Island Studies Journal 11(2), Book Reviews

Geographer Sasha Davis takes a broad regional view of the US military's past and future in the Pacific Islands and of islanders' histories of response to militarization and dispossession.He does so using insights from both spatial and postcolonial theory, insurgent political reformulations, and ethnographic experience on each of the islands whose fate has been intertwined with that of the US military.Writing on a topic of great international concern with the recent US "pivot to Asia," Davis writes with originality and insight into the problem of militarization.He focuses on those islands that have been especially damaged, environmentally and politically, by US military activities over the course of the last century, including Bikini Atoll, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, Okinawa, and Hawai'i.Based on his fieldwork in those and other places in the region over the course of a decade, Davis can argue against the standard view of US military power in the region.That view focuses on US strategy and its efficacies and effects on the international balance of power; or, more precisely, on the relations among political elites in the US and the Asia-Pacific region.Years of critique of the assumption that the Pacific is an "American Lake" have not succeeded in upending such strategic narratives.The flaws of those narratives are many, but most important is that they have the effect of disappearing the many millions of people who live there.While Davis draws attention to how US actors have thought and behaved, he focuses more on the damage their presence has wrought and the countervailing forms of thinking that Pacific people have developed in response to their marginalization and in imagining possible futures that include less militarized homelands.Davis' opening move is to contrast the hegemony-seeking moves of militarists in the US, China, Japan, and elsewhere (but mainly the US) with the affinity-seeking moves of antimilitarist activists.He attempts to denaturalize the idea that international politics will always be about who will dominate whom.He looks, by contrast, at the strategies, successes, and challenges of those who act on the basis of solidarity, respect, and networking for purposes of mutual aid.He sees the militarization of the region as a consequence of the ideological assumption that hegemony is nature's way of organizing itself, rather than as a consequence of the inevitable competition for power among international actors, as the realists would have it.He draws on recent attempts by geographers and theorists of the state to deconstruct the securitization of trade (along with virtually everything else).This is a necessary analytic move towards both understanding and undermining the US Navy's claim that disruption of trade routes is an existential threat to the US, and that it serves the Pacific and the entire global community by militarily protecting this "vital system."He argues that the military colonialism that has afflicted the Pacific has been justified by this argument as well as by a number of other myths about the Pacific that he details.They include the idea, common to military base official pronouncements, that anything standing in the way of their operations on and from those bases represents encroachment, reversing the historical sequence of who encroached on whom.Other myths include the formulation of the islands as alternately wastelands or Edens.His analysis here is particularly incisive given his research exposure to scientists and other internationals working on the ecology and possible

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