Gentleman-Bureaucrat Masculinities and UK National Security Policymaking

There has been a tendency for literature on masculinities, conflict, and security to focus on the masculinities of poor, racialised men in the Global South, military personnel, and/or ‘hostile states’ as conceived from a Western perspective. This chapter aims to redress this imbalance by examining how the masculinised performances, assumptions, and discourses of UK national security policymakers serve to make militaristic and colonial approaches to security appear natural and inevitable. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with civil servants, the chapter examines how organisational cultures in UK government departments responsible for national security policy are gendered, racialised, and classed and how this shapes the systems of meaning invoked in policy discussions, embodied performances of policymakers, and epistemological assumptions underpinning their work. It shows that the dominant gentleman-bureaucrat ‘script’ to which officials are expected to adhere, which is heavily shaped by middle- and upper-class white masculinities, is discursively associated with objectivity and neutrality. The chapter argues that this performance – coupled with discourses that construct UK security practices as exhibiting a similar, white-coded masculinity – reproduces the impression that the liberal militarism characterising the UK’s approach to national security is apolitical, a product of ‘letting the facts speak for themselves’.