Securing Profit: Private Security Companies and the Manichean World in U.S. Occupied Kabul

• In Event: 21012 - Empire and Settler Colonialism

Abstract

The expansion of U.S. military power increasingly relies on private security firms, reflecting a transformation in how imperial control manifests in occupied territories. Although existing research has documented the relationship between U.S. imperial expansion and capitalism, less attention has been paid to how racial hierarchies structure this relationship. This paper applies Fanon's framework of the Manichean world—which describes how colonial authorities establish rigid divisions between colonizers and colonized—to analyse how private security companies in U.S.-occupied Kabul implemented systems of racial capitalism through practices of criminalization and urban division. Through analysis of internal security documents, field observations in Afghanistan (2018-2020), and open-source materials, this study shows how Western security firms systematically criminalized the Afghan population, constructing them as inherent security threats to establish and perpetuate a racial order that advanced both imperial control and profit accumulation. The findings highlight three interconnected processes: (1) information gathering and reporting that portrayed Afghans as inherently dangerous by blurring the boundary between militancy and crime, (2) enforcement of physical boundaries between "Afghan" and "foreign " urban spaces justified through these discourses, and (3) conversion of these practices into financial gains. This research advances our understanding of racial capitalism in modern U.S. empire, demonstrates how Fanon's Manichean framework manifests through corporate entities, and reveals how technical security procedures mask underlying racial criminalisation of occupied populations which enable profit extraction under U.S. empire.

Author

• Syeda Quratulain Masood, Hamline University