Engaging theories of sovereignty, George Baca examines the relationship between militarization and racial reforms in the American South. Since WWI, the federal state has infused the southern economy with public money through building military installations. Using ethnographic and historical materials from Fort Bragg—one of the U.S. Army's largest military installations—Baca explains how the federal state uses military power to consolidate its control over poor regions like southeastern North Carolina. National institutions and local actors legitimize militarization with war-related metaphors to understand locally defined struggles against racism and poverty. Through appeals to African Americans, and the struggle against racism, the U.S. military rationalizes war preparation as a way to protect “the people.” Therefore, institutions of war and violence have reorganized race relations in ways that have allowed the federal state to extend its power into southern society. The case of Fort Bragg shows how western democratic states deploy military power to intervene into the most intimate domains of human affairs. Also, this case shows how military power symbolically links local politics to national visions of progress and development as military power projects powerful images of protecting and fortifying the collective.

Baca received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 2003 and is currently an assistant professor of Anthropology and Africana at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. His research interests include race and local politics in the American South. This year he continues his study of race in Fayetteville, NC. He is the editor of Nationalism's Bloody Terrain: Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition (Berghahn Books, 2006) and co-editor of Ethnographies, Histories and Power: Critically Engaging the Intersections of Culture and Political Economy (UNC Press, forthcoming).