Description
This paper interrogates the growing entanglements between NGOs and private security actors through a sociological lens, situated within broader transformations of humanitarian governance and the commercialisation of security. The prevailing narrative that “aid work is becoming more dangerous” has legitimised the expansion of NGO security management, making aid worker security a condition for humanitarian action and reinforcing hierarchies of lives to be saved and lives to be risked. This paper argues that such practices facilitate the diffusion of corporate and commercial security rationalities into the humanitarian field. Drawing on forty semi-structured interviews with NGO security practitioners and representatives from NGO specialised security companies, the analysis traces how movements between these fields of practice reconfigure the boundaries between these fields. It argues that a shared socio-professional space is produced in which security knowledge is co-produced, circulated, and prioritised across NGOs. In doing so, it complicates the conventional framing of private security through the lens of public–private partnerships, instead revealing a deeper sociological entanglement that embeds market-oriented security practices within the moral economy of aid. Ultimately, this paper contributes to debates on the privatisation of security, the professionalisation of humanitarianism, and the exceptionalised position of aid worker security.
