Abstract
A defining characteristic of the United States’ post-9/11 wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan is dependence on a global army of migrant contract workers employed by private military companies (PMCs). The types of jobs that this workforce performs are diverse, from armed security guards to transportation to serving food in dining facilities at massive bases. Also diverse are the regions from which this labor is sourced, ranging as far afield as Latin America, Southeast Asia, Southeast Europe, and Africa. Kevin Thomas’s Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq examines the case of Sierra Leonean laborers recruited to work on military bases in Iraq.
Thomas argues that this labor migration represents a “significant departure from existing norms” (185), and, thus, challenges existing perspectives on transnational migration, especially concerning risk. Most obviously, working in warzones is a riskier endeavor than taking jobs in stable countries. Equally important, in warzones, origin-country governments are less able to monitor labor conditions. Additionally, once in Iraq, migrant military workers were essentially a captive labor pool, with few avenues for resisting exploitative labor practices by contractors. Following a review of the existing literature on risk and migration processes (chapter one) and an overview of historical and present-day economic and political contexts that shape labor migration patterns in Sierra Leone (chapter two), we are presented with the empirical core of the research. This consists of four chapters that examine the recruiting process (chapter three), work and life on a military base in Iraq (chapter four), exploitative labor conditions and other risks associated with this type of work (chapter five), and return migration, from challenges that migrants face reintegrating into Sierra Leone’s labor market to social tensions surrounding wealth that some workers were able to accumulate, which is frequently referred to as “blood dollars” (chapter six). The book ends with a discussion of the limitations of existing migration policies concerning risks presented by this type of work, along with possible policy interventions (chapter seven) and a call for rethinking the dimensions of risk in migration processes in light of this case (conclusion).
As a researcher of contracting and military labor migration, I found the empirical material presented by Thomas to be the book’s most interesting aspect. Chapter three examines how the Sierra Leonean government was directly involved in negotiating contracts with PMCs and screening/selecting the workforce. This stands in contrast to the situation in major labor-export countries in South and Southeast Asia, where the PMC industry sourced workers through labor brokers, with little oversight by origin states, especially after many such states imposed bans on their citizens travelling to Iraq following attacks by insurgents on military contractors (the bans did little to stem the flow of labor migration from these countries). Chapter five provides a fascinating discussion of labor activism, including protests and strikes, by Sierra Leonean workers in response to wage theft by employers and poor working conditions on bases. This hidden history of labor activism corresponds with research I have conducted with Filipinos who have worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and suggests that more attention should be directed toward foreign military laborers’ agency and strategies of resistance in the face of exploitative labor practices on US bases in warzones.
As interesting as the experiences of Sierra Leonean workers in Iraq are, Thomas’s analysis would have benefited greatly by better situating this particular case of military labor migration within the broader phenomenon. This includes both a lack of engagement with other scholars’ research on military labor migrants, such as Amanda Chisholm’s work on Nepalese security contractors and racial hierarchies within the PMC industry, and cursory consideration of the ways in which the Sierra Leone case’s particularities (such as the recruiting process, noted above) parallel or differ from trends in other countries that serve as key sources of workers, especially those in South and Southeast Asia. I imagine that some migration scholars might also wonder if military labor migration in response to the United State’s wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan heralds a significant change in migration dynamics that requires rethinking existing theories concerning migration and risk, as the book argues, or is more unique and limited in this regard. Despite these limitations, Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq is a significant contribution to scholarship on military contracting and raises important questions about high-risk migration into warzones.