No Bases

Scott Ludlam's No Bases World Map Project / MAP



REPORTS

Outposts of Empire: The case against foreign military bases / Sarah Irving, Wilbert van der Zeijden, Oscar Reyes / 1 March 2007 / Transnational Institute

Outposts of Empire tells of the everyday effects of foreign military bases at a local or national level: the displacement of people; the democratic deficit and loss of sovereignty that bases cause; their devastating economic, environmental and health impacts; and impunity about the crime that bases bring with them, including sexual violence. These analyses are accompanied by case studies that illustrate the problems of bases in Diego Garcia, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, Panama, the Philippines and Turkey, as well as highlighting the remarkable efforts that people on the ground have made to struggle against them. An introductory essay sets out the broader history and changing geopolitics of the US military presence abroad, and introduces the emerging global network that aim to close these outposts of empire and send the troops home.

Introduction
Loss of sovereignty: Turkey
Democratic Deficit: Philippines
Economic drain: Hawai’i
Map: global US military involvement (PDF)
Displacement: Diego Garcia
Environmental impact: Panama
Health hazards: Guam
Crime and impunity: Korea
Sex crimes and prostitution: Okinawa
Further reading

The International Network Against Foreign Military Bases / MAP (PDF) / LINKS / ARTICLES / Transnational Institute



US Department of Defense Base Structure Report 2005 (PDF)

This government document provides statistics on more than 700 bases that the US military maintains in dozens of foreign countries and territories. The report includes details such as locations, acreage, numbers of personnel, and “replacement value” in US dollars for the components of its worldwide infrastructure. For a critical analysis of the 2003 Base Structure Report, see this article by Chalmers Johnson.



ESSAYS

Outpost of empire / Wilber van der Zeijden / Red Pepper

America's Empire of Bases / Chalmers Johnson / TomDispatch.com

Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door / Chalmers Johnson / TomDispatch.com

Bases, Bases Everywhere: Pentagon Planning in Iraq, 2003-2005 / Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch.com

737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire / Chalmers Johnson / AlterNet

Evolving Empire: Chalmers Johnson on Bush's Major Troop Realignment / Democracy Now

Chalmers Johnson: “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" / Democracy Now

U.S. Military Bases and Empire / MAP (PDF) / Monthly Review



US Military Bases Around the World / Daily Kos

US Military Bases: The Spoils and Deceptions of War / Kurt Nimmo / CounterPunch

New US Military Bases: Side Effects or Causes of War? / Zoltan Grossman / CounterPunch



Thomas P.M. Barnett / The Pentagon's New Map / MAP / BOOK



The Pentagon's New Map: Conversation with Thomas P.M. Barnett / Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

MISC

Closing Bases: Supporting Communities / Fellowship / Winter 2007

This special issue of Fellowship has been published in conjunction with the International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, held in Quito and Manta, Ecuador from March 5-9, 2007. Please visit www.no-bases.net for more information about the conference and to support the global movement to close military bases.

Bases, Empire, and Global Response / Catherine Lutz / Fellowship / Winter 2007

Global Expansion of U.S. Military Involvement: A World Map for Activists (PDF) / Brian McAdoo / Fellowship / Winter 2007

"Enduring" U.S. Bases in Iraq: Monopolizing the Middle East Prize / Joseph Gerson / Fellowship / Winter 2007



U.S. Foreign Military Bases & Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives / Joseph Gerson / International Consultation on U.S. Bases / Seoul / December 1-2, 2003

Ten Reasons to Withdraw all US Foreign Military Bases / Joseph Gerson / Peacework

Global Spread of U.S. Bases (Real Audio) / Chicago Public Radio

Empire? / US Military Expansion and Intervention / MAP / Global US Troop Deployment, 1950-2005 / Global Policy Forum

Democratic Social Movements against Militarization (PDF) / Bibliography of Recent Research on Militarization and Demilitarization (PDF) / Catherine Lutz / Watson Institute

Empire is in the details (PDF) / Catherine Lutz

Recent writing that identifies the United States as an empire has focused overwhelmingly on its political-economic underpinnings, without questioning the cultural making of value or examining empire as more than an elite project. This writing has not drawn on ethnographic work that would reshape it in more adequate, less economistic forms, make the human face and frailties of imperialism more visible, and, in so doing, make challenges to imperial practice more likely. Focusing on military institutions, and via some examples from U.S. imperial projects in the Philippines and elsewhere, I suggest where ethnographies of empire might be done and what vulnerabilities they might explore.

