Base Cities: Native Contestation of the U.S. Army in Korea and Japan
By Claudia Junghyun Kim
Oxford College Press, 2023
The U.S. navy basing community has been the topic of a lot scholarly inquiry through the years, and far of this literature might be divided into considered one of three traces of inquiry. First, what explains the distribution of bases all over the world? Why does america set up navy bases within the locations that it does, why do some overseas governments need (or refuse) to host U.S. bases, and the way do U.S. policy-makers and their overseas counterparts use completely different narratives to legitimize the presence of these bases?
Second, no matter what policy-makers and navy officers take into consideration basing, do navy bases really do what they’re meant to do? Do they efficiently advance U.S. pursuits? Or are there situations beneath which they’re roughly prone to have their meant results? We see such debates play out on the query of whether or not small, so-called tripwire forces have any deterrent impact.
Claudia Junghyun Kim’s Base Cities: Native Contestation of the U.S. Army in Korea and Japan joins a 3rd line of inquiry that has targeted extra on the subnational politics of basing. Such work considers how activists in addition to native and regional governments work together to form choices about the place particular person bases will probably be established, maintained, expanded, moved, minimized, or deserted. Base Cities contributes to this literature by specializing in anti-base social actions. That’s, even the place overseas governments welcome a U.S. navy presence, bases and their externalities usually generate native contestation. Bases range within the diploma of contestation they provoke, nonetheless, and it’s this variation that Kim seeks to elucidate.
Throughout the U.S. navy basing community, bases in South Korea and Japan have held explicit significance in U.S. overseas coverage. The variety of services in every nation suggests as a lot — Kim (p.13) cites a 2018 Pentagon report as itemizing 514 “formally acknowledged U.S. navy installations,” together with 83 and 121 websites in South Korea and Japan, respectively. In explaining why bases generate various levels of native contestation, Kim thus focuses on twenty of the most important U.S. navy bases in these two nations — ten every in South Korea and Japan — and the encircling “base cities” from which various levels of contestation emerge.
Drawing on interviews with activists, participant statement, and a dataset of protest occasions concentrating on these twenty bases between 2000 and 2015, Kim argues that local-level contestation of U.S. navy bases emerges by a confluence of three key components — the scope of deliberate modifications to the basing established order in a given city and the extent to which activists can benefit from these modifications to generate an anti-base social motion; whether or not the activists’ framing of the difficulty is sufficiently resonant with the broader, non-activist inhabitants; and whether or not activists can efficiently appeal to third-party assist from native political elites.
Among the many three components that Kim argues form native contestation to U.S. navy bases, it’s not essentially one issue that predominates. Slightly, she posits an additive, contingent relationship between these components — the extra disruptive a deliberate change is to the established order, the extra activists body their motion by way of native, pragmatic issues somewhat than extra summary, ideological issues, and the extra efficiently they will recruit allies amongst native elites, the extra doubtless the activists are to generate excessive ranges of anti-base contestation. Particularly on the latter two factors, nonetheless, profitable activism can come at a price; if activists are typically extra radical — i.e., extra interested by eradicating the American basing presence — than the non-activist inhabitants, framing their motion in mundane, extremely localized phrases and dealing with native political elites gives a path towards incremental positive factors, however it finally concedes the potential of extra radical change.
Base Cities makes particularly notable contributions which might be paying homage to Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Seashores and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of Worldwide Politics. First, it means that the politics of navy basing — to say nothing of different personal or public makes use of of area — is grounded in a ‘politics of sight‘. Getting a overseas sovereign to acquiesce to the upkeep of a U.S. navy base on its soil generally is a problem in its personal proper, but when the bottom is to be a long-lasting presence, the host authorities and the U.S. authorities alike have to have cheap confidence that the native inhabitants will tolerate the bottom’s presence. One solution to encourage native toleration of a navy base is to easily make it unobtrusive sufficient that it doesn’t provoke expensive backlash. “Most bases have managed to slide into the every day lives of the close by neighborhood,” Enloe writes (1990, 66), however that’s not a everlasting attribute. Kim’s work enhances Enloe’s in exhibiting that it’s exactly when main modifications in a base’s operations disrupt the established order that this means to cover in plain sight is most precarious.
Second, Kim argues that activists are almost definitely to reach attracting the assist of native residents and officers once they can body their opposition to bases in pragmatic phrases. Whereas Kim (pp.43-46, 86-87) catalogues a wide selection of such mundane issues — starting from automotive accidents to environmental degradation — a number of the most frequent, salient issues that recur all through the ebook are associated to gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. That’s, Kim’s examination of local-level contestation builds on Enloe’s (1990, 67) argument that, “A overseas base requires particularly delicate adjustment of relations between women and men, for if the match between native and overseas males and native and overseas ladies breaks down, the bottom might lose its protecting cowl.” Kim (pp.34, 73) exhibits precisely how this dynamic “breaks down” in an incident of rape by U.S. servicemen that galvanized anti-base protests in Okinawa and in activist campaigns in regards to the “decadent tradition and AIDS” that U.S. troopers would allegedly unfold. Prostitutes, furthermore, recur as a social concern for each politicians and activists — with bases maybe main nations to be “overrun by mixed-race kids and panpan (avenue prostitutes)” — and as people subjected to violence by U.S. servicemembers in ways in which have sparked anti-base contestation (pp.39, 87, 122).
All informed, Base Cities is a formidable work of empirical depth and theoretical ambition, however maybe most necessary is its normative thrust. That’s, Kim’s work casts a harsh mild on the myriad penalties that folks face merely for residing close to U.S. navy bases, and it asks us to behave as if these individuals and their lives matter. What U.S. officers have derided as “interminable dialogue over parochial points,” she argues, “should proceed”.
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