Global Borderlands: A Case Study of Subic Bay Freeport Zone, Philippines

Abstract

By developing the concept of "global borderlands"-semi-autonomous, foreign-controlled geographic locations geared toward international exchange-this dissertation shifts the focus of globalization literature from elite global cities and cities on national borders to within-country sites owned and/or operated by foreigners and defined by significant social, cultural, and economic exchange. I first define global borderlands and describe their shared features. Next, I situate global borderlands with the literatures on global cities, which are economic command and control centers, and traditional borderlands that highlight micro interactions across two national boundaries, and note that global borderlands represent nationally bounded, foreign-controlled centers for cultural and social interactions that also have important economic influence for their host nations. In this way, they are localized command and control centers of varied forms of foreign exchange. Then, I detail my case study, methodologies, and data. Next, I examine their creation, and show how these sites are purposefully constructed, the result of political and economic bargaining, and situated in particular historical circumstances. Following this, I analyze the three-shared features of these sites: semi-autonomy, symbolic and geographic boundaries, and unequal relations. to show (1) how the semi-autonomy of global borderlands produces different regulations depending on nationality, (2) how its geographic and symbolic borders differentiate this space from the surrounding community, and (3) how the semi-autonomy of these locations and their geographic and symbolic borders reproduce unequal relations. As home of the former U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base and current site of a Freeport Zone, the SBFZ serves as a particularly strategic research location to examine the different forms of interactions that occur between groups within spaces of unequal power. This multi-method analyses reveal how the analytic concept of global borderlands can help us better understand the interactions that occur in the contemporary era of globalization across people of different nationalities, classes, and races/ethnicities as well as the complex dynamics that occur within foreign-controlled spaces.