Catherine Lutz on US empire and militarism (MP3) / The Monitor

Subtopia's Baseworld Archipelago Meltdown / Subtopia's "bases" tag @ del.icio.us

If the U.S. is ultimately leaving Iraq, why is the military building 'permanent' bases? / Friends Committee on National Legislation

Report on the International Conference for the Abolition of All Military Bases (PDF) / Lalit

Military Geography for Professionals and the Public / John M. Collins / National Defense University / Reviewed by Megan Shaw Prelinger at Bad Subjects

US Air Force Bases / GLOBEMASTER: US Military Aviation Database



NO BASES / CONFERENCE 2007

NO BASES: International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / Ecuador / 5-9 March, 2007

Dispatches from the No Foreign Military Bases Conference 2007 / Declaration: International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / American Friends Service Committee

Bases Fuera: No Military Bases Network Launch Conference / Joseph Gerson / Quito, Ecuador / March 5, 2007 / American Friends Service Committee

A New Network Forms to Close U.S. Overseas Military Bases / Medea Benjamin

An Anti-Bases Network Finds its Base / Herbert Docena / Focus on the Global South

Ecuador: International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / Marc Becker / naclanews

Europe solidaire sans frontières / Military Bases

Report of the International Anti-US Bases Conference / World Social Forum / Mumbai, India / 17-20 January 2004



LATIN AMERICA

U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean / October 2001 / Foreign Policy in Focus / International Relations Center

U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean / August 2004 / Foreign Policy in Focus / International Relations Center

The Inescapable Beat: US Military Bases in Brazil / Robert Fisk / CounterPunch

ACJ Ecuador - No bases militares



ASIA

U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia / Lionel Beehner / Council on Foreign Relations

U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, Japan (MAP)

No Crimes by U.S.Troops! / Korea

YONIP! Yes, Observe National Independence & Peace / Philippines

AUSTRALIA

Australian Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition



HAWAI'I

DMZ Hawai'i/Aloha 'Aina / A Brief Overview of Militarization and Resistance in Hawai‘i (PDF) / Hawai'i Involvement in Foreign/US Military Bases Movement

Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i / Map of Military Occupied Areas in Hawai'i

The military takes up 20.6% of the total land area of the State of Hawai'i (about 200,000 acres). 56% of these lands are "ceded lands", or lands once under the Hawaiian monarchy that were granted when Hawai'i was purportedly annexed to the United States in 1898. In 1995 there were 405 toxic military sites in 122 facilities, with 6 of those facilities on the "Superfund" National Priorities List. As of 1995 the cleanup cost to taxpayers was $1.08 billion.

Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i is a documentary film that began as a project about resistance to the post 9-11 military expansion happening in Hawai'i, the largest expansion since WWII. The Army is bringing a Stryker Brigade to Hawai'i, which consists of about 300 urban assault vehicles that weigh 20 tons each, scheduled to arrive here by the end of the year. The amount of land being taken by the military to accommodate the Stryker is roughly the size of the island of Kaho'olawe, which was destroyed by the military. In addition, the state of Hawai'i is currently trying to bring a nuclear aircraft carrier group to Pearl Harbor, a site that history has shown us is a prime military target.



"INDIAN COUNTRY"

Native American Sacred Sites and the Department of Defense / Edited by Vine Deloria, Jr. and Richard W. Stoffle

Native American Affairs and the Department of Defense / Donald Mitchell and David Rubenson (RAND)

Nuclear and chemical warfare operations - Unwanted neighbors / Brenda Norrell / Indian Country Today

Trashing the Neoliberal City

Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago from 2000-2005

Edited by Daniel Tucker and Emily Forman, Learning Site, 2006

With contributions by Ava Bromberg, Rachel Caidor, Emily Forman, Dara Greenwald, Nicolas Lampert, Pauline Lipman, Josh MacPhee, Micah Maidenberg, Laurie Palmer, the Pink Bloque, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Daniel Tucker. Design by Dakota Brown and Daniel Tucker

Download as PDF

"We need an exciting new energy that challenges who will live in the city, who will benefit from its growth and development, and who will get to participate in fundamental decisions affecting economic, cultural, and social life. What we need is a space to contest whose city Chicago will be." - Pauline Lipman's essay from the publication entitled "Whose City Is It Anyways?"

