UC Berkeley

Land has been essential to American military power in Korea from 1945 into the present day. The dissertation charts the evolution of American “land power” in South Korea, focusing on the transition from direct military dispossessions during the Korean War to a US military real estate system that became increasingly enmeshed in South Korea’s land development system in the post-war decades. Today, American land power in South Korea consists not only of the US military’s ability to project force from a point in space, but also of land valued as a commodity in a way that serves the ongoing US military presence in the country. In the early 2000s, military lands accumulated during the Korean War through mass civilian dispossession began to function as assets in the US-South Korea burden-sharing system. Even with a reduction of the total number of US bases in South Korea, alliance burdens have been increasingly shifted onto South Korea and onto localities. The South Korean state has treated most released US military lands as an asset used to fund the US-South Korea alliance, essentially forcing local communities to either repurchase their own lands back from the state, or to lure investors and developers to do so by passing deregulatory measures. Further, political devolution and neoliberalization created conditions in which the politics of (de)militarization were almost entirely subsumed by a new pro-growth and pro-deregulation politics of development in many places. The dissertation argues in favor of a multi-scalar anti-dispossession critique of US militarism that considers (de)militarization as a process that extends beyond the walls of any military base and into a landscape of uneven local development.