The US military recently shuttered and released the lands of 70 military bases in South Korea, many of them located near the DMZ, and it plans to release the lands of eleven more bases soon. A South Korean policy experiment, referred to here as the Defense Land Brokerage Scheme, treats most released US military lands as real estate assets from which the state could extract billions of dollars through privatization. The Defense Land Brokerage Scheme was initiated in 2005 to fund South Korea’s multi-billion-dollar construction cost commitment to the US for military facilities in Pyeongtaek, south of Seoul. This presentation explains the Defense Land Brokerage Scheme’s influence on the development of DMZ borderlands and identifies one of the scheme's key contradictions: neoliberal development-inducement in the borderlands is limited by the concrete geography of DMZ. The deregulation of development that would encourage investors and developers to the militarized and economically marginal localities of the borderlands is prohibited by the securitized setting of the area itself . The neoliberalization of the DMZ borderlands is preferred by local governments and it would also benefit the Defense Land Brokerage Scheme by raising the values of released US military lands--but the DMZ's overlapping restrictions on private development and mobility limit neoliberal strategies. South Korea's ability to pay for US military infrastructures in Pyeongtaek, in short, is limited by the depression of land values by military infrastructures at the DMZ.

Bridget Martin is the SBS Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social Sciences at the Korea Institute at Harvard University, where she is also a Lecturer on Anthropology and in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her research focuses on the role of land in the US-South Korea security alliance from 1945 into the present moment. She has published research articles in journals such as Political Geography and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is currently working on a book manuscript on sovereignty, territory, property, and US military dispossessions in South Korea. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Arts in Politics from The New School for Social Research.