The military spatial complex: A framework of neoliberal urban power relations

This paper develops the concept of the military–spatial complex (MSC) to analyze how armed forces increasingly shape neoliberal urban development. While military urbanism has often been studied through the visible apparatus of surveillance and security, the MSC highlights subtler forms of militarization: the embedding of martial authority into civilian urban life through planning, land governance, and property development. Correspondingly, this paper argues that militaries today operate as hybrid actors, part sovereign apparatus, part market developer, transforming their privileged access to land and resources into mechanisms of accumulation and control. Drawing on Israel, Egypt, and Serbia, the paper demonstrates how the MSC operates across different political economies and institutional configurations. Whether the relocation of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bases and the militarization of the Israeli south, the development of the new administrative capital in Cairo and the military-led slum clearance programs, or the housing projects for military personnel alongside the rearrangement of military sites in Serbia, these cases reflect a broader reconfiguration of state power under neoliberalism, in which rather than retreating, states restructure authority through military-led urbanism. Accordingly, the MSC captures this paradoxical shift, in which armed forces seemingly demilitarize yet extend influence via civilianized urban mechanisms. Therefore, it offers a framework for understanding the ways in which neoliberalism emerged not as an externally imposed transition, but rather from internal power relations.