Private security work can be a brutal world of short-term contracts, exploitation, and under-regulation, where the imperative of profit is expected to trump collective notions of military brotherhood. Why then do so many demobilized soldiers turn to it as a vocation? While a rich body of work has revealed the vulnerabilities of demobilized military life, ethnographic investigations into how contractors experience and make sense of precarity are less common. Drawing on fieldwork with military veterans of European descent working and living in East Africa, this article argues that a central, yet underexplored, feature of contemporary security work is colonial nostalgia. Some contractors read the travelogues of colonial adventurers, while others trace their family genealogy to ancestral colonial frontier soldiers. A few even write their own memoirs in similar fashion. Writing, reading, and living the colonial past through this contractor canon serves several present-day functions. First, the parallels between risk-taking colonial adventurers and the kind of rugged individualism associated with homo economicus masks the tensions and fissures that emerge from soldiers’ discharge from the military and subsequent remobilization as privatized contractors. Secondly, colonial nostalgia forms part of a larger political critique of Western military interventions, of which many of these contractors experienced first-hand. Here, private security work is imagined as replicating an older, more effective tradition of frontier soldiering that is rooted in a logic of settler-colonialism. Finally, fantasies of a colonial past feed into contractors’ attempts to market themselves to clients and to organize their everyday work.

私人保安工作可能是一个充满短期合同、剥削和监管不足的残酷世界，在这个世界中，利润的迫切性预计会压倒军事兄弟情谊的集体观念。那么为什么这么多复员军人将其作为职业呢？虽然大量的工作揭示了复员军人生活的脆弱性，但对承包商如何体验和理解不稳定的人种学调查并不常见。本文借鉴在东非工作和生活的欧洲裔退伍军人的实地调查，认为当代安全工作的一个核心但尚未充分探讨的特征是殖民怀旧情绪。一些承包商阅读了殖民冒险家的游记，而另一些承包商则将他们的家谱追溯到殖民边防士兵的祖先。有些人甚至以类似的方式写自己的回忆录。通过这本书来书写、阅读和体验殖民历史承包商佳能目前承担多项职能。首先，敢于冒险的殖民冒险家和与经济人相关的那种粗暴的个人主义之间的相似之处掩盖了士兵退伍和随后重新动员为私有化承包商所产生的紧张和裂痕。其次，殖民怀旧情绪构成了对西方军事干预的更大政治批评的一部分，其中许多承包商都亲身经历过这种干预。在这里，私人保安工作被认为是复制一种更古老、更有效的边境士兵传统，这种传统植根于定居者殖民主义的逻辑。最后，对殖民历史的幻想助长了承包商向客户推销自己并组织日常工作的尝试。