Political Military Companies: Commercializing the Military/Militarizing Politics?

Abstract:

This project is situated in the trans-disciplinary debate about the significance of the outsourcing and market based management of the military. It asks how this commercialization of the military changes politics. Drawing on ethnographic methods (Bourdieu) it tests the hypothesis that commercializing the military militarizes politics. It studies how five practices enacting the authoritative distribution of values (sovereignty, voice, accountability, regulation and resistance) are transformed by commercialization. Within each practice it follows one transformative process (everyday, visibility, affect, artefacts and digitization respectively) through which commercializing the military is altering practices to assess its implications for the "field" re-produced by the practice. Whether or not commercializing leads to militarizing is assessed on the basis of whether or not the space for military dispositions in the field is enlarged by in the field or by shifting the field boundaries