Contested stories of commercial security

Kruck, Andreas und Spencer, Alexander (2013): Contested stories of commercial security. Self- and media narratives of private military and security companies. In: Critical Studies on Security, Bd. 1, Nr. 3: S. 326-346

Abstract

The article illustrates the potential of narrative analysis as a transdisciplinary method for Critical Security Studies by investigating self-legitimizing narratives of private military and security companies (PMSCs) and contrasting them to the narratives on PMSCs found in the news media. Employing narrative analysis and focusing on the websites of 55 PMSCs and 4 quality US and British newspapers, we reconstruct how PMSCs and the media establish 4 conflicting narratives characterizing PMSCs as technical and military experts vs. incompetent cowboys, professional businessmen vs. exploiting war profiteers, noble humanitarians vs. uncontrolled abusers and proud patriots vs. dirty mercenaries. Our analysis shows that the self-narratives of the PMSCs largely fail to arrive in the public media narratives, although some self-characterizations such as the expert or the businessman resonate somewhat better than others, in particular the strongly romanticizing images of the humanitarian or the patriot. We propose the concept of ‘intertextual narratability’ to suggest that the media reception of PMSCs’ self-narratives is shaped by their (lack of) connectability to existing culturally embedded narratives on PMSCs.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Keywords: Private military and security company; narrative; narrative analysis; media; image
• Fakultät: Sozialwissenschaften > Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 320 Politik
• ISSN: 2162-4909; 2162-4887
• Sprache: Englisch