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Citations
Private Military Security Companies (PMSC) have come increasingly to supplant the activities of regular, national militaries -most notably in such contexts as Iraq and Afghanistan. Though a wide scholarship has addressed questions of legitimacy, regulation and control of PMSCs, critical commentators on gender have almost entirely overlooked the masculinised cultures of these private firms, the majority of which employ former military personnel. This is surprising since masculine norms, values and cultures shape private contractors security practices and can be used to explain human rights abuses, as well as the everyday ways in which these men imagine security. In these terms, the key critical issue concerns what is missed when masculinity is ignored in analyses of PMSCs, a question that is taken up in this working paper within the context of a potential research agenda for this topic of research.
In this article, we examine the social production of autism in US foreign policy discourse. Autism, we argue, is evident in the active forgetting of US foreign policy and its consequences, both in the US and abroad. It is this forgetting, promoted by the US state, that enabled many Americans to respond to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with the question ‘Why do they hate us?’ The explanation for the social production of an autistic attitude in US foreign policy, we argue, lies in the relations between institutional power and competing narratives and articulations of US foreign policy and domestic politics. The argument is illustrated through analysis of the politics of public memory at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where, on May 4, 1970, 13 students were shot, four fatally, while protesting the US invasion of Cambodia.
