Demilitarizing the City: Camptowns and Transnational Restructuring In Post-Military Base Urbanism

Military bases have profoundly shaped the cities that grew up around them, yet the urban dimension of these places—and what becomes of them as bases close, contract, or relocate—remains undertheorized. This session convenes scholars of post-military base cities: the camptowns, garrison towns, and base-adjacent districts of the Asia-Pacific and beyond, now undergoing contested transformation. Too often treated as isolated local problems or reduced to matters of security, these cities are in fact dense knots of colonial, imperial, and capitalist relations that operate well beyond the national scale.

We invite ethnographic, archival, and other fieldwork-grounded contributions attentive to the lived textures and contested politics of these transitions. Possible themes include:

• the afterlives of base return and the stalled or speculative redevelopment of former military land
• difficult heritage and struggles over memory, including colonial-era and Cold War remains
• transnational migration and the remaking of former camptowns by new residents
• the cross-border circulation of capital, expertise, and urban models, such as the reproduction of "sub-imperial" spatial orders when capital from once-colonized states reshapes ex-base zones elsewhere
• (re)ordering of gendered relations and militarized urban masculinity

By placing cases in conversation across the Asia-Pacific and other regions, the session aims to build a comparative, transnational, and postcolonial agenda for studying militarization and demilitarization as urban processes. We especially welcome work grounded in fieldwork, oral history, and close attention to everyday life, rather than studies centered on aggregate quantitative analysis.