// DISSERTATION PROJECT

The American Media Discourse on Private Military and Security Companies After the Iraq War’s Nisour Square Incident

With states increasingly resorting to private military and security companies (PMSCs), security is outsourced further and further.

In contrast to greater parts of the academic debate, which is focused on whether this signifies a return of mercenaries, if by a different name, my thesis focuses on the specific politics that account for their conditions of emergence by drawing on a poststructural discourse analysis.

Drawing on and contributing to the Essex School of Discourse, an underutilized resource in IR, the thesis makes use of three explanatory devices – so-called logics – to articulate the social, political, and fantasmatic dimensions that contributed to PMSC emergence. Zooming in on the disruptive crisis of the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad of 2007, in which employees of the PMSC Blackwater killed several civilians, the study illuminates a key moment of the Iraq War, which is considered a watershed moment for PMSC use and normalization.

Corpus linguistic analyses of a newspaper corpus spanning 2001 – 2010 revealed that a key component that contributed to contractor use was a social logic of passivity and inferiority that is attached to one of the key identities used to describe contractors: private security guard. Analysis of political logics, meanwhile, suggest that proponents of PMSCs were able to draw in several sceptics by the double strategy of antagonizing contractors themselves and demanding changes that can absorb other demands. Fantasmatic logics, lastly, showed that opposition to PMSCs was overlaid with modes of enjoyment that, for their very own reasons, had little motivation to thoroughly criticize the Bush administration for the use of contractors, since the government was for them already so strongly associated with failure and nepotism.

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// ACADEMIC BACKGROUND  

2015 – 2023
Doctoral Studies at University of Bamberg

2014 – 2015
Master in Political Science (M.A.) at University of Münster, Germany

2013 – 2014
Master in International Security with Distinction (M.Sc.) at University of Bristol, England

2009 – 2013
Bachelor in Poitics and Law (B.A.) at University of Münster, Germany

2011 – 2012
University of Exeter

Awards / Academic Achievements and Scholarships

2018                     
Best Poster Award, BAGSS

2015 – 2019        
Full Doctoral Scholarship, BAGSS/German Research Council

2015                     
Award for best-in-class 2013/2014 (International Security programme), University of Bristol

2014 – 2015        
‘ProTalent’ scholarship (‘Deutschlandstipendium’), University of Muenster/Banco Santander

2013 – 2014        
‘Promos’ scholarship for studies at the University of Bristol, DAAD

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// CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS

International Conference in Ideology and Discourse Analysis 2019. “Corpus Linguistics and the Logics Approach. Pitfalls, Puzzles, Possibilities”. Colchester, UK. May 2019.

Quantitative Tools for Qualitative Analysis: Computational Social Science meets Discourse Analysis/1^st European Symposium on Societal Changes in Computational Social Science. London, UK. November 2017.

11^th EISA Pan-European Conference on International Relations. “Antagonisms at Play. The Important Role of Antagonisms in the Case of PMSCs”. Barcelona, Spain. August 2017.

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// EXPERIENCE

10/2021 – 09/2023
Assistant Lecturer, Chair of International Relations, University of Bamberg.

10/2016 – 03/2017
Teaching Assistant, Chair of International Relations, University of Bamberg.

04/2015 – 07/2015
Assistant within the BEMA Research Group, contributing to the project ‘Fußball und Gesellschaft’ [Football and Society], University of Münster.

11/2012 – 01/2013
Intern with the German Foreign Office, division of EU enlargement, Berlin.

03/2010 – 04/2010
Intern with Spiegel TV Infotainment/The Johannes B. Kerner Show, Hamburg

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Image Credits: © Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences