Tensions of modernity

In East Africa, former soldiers have found work in private military and security companies or as security consultants, military trainers, and risk management professionals. Based on fieldwork in Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania and South Sudan, a new article by Postdoc Jethro Norman shows how the colonial past is inscribed into the everyday lives of private security contractors, painting a nuanced picture of security contractors as both victims of precarity and participants in hierarchy and exploitation. 

Contractors do not see themselves as futuristic corporate agents of ‘new wars’ as some academics would suggest, but as the exact reverse – they view their privatised roles as akin to colonial adventurers. Some read colonial histories and the travelogues, finding refuge in an imagined settler-colonial past, and reinscribing colonial and postcolonial legacies into exploitative neoliberal work practices in order to make the precariousness of private security palatable. Colonial nostalgia also serves as a critique of recent western overseas military intervention, especially the unpopular wars in the Middle East that many contractors were themselves a part of. Here, private military contracting is imagined to embody a more successful colonial model of intervention based on a tradition of frontier soldiering rooted in the logic of settler-colonialism. 

Much of this is specific to the East African context. Britain’s Kenya colony was a place of elite privilege, an aristocratic playground in pristine nature, a place of escape, where the ordinary rules did not apply. This legacy is still alive today – and partly explains the contemporary allure of working there amongst certain former soldiers, especially from higher ranks. Colonial nostalgia is not a dormant remembering, but a central, living feature of modern security contracting that emerges out of these tensions and is implicated in ongoing cycles of violence, precarity, and exclusion.