Our guest on this edition of the Geopolitics and Empire podcast is Professor Noah Coburn,

who is a political anthropologist at Bennington College.

His focus is on political structures and violence in the Middle East and Central Asia.

He teaches courses on the overlap of politics, power, and culture.

He has conducted over five years of field research in Afghanistan and also in Kyrgyzstan

and Uzbekistan.

We'll be discussing the lucrative private contracting job market that services the never-ending

global war on terror in Afghanistan, and we'll be taking a break a bit from the usual

politics of empire and look at an aspect perhaps that's less spoken of

from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective, looking at the lives of those who participate as contractors.

His latest book is Under Contract, The Invisible Workers of America's Global War.

It's an honor to have you on the show,

Dr. Coburn. Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and your interest in the subject.

I just finished your book. I really enjoyed it. I gave it a five-star review on Amazon, and I

urge listeners to go and check out the book.

And in the book, you mentioned that regarding the Afghan war,

that more countries have partaken in the war than in World War II,

and that if I'm not mistaken, over 3 million non-Afghans have been involved in its logistics and your book focuses on this machinery

the underbelly that services the war this privatized contract work you've spent many years on the

ground there and in the surrounding countries could you just tell us a bit to start off what inspired

you most to spend

the years in the field and these dangerous locations? And what questions were you trying to find

...