ of biological sex. The following explanation of what I mean
by gender is borrowed largely verbatim from Stern (2011, p.33): Because of their associations with the ‘nat-
ural’, gendered divisions provide a powerful mechanism for creating seemingly stable categories. Evocations
of masculinity and femininity masquerade as known entities. According to common wisdom, humanity is
‘naturally’ divided into two categories: men and women. Although we might not agree on their content,
we are able to discern characteristics associated with masculinity (or the masculine) from those associated
with femininity (or the feminine) as inscribed in established discourses. Masculinity and femininity there-
fore appear as seemingly safe foundations upon which to establish certainty and help maintain the borders
between that which is securely known and the indeterminate. Furthermore, like other binary pairs, mascu-
linity and femininity are relationally constructed through power: that which is associated with masculinity is
‘ranked’ higher than that which is associated with femininity. This relationship allows for what R.W. Connell
has called the persistence of hegemonic masculinity (or masculinities), which creates a hierarchy of mas-
culinities, some subordinate (feminised) to others (Connell, 2005). Furthermore, gender coding (simply
put: how attributes or qualities are associated with, or stick to, masculinity or femininity) not only creates a
‘natural order’ of distinctions whose logic serves as one of many organising principals for political and social
life, and can be seen as productive of political social life, but the relational character of these codings further
implies that gender is far from fixed (Sinha, 1995) and that there is a range of masculinities and femininities
at play in any discursive field (Zalewski and Parpart, 2008).

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5 For a critique of 1325 see Shepherd (2008); Hudson (2010).

6 Much of the introduction to this section has been borrowed from Stern (2016).

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