Description
The militarization of humanitarianism is often understood through the relation between states and humanitarians. Increasingly and often against their will, humanitarian organisations are integrated into state (predominantly US and UK) and UN solutions. To meet the requirements for funding they must adhere to the security standards implied from above, which often means bunkerization. However, this observation does not account for the hardening of security practices of NGOs that operate more independently or in less high risk environments. This paper asks how NGO security practices have come to resemble those of military and private military and security actors by looking at the relational structures between NGO security professionals and private security actors. I argue that this is the result of the formation of a new field, in the Bourdieusian sense, of security experts who are moving between military, private and NGO security. I use a combination of biographical methods and network analysis to show how these individuals and their practices are interconnected and how exceptional practices have moved into the everyday of the NGO.
