The Privatization of War: A New Challenge for the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) have rapidly increased in size and rate of deployment since the 1991 Gulf War, notably during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars of 2001 and 2003 respectively. This growth of PMSCs in the last two decades has not been accompanied by an effective legal regulatory framework, and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda does not include any provisions related to the escalating threat that private contractors hired to provide military and security services in conflict settings pose to international peace and security and human rights. This chapter argues that UN institutions, scholars, advocates, and practitioners should incorporate the privatization of war as a new challenge within the WPS agenda, intending to plant a seed in touching upon different ways in which the privatization of war should be addressed in order to prevent gendered human rights violations in conflict scenarios.

British Public Perception towards Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

This article seeks to explore the perception of the British informants regarding the Afghanistan war 2001 and Iraq war 2003. Heavy users of British media were interviewed. The present article adopts the qualitative approach and ten in-depth interviews were conducted by the British informants. It was found that the British informants considered the 9/11 attacks as a tragic incident and Al Qaeda was held responsible for this. They supported their governments policies to curb terrorism but they highly condemned human causalities during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Particularly, they condemned their governments policy about Iraq war 2003. Regarding, the British media coverage of these wars, there was mixed opinion. Some of them considered that British media gave biased coverage to the wars however; few thought that media adopted a balanced approach. Overall, they stressed that the government should take responsible action against terrorism and human causalities should be avoided.

War Families and the Iraq Wars

In this paper, I argue that it is not just that wars impact people’s lives—it is that people live wars and wars are constituted by people living them. It is appropriate to think of war as happening on battlefields and in bedrooms, in command centers and in kitchens, with fighter planes and with soup cans. Using this interpretation of war as everyday experience, this article looks at Iraqi war families—that is, families constituted by and constitutive of the Iraq war(s). It begins with five vignettes that tell some, by necessity, partial, stories of the complexity of families living the war(s). Drawing from those vignettes and aggregated data, the article explores changing demographic, nutritional, and health dynamics of Iraqi families over the successive years of war and conflict in Iraq. The article concludes with a contextualization of war families, and a look forward for families in Iraq’s near future.