Economic Geography

The geography of the military-industrial complex
Many, many wonderful contributions have been inspired by and followed on
these works and others equally pioneering. Two generations of younger scholars
have extended these analyses deep into the terrain of labour, corporate strategy,
community development, gender, race, ethnicity, and developing countries’
experience, among others. Precisely because this body of work is so grounded
and institutional, it is easiest to demonstrate its synthetic character, its power to
analyse, its normative stance and concrete achievements and failures by looking
at its contributions in a single area. I use the case of the military industrial
complex because it is one I know well and to which I have contributed.
The questions driving this research area are the following: what is the
geographic distribution of military industrial and personnel activity, what drives its
changing spatial configuration, which communities and constituencies benefit
from and are hurt by it, and what can be done to curtail its negative conse-
quences? Economic geographers had not worked on this topic at all up through
the Vietnam era and its aftermath, though some quite accomplished economists,
especially during the Vietnam War, had analysed the macroeconomic implica-
tions critically. It was during the 50 per cent peacetime increase under Reagan 
in the 1980s that American and British social scientists and geographers began
to probe the spatial patterning of this important and unique sector (Crump
1989). In a historical account relying on contemporary corporate interviewing,
Markusen et al. (1991) argued that the sunbelt phenomenon in the United States
had been mis-interpreted; it was not just sunshine and low labour costs that

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impelled the uneven regional development of the United States in the postwar
period, but the huge and enduring impact of government spending on industry
and military bases, heavily skewed towards the south and west, and to a 
New England revitalized by diversified defence activities. Hooks (1991) studied
the distribution of World War II military industrial capacity in particular and
demonstrated a marked shift in the geography of American manufacturing and
population as a result.
This shift, which separated military from civilian production and created huge,
permanent enclaves of relatively transient military personnel on bases in remote
places, rendered host communities quite vulnerable to the political business 
cycle and to the vagaries of American military policy. The damage to the
American economy went deeper than that, argued Markusen and Yudken in 
their Dismantling the Cold War Economy (1992). The structure of United States
industry, the character of lead firms in the sector, the lopsided development of
the labour force (especially among scientists and engineers), and technological
priorities mirrored this geographically uneven development. Working in Britain,
geographer John Lovering documented many of the same tendencies at both the
regional and industrial scales (1988, 1990b).
This body of work was poised for heightened interest at the end of 
the Cold War. Military-dependent constituencies feared the negative impact of
United States defence budget cuts of 40 per cent (70 per cent for procurement)
within a few short years, while others saw an enormous opportunity to use freed
up resources for other purposes. The question was whether and how the re-use
of resources might happen in the same communities and regions that had hosted
defence-related activities. Peace activists understood that the pursuit of a new,
diplomacy-intensive and peaceful foreign policy required that the nation worry
about defence conversion on a local basis; otherwise, pork-barrel politics might
string out military spending and military-led foreign policy. At the local level,
unlikely coalitions of trade unions, peace activists, local economic development
advocates and smaller defence contractors emerged hungry for an understanding
of their predicament and what might be done about it.
Because the economic geographers who had done this research were working
in the political economy tradition, it was easy for them to shift into more inten-
sive, localized work in tandem with these coalitions. They had the skills to analyse
corporate structure and strategy, labour skills and organization, technologies, the
role of the state, local economic development, and the regional economy. They
were comfortable working with these constituencies and were willing to address
a larger public, at both local and national levels. Lovering in Britain and Markusen
and her colleagues in the United States wrote a body of journal articles over a
decade, but they also wrote popular accounts and op eds (e.g. Lovering 1990a;
for a reflection on Markusen’s team’s ten years of work on defence conversion,
including its wins and losses, see Markusen 2006).
Did it make a difference? Of course, the movement for a peace dividend 
and for permanently dismantling the bulk of the cold war weapons systems is
currently in remission. Huge increases in military spending associated with the
Economic geography and political economy
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Iraq war have created an umbrella rationale for continuing old programmes as
well as funding new ones. But the work of economic geographers, I would argue,
did make major contributions to the institutional and programmatic realization
of a considerable peace dividend in the United States during the 1990s. First, it
helped many communities understand their crises, identify and secure transi-
tional assistance, and work with firms and unions to shift plants, bases, people and
technologies into other activities. Second, because defence conversion required
federal government involvement (since it was often the owner and always the
consumer of military-related capacity), intellectual work successfully made the
case for institutional innovations at the federal level and quickened the pace and
quality of conversion. Third, critiques of existing labour programmes helped
speed reform of worker displacement and retraining for defence workers, many
of whom were older, specialized, and clustered in regions hard hit by defence
cutbacks. Fourth, critiques of military corporate strategies in this era – mega-
defence mergers and aggressive efforts to export – helped to rein in approvals of
mergers and the more egregious proposed sales of high tech equipment to devel-
oping countries, whose resources were much better spent on building a civilian
economy (Markusen 2006).
On many other social, political and economic fronts, the scholarly and outreach
activities of political economy-informed economic geographers have made signif-
icant contributions to altering the trajectory of capitalist development.