Reproductions of global security: accounting for the private security household
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article shows how private security households exist at the nexus of two foundational logics of contemporary warfare—militarism and neoliberalism. The celebration of neoliberalism and normalization of militarism allow the private security industry to draw upon the labor of eager contractors and their supportive spouses. This article develops a feminist analysis of the role of the private security household in global security assemblages. In what ways are households connected to the outsourcing of security work to Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), and how are these connections gendered? Through interviews with female spouses of former UK Special Air Services soldiers, now private security contractors, we demonstrate how the household is both silenced and yet indispensable to how PMSCs operate and how liberal states conduct war. These spouses supported the transition from military service to private security work, managed the household, and planned their careers or sacrificed them to accommodate their husband’s security work. Their gendered labor was conditioned by former military life but animated by neoliberal market logics. For the most part, the women we interviewed normalized the militarized values of their husband’s work and celebrated the freedom and financial rewards this type of security work brought.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".