The sovereign city?: Negotiating self-determination in an American military enclave

Abstract

U.S. military facilities abroad are key sites around which foreign citizens and U.S. officers negotiate questions of sovereignty with a particular intensity. Between 1999 and 2009, Manta, Ecuador, was home to one of the most strategic U.S. Air Force “forward operating locations” (or FOLs) in the Western hemisphere. While rejected by most Ecuadorian legal scholars, anti-FOL activists, and the current Ecuadorian administration as a violation of national sovereignty, the facility was widely embraced by residents of the city itself, who actively rejected this characterization of “violation” by arguing that the FOL was, on the contrary, a strategic means of bolstering their “municipal sovereignty.” Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research on and around the FOL in 2006–2007, this chapter tracks the efforts of Manta residents, U.S. military personnel, and anti-base activists to both circumscribe and expand the various registers in which they articulated their understandings of “sovereignty.”

Citation

Fitz-Henry, E. (2010), "The sovereign city?: Negotiating self-determination in an American military enclave", Sarat, A. (Ed.) Special Issue Interdisciplinary Legal Studies: The Next Generation (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 51), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 153-183. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-4337(2010)0000051009