Private Armies, Testimonies, and Human Experience (PATH): Comparative Identity in Privatised Warfare
Navn på bevillingshaver
Özlem Has
Titel
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
University of Southern Denmark
Beløb
DKK 1,968,000
År
2025
Bevillingstype
Reintegration Fellowships
Hvad?
PATH examines how private military company (PMC) contractors from the USA, Russia, and Turkey narrate their identities and experiences in privatised warfare. Focusing on memoirs and media interviews, it explores how contractors frame their roles and motivations, and how these accounts intersect with wider political and media discourses that often label them mercenaries, proxies, or paramilitaries.
Hvorfor?
Existing research on PMC contractor experience is narrow and Western-centric. PATH addresses this gap by incorporating diverse cases across American, Russian and Turkish contexts, offering comparative insights that challenge reductionist portrayals and enrich debates on legitimacy, accountability, and the human experience of privatised warfare.
Hvordan?
The project employs discourse analysis of memoirs and media interviews in English, Turkish, and Russian, treating them as discursive performance arenas where reality is reconstructed and reimagined. By conducting cross-case comparisons, PATH traces how contractors justify, normalise, or, at times, regret their involvement in privatised warfare across different political and cultural contexts.