Blurring Centers and Resisting Peripheries

The U.S. Military in Hawai'i

Abstract

The militarization of Hawai'i offers a useful geographical and political space for tracking tangled relations of power and resistance. Hawai'i is both a ‘center’ of militarization and a ‘periphery’ of resistance. The most militarized of the U.S. states. Hawai'i is the center of the U.S. Pacific command, with its pervasive retenue of personnel, technologies, and spaces of training and deployment. This centrality is enabled by a century and a half of colonization, which has defined Hawai'i as the irreplaceable center of U.S. military operations in the Pacific. Yet Hawai'i's indigenous population, its environmental forces, and other local practices also position the islands as both marginal and resistant to militarization. By tracking the complex processes of hegemony and opposition in Hawai'i's militarized spaces, we aim to denaturalize the military's claims to meaning and to make space for more contestatory voices to be heard.