Chicago is a post-industrial success story. At least that is what the spring 2006 special feature article on the 3rd largest city in the United States had to say about the matter. Increasingly cities, especially those that qualify as "Global Cities" of significant importance to the world economic stage, compete for success in terms of quality of life for white collar service workers and the so-called Creative Class and to facilitate the proper business climate to satisfy the needs of globalized capital. Other characteristics include the privatization of services previously managed by the state and the deregulation of labor and markets. Aspects of this contemporary phase of neoliberal capitalism are new, while some are as old as the free market itself. When we look at the implications of such a moment in time on a single city, many questions about the social impact on precarious residents arise. This publication catalogues a diverse range of cultural projects that responded to and questioned the state of social and political life in Chicago at the turn of the century.

The projects in this publication raise fundamental questions about our right to the city and the possible uses of culture in the struggle for community self-determination: How do we want to interact with our neighbors? What kinds of reforms do we want from the state and what kinds of collective infrastructures should we be building ourselves instead? What kinds of spaces encourage resistance, free movement and the well being of the whole population?

Most of the work featured in this publication has never been published or seen in print. For the first time, seventeen of the most compelling self-organized projects, events and initiatives from Chicago's recent past have been catalogued together to present a document of a unique period of cultural activism. Only the surface is scratched with 1-3 pages dedicated to each individual project, yet we get a sense of the projects essence and motivation through the inclusion of original press releases and reproductions of promotional materials as well as documentation. The work is divided up into three sections which attempt to organize the work according to it's most significant themes. The sections are "The Right to the City" featuring work that deals with housing and gentrification, "Protest Experiments" that address the policing of public space and dissent, and "Social Reorganization" which offers alternative contexts for gathering and relating to strangers, friends and collaborators in times of intense alienation and social isolation.

Earlier on CSP > Department of Space and Land Reclamation / Counter Productive Industries

UNHOUSED

UNHOUSED
organized by In the Field

Opening Reception:
Tuesday March 27, 6-8pm

Lecture by Brett Bloom and Ava Bromberg of In the Field:

Thursday March 29, 7pm

common room 2
465 Grand Street
New York, NY 10002
www.common-room.net

Global housing crises are not abstract. They are visible and viscerally experienced on the ground where people sleep, gather, eat and raise their families. While conditions in distinct and distant cultures may differ, they are increasingly interrelated; so are the processes that generate these conditions. People are actively (and passively) unhoused by markets, governments, wars, ethnic violence, gentrification, natural and manmade disasters, and other factors. Where markets and governments fail to provide housing, people are left to provide housing for themselves. The creative efforts of individuals, groups, and others invested in improving the condition of daily life and shelter at the margins of affordability are the subject of this exhibition. The material presented here is drawn from research on creative responses to global housing crises we are doing in preparation for a book called UNHOUSED.

We are putting multiple forms of housing crises in relation to one another in a way they never are. We are exploring the relationships between diverse phenomena: gentrification in wealthy Western cities, the slum clearance that accompanies the Olympic Games nearly wherever it goes, the occupation of large tracts of land in rural Brazil by thousands of “landless” people and more. The purpose of this project is not to glorify or fetishize life under difficult conditions. Rather, our intention is to give visibility to the magnitude and complexity of housing crises and to stimulate thoughtful action, facilitate potential collaborations amongst innovators on the ground, and – we hope – inspire meaningful policies that can better house people at all levels of society.

Over the next 5 years, we will travel to dozens of cities to conduct research. We will seek out highly localized forms of creative engagement with housing problems all over the world – from direct actions to house people to innovative changes in public policy. Our efforts will combine the work of artists, urban planners, activists, architects, and UNHOUSED populations themselves. We will seek out people who have already conducted in depth investigations of UNHOUSING, like some of the material presented in this exhibition.

UNHOUSED BLOG

See also: squattercity and spacing wire

Rozalinda Borcila

Geography Lessons / Video Set #1 / Video Set #2

An on-going archive of videos and still images generated from trespasses in airport security zones.

Increasingly, the spaces we navigate are policed through technologies of visualization and information management. The X-Ray machine, racial profiling practices, surveillance devices, scrutiny of documents, fingerprinting etc are meant to make everything, visible or invisible, available for inspection. Justified through the imperative of security, vast databases track our movements, health records, purchases, reading habits, web navigation and so on.

And much is at stake in representation.

This series of small interventions in highly controlled spaces began shortly after September 11th 2001. Using a video camera as a way of looking back, I shoot images in airport security zones: inside X-Ray machines, at passport check points, immigration control, baggage claim. Geography Lessons (... cont.) is an on-going archive of these video images, a structured and somewhat absurd system of unauthorized counter surveillance, a meditation on the nature and implications of representation. This website contains a small portion of the archive: excerpts of a few videos taken around, and inside of, airport X-Ray machines.



