“The Military Base and Camptown: Seizing Land ‘by Bulldozer and Bayonet’ and the Transpacific Masculinist Compact,” Excerpt from Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2022)

In this excerpt from Jodi Kim's book Settler Garrison, Kim maps the use of debt as a form of power wielded by the creditor over the debtor, examining the dynamics of this assymetrical relationship through the case studies of sex camps outside military bases in South Korea and Okinawa. Kim extends this analytic to a trenchant examination of the injustices legitimated by colonialism, tracing the ways that the US extends its power into the sovereign spaces of Asian countries and marshalling them through structures of IMF-indebtedness into the settler garrisons of the book's title.