Military Industrialization and the Reshaping of Local Political Economies in the United States, 1965-2000

Hyunku Kwon, Johns Hopkins University
Alex Trahan, Independent Scholar

How does military spending shape local political economies? Deindustrialization, neoliberal state policies, and their effects on local economic structures, patterns of inequality, and political change have been a central theme in historical and political sociology. While the role of the military industry remains relatively understudied in historical political sociology, more recent historical and sociological scholarship (e.g., Corey Payne, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Mark Wilson, and Tim Barker) has begun to foreground the role that the military industry has played in reshaping the political and economic geography of the United States. Building on the macro-level theoretical and historical insights from this emerging body of work, this project leverages novel historical data on military prime contracts (1965-1980) to study the geographical unevenness of how military industry reconfigured American society and how such regional heterogeneity has generated unintended political and social consequences. Combining computational methods and historical case studies, this project attempts to provide a granular geography of military industry in the United States and to uncover social processes through which military industrial developments reshaped American labor structure and patterns of social inequality.

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 Presented in Session 44. Where Markets End and States Begin: Institutional Boundaries, Military Spending, and Neoliberal Networks