US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing: An Ethnography of an Air Force Base in Ecuador - Hardcover

Fitz-Henry, Erin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137501170 ISBN 13: 9781137501172

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Synopsis

The first decades of the twenty-first century in Latin America have been characterized by rapidly intensifying US-led militarization, with the US acquiring controversial rights and unprecedented access to facilities in Panama, Honduras, and Peru. US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing is the first book to look closely at the struggles of anti-military activists in Ecuador as they attempted to challenge what was, for just under ten years, the US Air Force's largest forward operating location in the Western hemisphere. Drawing on sixteen months of fieldwork with US military personnel, US private military contractors, and anti-military activists on and around this facility in Manta, Ecuador, Fitz-Henry reorients contemporary anthropological and political debate about US-led militarization by focusing on the neglected range of ways in which the anti-base movement came to be rejected by local residents.

About this title

Review:

"In this highly readable and fascinating ethnographic account of an Ecuadorian community's response to the US military base in Manta, Erin Fitz-Henry presents the often neglected stories of local pro-base supporters and their efforts to counter anti-base activism. Her book turns conventional wisdom about anti-base activism on its head and is a welcome addition to the growing literature in anthropology, political science, and sociology on US military bases and their impact on communities." - Andrew I. Yeo, Associate Professor of Politics, Catholic University of America, USA

"In rich and evocative prose, Erin Fitz-Henry takes us to an "outpost of empire" and identifies the unexpected stories of, and edgy alliances between, US military personnel and the residents of the drug trade and crime-pocked city of Manta, Ecuador. It is centrally a story about transnational social movements and how they work or don't, and about where the US military has established itself and what its personnel make of their tasks. In the process, it provides an original and ethnographically rich sense of how arguments about sovereignty have been diversely configured." - Catherine Lutz, Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, Brown University, USA

About the Author:

Erin Fitz-Henry is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1137501170
• ISBN 13: 9781137501172
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 247