the.com/demilitarized zone

means A buffer strip between hostile territories where military forces, weapons, and fortifications are, by treaty, not supposed to be — the Korean DMZ being the most famous example.

from Built from 'de-' (reversing or undoing) plus 'militarize,' itself from Latin 'militaris,' tied to 'miles' meaning soldier. 'Demilitarize' entered use as diplomats needed a clinical term for stripping an area of armed forces after a conflict; 'zone' comes from Greek 'zone,' originally a girdle or belt, later a geographic band or region. The phrase hardened into a fixed term through 20th-century armistices, most famously the one splitting the Korean peninsula in 1953 — a line so distrusted that both sides packed it with troops and mines, turning a word meant to mean 'empty of soldiers' into one of the most fortified strips on the planet.