The Burdens of Sovereignty

Keywords: sovereignty, Korea, military, dispossession, land, territory
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 41

Abstract

The US military base network in South Korea was largely established through a series of American land enclosures that displaced civilians during the Korean War. During the crisis of war, American officials invoked South Korean “sovereignty” to black-box displacements and other spatial fissures of militarization as South Korean domestic problems. More recently, the US military has closed dozens of bases in the country. While it might appear that the US is “handing sovereignty back” to “the Korean people” by reducing its land presence, in fact the opposite has been the case. This paper traces iterations of South Korean sovereignty in the US-South Korea alliance from the Korean War onward to argue that South Korean sovereignty has not only limited American power but also been a vector of American power. At every turn, with Korea perpetually in a state of security crisis, invocations of South Korean sovereignty have served to shift the political, social, and financial burdens of the alliance onto South Korea and, in the neoliberal era, onto the poorest South Korean cities. This paper focuses on three key moments when the use of “sovereignty” has led to the shifting of burdens: original US military land accumulations during the Korean War; the formalization of South Korean territorial sovereignty in the asymmetrical alliance in the 1960s and 1970s; and the recent tendency by the US military to construct the socio-material fissures of US militarism not only as domestic problems, but as technical problems solvable by techniques of neoliberal urban planning.