The Naturalization Project

National parks, immigration law, Olympic television, travel guides, night vision, wedding rituals, border crossings.... A collusion of multiple articulations of the national and the natural....



This long-term project explores the problematics of naturalization by considering multiple sites in which this construct is articulated. In each site, the citizen/foreigner dynamic is produced through a series of tropes. The focus is primarily on the production of the Eastern European other via tropes of gymnastics, poverty, nationalism, violence and orphans – as well as the production of the Western citizen subject as a type of viewer (a way of watching). This project consists of a series of multi-channel video installation, 5 short videos, a series of border trespass interventions, interventions within immigration proceedings and wedding rituals.



Composition in Black and White (Danube Bridge, 042099)

Photos shot off the targeting screen of US bomber aircraft during operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. The images are taken a few frames after the moment of explosion, when heat patterns translate on the screen into compositions in black and white. The photos are taken without authorization.



911+1: The Perplexities of Security / Rozalinda Borcila / The Information Technology, War and Peace Project / Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

A Different Kind of Border

Craig Robinson for The New York Times / September 17, 2006
Manuel Heart, center, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, at a recent memorial march near Farmington, N.M., for victims of racial violence.

Indian Blood / Susy Buchanan / Southern Poverty Law Center

Native Americans have been brutalized from the beginning. And the hate goes on. Violence against American Indians, much of it motivated by racial hatred, is a pervasive yet obscure problem that is especially prevalent in so-called "border towns" - majority-white cities abutting reservations - where cultures clash against the historical backdrop of institutionalized racism, cultural subjugation, and genocide.

Malign Neglect / Susy Buchanan / Southern Poverty Law Center

Racial violence against Native Americans has drawn attention from the federal government twice in recent years, but many hate crimes still seem to get a pass.

Edge of the Rez Revisited / A KNAU Special Series

Ten years ago, KNAU explored racism in reservation border towns with the award-winning documentary Edge of the Rez. KNAU is now presenting an updated version. Edge of the Rez Revisited profiles the people who inhabit the disparate worlds on and off the reservation.

Day 1 / Racism in Border Towns >> For the first installment of KNAU's Edge of the Rez Revisited series, we'll learn what the Navajo Nation is doing to combat racism in reservation border towns....


AP Photo/Donovan Quintero
Army veteran George Wells Jr., held an eagle staff while a fellow veteran adjusted the handle before a memorial walk Sept. 2 near Farmington, N.M. American Indians walked that day down a 1-1/2 mile stretch of U.S. 64, the main highway into the city, to honor those who have been victims of violence and discrimination in towns that border the Navajo Nation. Navajo leaders planned the event after a summer in which 21-year-old Clint John of Kirtland was shot to death by a Farmington police officer and another Navajo man allegedly was beaten by three young Anglo men.

NEWS

In Shadow of 70’s Racism, Recent Violence Stirs Rage / New York Times

In Navajo country, racism rides again / Salon.com

Report looks at discrimination in Navajo border towns / Indian Country Today

Navajos march against discrimination, violence / Indian Country Today

Racism a possible issue in reservation bordertown murders / Indian Country Today

Tensions run high along the border / Missoulian

Conference explores racism in cities near reservations / Missoulian

RADIO

Navajos Protest Violence Against Tribe / NPR Morning Edition

Violent Crime and Native Americans / Democracy Now

REPORTS

The Farmington Report: Civil Rights for Native Americans 30 Years Later / New Mexico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

American Indians and Crime: A BJS Statistical Profile, 1992-2002 / U.S. Department of Justice / Bureau of Justice Statistics

American Indians and Crime / U.S. Department of Justice / Bureau of Justice Statistics

Policing on American Indian Reservations / A Report to the National Institute of Justice

MISC

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide / Andrea Smith / Lecture in Grand Rapids, Michigan (February 7, 2006)

Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples / Andrea Smith

The Prison Industrial Complex in Indigenous California / Stormy Ogden

Vectors / Perception

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular is pleased to announce the launch of its Winter 2007 issue devoted to the theme of Perception.

