Rafael Correa famously proclaimed after taking office as president in 2007 that if foreign military bases were not a concern then the United States should have no problem with his country of Ecuador establishing a military base in the US. At issue was a Forward Operating Location (FOL) that the US military maintained at the Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta. In 1999, former president Jamil Mahuad had signed a ten-year lease for US use of the base, purportedly to halt drug trafficking in neighbouring Colombia. Critics charged that the presence of US troops in Manta dragged Ecuador into a growing regional conflict, and that the mission had expanded into other unrelated activities – especially that of providing surveillance of Colombia's internal political conflicts. Opponents considered the lease to be unconstitutional and a violation of national sovereignty, and Correa refused to renew it when it came due two years later.

Correa's request for an Ecuadorian base in Miami highlighted the fundamentally unequal nature of international relations and the hypocrisy of US pressure on other governments to host such institutions. The peaceful departure of an occupying force from a foreign military base reflected the success of a well-organised social movement, as well as the election of a sympathetic president who was willing to implement their demands. That feat joined a growing list of successes of a global movement against foreign military bases, and that movement in turn has given rise to a robust literature by David Vine, Katherine McCaffrey, Lesley Gill and others on anti-base movements.

Given that history and context, a reader perhaps could be forgiven for assuming that a book entitled US Military Bases and Anti-Military Organizing would be part of a scholar/activist literature on social movement opposition to US imperialism. That is not the case, however, and the book is mistitled. This is not an ethnography of the anti-base movement, but instead of local conservative politicians and the propertied class who for their own economic reasons supported the presence of the US troops and opposed the closing of the FOL. Anthropologist Erin Fitz-Henry explicitly situates herself as wanting to give equal attention to all parties in the debate around foreign military bases. And there is a debate. Opponents claim issues of sovereignty and advocate for alternative economic development models. Proponents contend that military bases contribute to economic growth. And as an author Fitz-Henry does have a position in this debate, and it is not in favour of the anti-base movement.

Fitz-Henry's entry point to the study, and in fact a key event that provides a core of her work as well as most of the photos that illustrate the book, was an International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases held in Quito, Ecuador in March 2007. Hundreds of activists from around the world gathered in common concern for the proliferation of military bases, primarily those the United States operated outside of its own territory. Fitz-Henry complains that the conference organisers did not want to talk to her, as if the priority of social movement leaders were to take time out of their busy schedules to talk to academics who have an antagonistic attitude toward their goals. It is not entirely without foundation that anti-base activists were suspicious of Fitz-Henry's interest in the subject, and accused her of being a CIA stooge. The conference culminated in a march on the Manta base. Fitz-Henry describes how she struggled to explain to local inhabitants what these ‘outside agitators’ were doing in their city, and why they wished for the base to leave.

Without access to anti-base organisers, Fitz-Henry spends almost all of her time with US military personnel and those who favour the base's presence. There is, of course, no inherent problem with writing an ethnography of an imperialist occupying force, and of domestic support for that force. In fact, such studies can be very useful and insightful. The problem, rather, is presenting as ‘objective’ and ‘even-handed’ a study that purports to communicate ‘both’ sides of a debate (even though debates always have more than just two sides), but then indeed taking a position and presenting that as normative.

At one point in her ethnography, Fitz-Henry states that she ‘just happened’ to be in a vehicle travelling through Manta with US military personnel. How does an ethnographer ‘just happen’ to accept a ride with an occupying force? Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with that if it were part of the research design. Anthropologist Brian Selmeski, for example, engaged in a remarkable ethnography of training with Indigenous conscripts in the highland town of Riobamba in Ecuador. That, however, was an intentional part of his research design, not an activity presented as incidental. And Selmeski's participant observation was definitely not part of a work that was mislabelled as a study of anti-military organising.

Fitz-Henry is not alone in taking a pro-military base perspective in her work. Another notable example is Andrew Yeo's equally mistitled Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Yeo openly admits that he is not an activist/scholar, acknowledges that he disagrees with anti-base activists, and admits that he does not understand why anti-US protests take place in countries such as Ecuador with pro-US governments. Fitz-Henry claims to write a ‘balanced’ account of anti- and pro-base movements, and Yeo takes one step further to assert his commitment to academic objectivity. A key question, though, is why activist/scholars are disparaged with ‘bias’, while those who essentially function as stenographers to power (in Noam Chomsky's phrasing) claim objectivity? Is it not more honest, following Howard Zinn's lead, for a progressive scholar to acknowledge openly a political viewpoint than for a conservative counterpart to claim objectivity even while channelling the perspective of empire?