Basic villages: local contestation of the American army in Korea and Japan
By Claudia Junghyun Kim
Oxford University Press, 2023
The American military base network has been the subject of a large learned investigation over the years, and a large part of this literature can be divided into one of the three ways of investigation. First, what explains the distribution of bases around the world? Why do the United States establish military bases in the places it makes, why some foreign governments want (or refuse) to welcome American bases, and how do political decision-makers and their foreign counterparts use different stories to legitimize the presence of these bases?
Second, whatever the political decision-makers and military officials of the base, do the military bases really do what they are supposed to do? Successfully advance American interests? Or are there any conditions in which they are more or less likely to have their expected effects? We see that such debates take place on the question of whether the small forces supposedly tripwire have a deterrent effect.
Claudia Junghyun Kim Basic villages: local contestation of the American army in Korea and Japan joins a third line of investigation which has focused more on the substantial policy of the base. These works examine how activists and local and regional governments interact to shape decisions in the place where the individual bases will be established, maintained, widened, moved, minimized or abandoned. Basic cities contributes to this literature by focusing on anti-base social movements. In other words, even when foreign governments host an American military presence, the bases and their externalities often generate a local challenge. The bases vary in the degree of dispute that they provoke, however, and it is this variation that Kim seeks to explain.
Within the American military base network, the bases in South Korea and Japan are of particular importance in the foreign policy of the United States. The number of facilities in each country suggests as much – Kim (p.13) cites a 2018 Pentagon report as indicating 514 “officially recognized American military installations”, including 83 and 121 sites in South Korea and Japan, respectively. By explaining why the bases generate different degrees of local contestation, Kim is thus focused on twenty of the largest American military bases in these two countries – ten each in South Korea and Japan – and the surrounding “basic cities” from which variable protest emerging.
Based on interviews with activists, the observation of the participants and a set of data of protest events targeting these twenty bases between 2000 and 2015, Kim maintains that the local challenge of the American military bases emerges through a confluence of three key factors – the scope of the changes planned to generate a basic status in a given city given and in which activists can take advantage of these social changes given in a given social movement; If the framing of activists of the problem is sufficiently resonant with the larger and non -activist population; And if activists can succeed in attracting third -party support from local political elites.
Among the three factors that Kim faces the local challenge of American military bases, it is not necessarily a factor that predominates. Rather, it poses an additive and contingent relationship between these factors – the more a planned change is disruptive for the status quo, the more the militants supervise their movement in terms of local and pragmatic concerns rather than more abstract and ideological, and the more they can recruit local allies, the more likely the activists are more likely to generate high levels of anti -base contestation. Especially on the last two points, however, successful activism can have a cost; If activists are generally more radical – that is to say more interested in removing the American basic presence – than the non -activist population, supervising their movement in banal and very localized terms and working with local political elites offers a path to progressive gains, but it ultimately conceded the possibility of a more radical change.
Basic cities Makes particularly notable contributions that recall the bananas, beaches and bases of Cynthia Enloe: to make a feminist sense of international politics. First, this suggests that the policy of the military base – to say nothing about other private or public uses of space – is founded in a “policy of view”. Getting a foreign sovereign to maintain an American military base on his soil can be a full -fledged challenge, but if the base must be a sustainable presence, the host government and the US government must have reasonable confidence that the local population will tolerate the presence of the base. One way to encourage the local tolerance of a military base is to make it discreet enough not to cause an expensive backlash. “Most of the bases have managed to slip into the daily life of the neighboring community,” writes Enloe (1990, 66), but this is not a permanent characteristic. Kim’s work completes Enloe by showing that it is precisely when major changes in the operations of a base disrupt the status quo that this ability to hide at sight is the most precarious.
Second, Kim maintains that activists are most likely to succeed in attracting the support of local citizens and civil servants when they can supervise their opposition to the basics in pragmatic terms. While Kim (pp.43-46, 86-87) catalog a wide range of these banal concerns – ranging from car accidents to environmental degradation – some of the most salient and salient concerns that happen throughout the book are linked to gender, sexuality and sexual violence. In other words, the KIM examination of the protest of local level is based on the argument of Enloe (1990, 67) according to which “a foreign basis requires a particularly delicate adjustment of relations between men and women, because if the adjustment between local and foreign and local and foreign women are decomposed, the base can lose its protection coverage.” Kim (pp.34, 73) shows exactly how this dynamic “breaks down” into a rape incident by American soldiers who galvanized anti-base demonstrations in Okinawa and in activist campaigns on “decadent and AIDS culture” that American soldiers would have allegedly spread. Prostitutes also reproduce as a social concern for politicians and activists – with bases perhaps the countries which are “invaded by mixed children and punch (Street Prostitutes) “- and as an individual subject to violence by the American soldiers in a way that sparked the anti-base dispute (pp.39, 87, 122).
In all, Basic cities is an impressive work of empirical depth and theoretical ambition, but perhaps the most important is its normative push. In other words, Kim’s work throws a blow on the countless consequences that people face simply to live near the military bases, and that asks us to act as if these people and their lives were counting. What American officials have ridiculed as an “endless dialogue on parish issues”, she says, “must continue”.
Read more in -depth on international relations