Our fourth issue of Vectors examines the sensory, phenomenological, and epistemological stakes of perception at different moments of history and in varied geographies, paying special attention to the cultural, ethical and ideological stakes of what, how, and when we perceive. Featured scholars include Sharon Daniel, Eric Faden, Anne Friedberg, Perry Hoberman, Donald Hoffman, Caren Kaplan, Laura Marks, and Trevor Paglen. Vectors is produced by editors Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, co-creative directors Erik Loyer and Raegan Kelly, and programmer Craig Dietrich.



Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the Social Construction of Targets
By Caren Kaplan
Design by Raegan Kelly

In this piece I explore the idea that altitude-the view from above the ground-inspires and creates some of the most powerful social relations of sight and knowledge in the European Enlightenment and its imperial and neoliberal aftermath. That geography has depended heavily on the "bird's eye view" comes as little surprise to anyone who has navigated a locale by map (climbing a hill or building almost always seems to enhance the navigational experience of using a map). But the extent to which this set of discourses and practices pervades art, science, and popular culture remains a matter of some urgent scholarly attention. As the aerial photographs and satellite images of the devastated Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina demonstrate all too clearly, views from the air can represent seemingly everything and nothing. The particularism of thousands of pixels reveals startlingly detailed images of submerged rooftops and decimated levees yet the information cannot convey, apparently, the sheer need of thousands of people in a convention center waiting for evacuation. The expectation that the picture will deliver the truth, that the higher you go the better the view of that truth, and the more precise the information will be bears directly not just on social policy in an era of heightened national security but on the ways we imagine and act on national identity. Aerial perspective and the rise of an imperial world view become intrinsic to the discursive representations of contemporary nation-states.... [continue]

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Public Secrets
By Sharon Daniel
Design by Erik Loyer

There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like the troubling "don't ask, don't tell." The trick to the public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are "public secrets."

The public perception of justice - the figure of its appearance - relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.

The expansion of the prison system is possible because it is a public secret - a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their communities. As the number of prisons increases, so does the level of secrecy about what goes on inside them. The secret of the abuses perpetrated by the Criminal Justice System and Prison Industrial Complex can be heard in many stories told by many narrators, but only when they are allowed to speak. After a series of news stories and lawsuits documenting egregious mistreatment of prisoners in 1993, the California Department of Corrections imposed a media ban on all of its facilities. This ongoing ban prohibits journalists from face-to-face interviews, eliminates prisoners' right to confidential correspondence with media representatives, and bars the use of cameras, recording devices, and writing instruments in interviews with media representatives. Women incarcerated in California are allowed visits only from family members and legal representatives. Inmates are not allowed access to computers, cameras, tape recorders or media equipment of any kind. Such restrictions preserve the public secret.... [continue]

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Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies
By Trevor Paglen
Design by Raegan Kelly & Craig Dietrich

You can learn a lot about geography by tracking the movements of airplanes. Open up the in-flight magazine on any airplane and you’ll see what I mean. Within the glossy pages of those magazines, you’ll inevitably find maps of the world with lines connecting cities to one another – these are of course routes flown by the airline whose plane you’re sitting in. But they represent something more than that. Aircraft flights and routes help visualize a form of what geographers call “relational space”: the often hidden ways in which non-contiguous spaces are in fact profoundly interwoven. London is intensely connected to New York to Los Angles to Tokyo… one the other hand, how many lines connect to Kinshasa? Ashgabat? Kabul? These absences represent a different kind of relational space.

But there are many, many kinds of aircraft besides the cramped, coach-class commercial planes that many of us are accustomed to. There are the private executive jets of the extremely rich; the light prop planes of recreational pilots; the cargo fleets of UPS, Federal Express, DHL and the like; the helicopters and light planes of police departments; need I go on?; then there is, of course, the military. And within the military – which sometimes seems like a world unto itself - there are also scores of different aircraft types: cargo planes, fighters, bombers, trainers, transports, spy planes. Just as the movements of commercial aircraft describe various kinds of relational space, so do the movements of military aircraft.

This project is about one very peculiar subset of military aircraft – a fleet of nondescript Boeing 737s and Beechcraft King Airs that use the call-sign JANET when they’re operating in civilian airspace. The JANETs are an airline operating in the service of the military whose purpose is to shuttle workers to and from a collection of secret military installations in the Southwest and to undertake support operations for some of the most obscure activities within the Military Industrial Complex. The JANETs' movements represent a very peculiar kind of relational space indeed – a geography of secret projects, places, and people that military and defense-industry insiders refer to as the “black world”.... [continue]

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Vectors is an international peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Vectors brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures social and cultural relations. We only publish works that exceed the boundaries of print.