This article develops a feminist postcolonial approach to risk analysis as an increasingly central security practice in the EU's emerging border management and security regime. For this purpose, we theorize risk analysis as a sense-making practice embedded within colonial power relations. As such, risk analysis problematizes migrants and migration in gendered and racialized ways that make them amenable to border management and other, potentially violent security practices, such as detentions, returns, surveillance, and Search and Rescue. In an exemplary frame analysis of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency's (Frontex) risk analysis report 2016, we show how conceptualizations of risks and solutions by this key actor are informed by gendered and racialized framings of 1) chaos and violence, 2) exploitation of the EU economic and welfare system, and 3) humanitarianism towards 'vulnerable' migrants. With this study, we seek to strengthen feminist and postcolonial interventions into critical security studies on knowledge, power, and expertise. By conceptualizing risk analysis as political, this article pushes critical security theory beyond understandings of security as socially constructed and towards systematically unpacking the meanings of (in) security as implicated in the reproduction of gendered and racialized power relations.

In a case study of Nepalese Gurkhas working for Western private military and security companies (PMSCs), this article develops feminist global political economy understandings of global labour chains by exploring how the 'global market' and the 'everyday' interact in establishing private security as a gendered and racialised project. Current understandings of PMSCs, and global markets at large, tend to depoliticise these global and everyday interactions by conceptualising the 'everyday' as common, mundane, and subsequently banal. Such understandings, we argue, not only conceal the everyday within private security, but also reinforce a conceptual dualism that enables the security industry to function as a gendered and racialised project. To overcome this dualism, this article offers a theoretically informed notion of the everyday that dissolves the hegemonic separation into 'everyday' and 'global' levels of analysis. Drawing upon ethnography, semistructured interviews, and discourse analysis of PMSCs' websites, the analysis demonstrates how race, gender, and colonial histories constitute global supply chains for the security industry, rest upon and reinforce racialised and gendered migration patterns, and depend upon, as well as shape, the everyday lives and living of Gurkha men and women.

This article examines the gendered implications of military privatization and argues that the outsourcing of military functions to the private sector excludes women from newly developing private military labour markets, impedes gender equality policies and reconstructs masculinist gender ideologies. This process constitutes a remasculinization of the state, in the course of which the nexus between state-sanctioned violence and masculinity is being reaffirmed. Recent research has introduced the concept of masculinity to the study of the private security sector. Building upon these approaches, the article integrates feminist theories of the state into the research field and evaluates their potential contributions to the analysis of military privatization. In an exemplary case study of the US military sector, this privatization is embedded within debates on the neo-liberal restructuring of the state and addressed as a gendered process through which the boundaries between the public and the private are being redrawn. The implications of these transformations are investigated at the levels of gender-specific labour division, gender policy and gender ideologies. applying the concept of masculinity in the study of gender identity in the private security sector. Because war and political violence are gendered phenomena linked to the evolution of the modern nation-state, this article aims at expanding these approaches by introducing feminist theories of the state into the research field and embedding military privatization in debates on the neo-liberal restructuring of the state and its gendered implications. 2 This article argues that the privatization of military security constitutes a process of remasculinization, which excludes women from newly developing private military labour markets, impedes gender equality policies and reconstructs masculinist gender ideologies. These processes are the result of interactions between gender discrimination in the regular forces and in the private security industry, which reaffirm the nexus between state-sanctioned violence and masculinity. KeywordsThis article examines military privatization processes in an exemplary analysis of the US military sector. The gendered division of military labour, patterns of gender integration in the regular forces and general trends towards the marketization of state responsibilities are considered as relevant contexts. The relative importance of the military realm, the quantitative and qualitative scope of global military interventions, the advancement of gender integration and privatization processes and the availability of data and analysis on these subjects make the United States an ideal starting point for the critical investigation of the contractor industry. The US case can provide the basis for comparative research and guidelines for the study of similar developments in other countries. Caution is, however, advised in generalizing findings because of the specific structure and culture of the US military sector. More research on priva...

Considerations to integrate feminist security studies (FSS) and global political economy (GPE) were first systematically reflected in the Critical Perspectives section of the June 2015 issue of this journal. That collection presented engaging essays on how the divide between the two fields has evolved and ways we can seek to overcome it—or, indeed, whether we should attempt to bridge the divide. This debate has gained momentum in workshops and conference panels attempting to build bridges between the two feminist subfields. Given the richness of scholarship associated with the two fields, we aim to continue this productive conversation by bringing new voices and ideas into the debate and by engaging in further possibilities for theoretical, methodological, and empirical advancement that allow for a more comprehensive approach to global gendered inequalities and hierarchies—one that is not disciplined by academic boundaries. With this, we hope to challenge the constructed and sometimes violently sustained borders between public and private, domestic and international, political and economic, Global North and Global South, as well as disciplinary “camp structures” (Parashar 2013) that too often shape academic, and also feminist, knowledge production.

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This article assesses the implications of the shifting market-state relationship for feminism in the neoliberal era. In a case study of the private military and security industry as an actor that is uniquely positioned at the intersections of security governance and global markets, the analysis combines feminist security studies’ critique of securitized gender discourses and feminist global political economy scholarship on corporate-led equality initiatives. Based on a critical discourse analysis of documents from industry and nongovernmental organizations, such as codes of conduct and policy recommendations, I argue that the discourses on gender put forward in the context of security privatization merge securitized and marketized discourses to the effect that the emancipatory potential of “gender” is further curtailed, raising new challenges for feminist knowledge in powerful organizations. The article thus contributes to the critical gender research on private security, debates on the neoliberalization and securitization of feminism, and the integration of feminist security studies and feminist global political economy.