Base Towns

Local Contestation of the U.S. Military in Korea and Japan

Claudia Junghyun Kim (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

248 Seiten

2023
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-766527-5 (ISBN)

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When do we see social movements mobilize against the American military overseas, and what explains their varying intensity? Despite increasing interest in the vast network of U.S. military bases on foreign soil, it is still not well understood why some host communities resist the bases in their backyards, while others remain compliant.

In Base Towns, Claudia Junghyun Kim addresses this puzzle by investigating the contentious politics surrounding twenty U.S. military bases across Korea and Japan. In particular, she looks at municipalities hosting these bases and differing levels of community acceptance and resistance over time. Drawing on fieldwork interviews, participant observation, and protest event data from 2000-2015, Kim shows that activists occasionally manage to join hands with the otherwise politically inactive local populations when they deliberately subordinate their radical movement goals to more immediate, mundane demands that form the basis of everyday local grievances. Specifically, the activists in base towns successfully build broad anti-base movements when they take advantage of quotidian disruption, adopt culturally resonant movement frames, and ally with local political elites. These activist strategies, however, sometimes end up reinforcing the widely presumed inevitability of the American presence.

In examining activist actions, strategies, and dilemmas, this book sheds light on marginalized actors in domestic and international politics--far removed from elite decision-making processes that shape interstate base politics and yet living with their consequences--who sometimes manage to complicate the operations of America's military behemoth.

Claudia Junghyun Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong. She has written about U.S. military bases overseas, social and transnational movements, global norms, and Korean and Japanese politics. From 2019-2020, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
Chapter 1: Introduction: U.S. Military Base Towns in Korea and Japan
Chapter 2: Explaining Protest (De)mobilization
Chapter 3: Bases in Motion
Chapter 4: Framing Bases
Chapter 5: Governing Bases
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Local Voices in Contentious Base Politics
Appendix
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	09.01.2023
Reihe/Serie	OXFORD STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POLITICS
Zusatzinfo	7 b/w line drawings, 2 maps, 5 tables
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	237 x 162 mm
Gewicht	526 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Europäische / Internationale Politik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Staat / Verwaltung
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-19-766527-6 / 0197665276
ISBN-13	978-0-19-766527-5 / 9780197665275
Zustand	Neuware