This thesis is an account of the ways in which private security markets rest upon and reproduce categories of race, colonial constitutions and gender in its commodification of security labour. To support this claim, this project is a feminist political ethnography that draws upon interviews and observations from both white British Gurkha officers/presently security company directors, local Gurkha employment agents and Gurkha security contractors operating in Afghanistan between January 200B-September 2010. This study considers the ways Gurkhas are represented, recruited and marketed in private security by these individuals and how these men negotiate/adapt and resist representations of Gurkhas within larger security market colonial scripts. It offers a much-needed historic and cultural analysis of the ways race, class and gender work in tandem to construct differences amongst security and security labour and how these practices constitute security markets. As such this research demonstrates that experiences and representations of Gurkhas (and any security contractor) can never be reduced to naturalising claims of "just the market".