Introduction

Those whose lives are crossed by uranium and other radioactive weapons materials form a diffuse collective of families, communities, enemies, and strangers. They are the irradiated international and, in their glowing deathlaced tales there is another invisible world emerging, one paradoxically borne of destruction and staged to destroy the destroyers.

Lou Cornum, The Irradiated International¹

In the installation We Have Always Known the Wind’s Direction (2023), Palestinian Dutch artist Inas Halabi shows 40 red-hued carousel slides depicting sites in the Hebron District, to make the presence of Cesium 137 in the West Bank in Palestine visible. Cesium 137, Halabi explains, is a man-made radioactive isotope that “has no color, odor, or taste” but can lead to “serious diseases …, deformities and even death.”² Adding layer upon layer of red filter sheets in front of the lens to convey increasing levels of radiation, as registered by nuclear physicist Khalil Thabayneh, the images represent the charge that nuclear waste was illegally disposed of on Palestinian lands.³ In doing so, they invite the viewer to consider the colonial relations that have made the irradiation of Palestinian lands possible. Though Palestinians in the West Bank are living with the suspected impacts of buried radioactive waste, they are unable to scientifically validate its existence due to restrictions placed by the Israeli state.⁴ Displayed as part of the 2026 group exhibition “Between Fires: Irradiated Imaginations and Anti-Nuclear Solidarities,” curator Fabienne Rachmadiev underscores that the “irradiated landscapes” in Halabi’s installation “should not be viewed merely as ‘elsewhere,’ nor confined to the past or the unreality of a dystopian future.”⁵ Rather, “[t]he nuclear is a planetary condition” as it structures the world for all of us, not only those living in close proximity to sites of procurement, transfer, storage, or deployment of nuclear materials.⁶ The unboundedness of nuclear matter and the radioactivity of colonialism become visceral in Halabi’s work, echoed in the adjacent installations that depict parallel but distinct sites marked by fallout, spanning Kazakhstan and Dinétah, Hiroshima and Shinkolobwe, and beyond.⁷

In their landmark 1986 article, “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill posit that colonialism has a radioactive quality: everything it does cannot be undone, and in its doing, it imperils “everyone alive and who will be alive.”⁸ Arguing that the project of the nuclear age was only possible through colonization, they observe that colonial relations of power enabled the dispossession and removal of Indigenous peoples from natural resource-rich lands and/or forced them to accept bad deals for resource extraction or the disposal of radioactive waste on their lands. In this frame, colonialism and nuclear activities are historically and heuristically entwined. Forty years on, this special issue seeks to reflect on this work by mapping some of the cross-temporal and cross-cultural impacts of this interrelation, accounting for the place of nuclear technologies in interconnected historic and contemporary colonial and imperial contexts, as well as the impacts of nuclear energy production, storage, and waste on colonized territories.

As the title of our special issue suggests, and drawing on the work of Cornum (2018), LaDuke & Churchill (1986), and Gabrielle Hecht (2012), we situate nuclear activity within colonial and imperial contexts whilst simultaneously treating terms such as “irradiated” and “nuclear” as heuristic devices. The provocations in their work invite us to consider nuclearity and radioactivity as material history, and also as descriptors for the subjective and affective experiences of colonialism and empire. Effectively, these authors intervene in the Western canonical use of these terms that are largely embedded in discourses that exclude Indigenous epistemologies, histories, and sovereignty. The terms radioactive and nuclear are not neutral; rather they operate largely within Western epistemological frameworks that privilege and support colonial and imperial projects. While empire refers to broad structures of domination that extend across territories and peoples, colonialism captures the specific relationships and forms of power through which such domination is lived and resisted. Deploying “radioactive empires” and “the nuclear relations of coloniality” allows us to see how power functions differently within expansive imperial systems and within the more immediate, grounded practices of colonial rule and enduring coloniality. These terms foreground the ways that colonial logics continue to shape societies and economies, even after the formal dissolution of colonialism, highlighting the varied ways domination is organized and contested. By foregrounding the relational formations through which nuclear coloniality becomes embedded in the textures of social life, the authors in this special issue explore how cross-cultural and more-than-human entanglements generate alternative ways of knowing and being in the world. These entanglements offer a lens for apprehending the operations of radioactive empires and for tracing the emergent relations of resistance that unsettle and reconfigure dominant imperial and colonial logics.

Rendering Nuclear Relation Visible

LaDuke and Churchill’s 1986 exploration of “radioactive colonialism” is largely centered on Indigenous perspectives in North America, and the impacts of uranium mining on Navajo Nation in particular.⁹ Here, they understand the United States as “the seat of the most comprehensive system of imperialism ever witnessed by humanity,” and one that is increasingly, “fueled by nuclear capabilities, fed by uranium.”¹⁰ Since this pivotal essay was published, a range of scholarly works, as well as artworks, poems, plays, and films, have sought to explore the logics, legacies, and conditions of radioactive colonialism and the empires it built on global or, indeed, planetary scales. The “Irradiated International” by Diné writer and theorist Lou Cornum has been especially transformative for our thinking. Published in 2018, the paper develops “the irradiated international” as an analytic that redefines relations among those “whose lives are crossed by uranium and other radioactive weapons [or] materials,” emphasizing interconnected geographies and experiences without collapsing them into sameness.¹¹ Positioning their own familial experiences of radioactive colonialism in connection with that of human and more-than-human others around the globe, this work reconceptualizes the forms of relation that connect those impacted by nuclear violence as a potentially generative force. In response to this “new geography […] cut by empire’s geometry but now shaped into something else,” we ask how relations of care and kinship might emerge in the wake of disaster.¹²

This special issue is interested in theoretical frameworks that reflect on these forms of connection, as well as the animacy of cultural texts, narratives, and histories of solidarity, which document, imagine, or manifest these relations. Think for example of LaDuke’s own experience visiting Europe in 1983 as part of an 8-person delegation from Menominee, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Lakota nations.¹³ The delegation had been invited by a group of environmental organizations and the German Green Party in response to the planned deployment of US Pershing II missiles to Germany.¹⁴ Aside from attending the Bundestag hearings where the deployment was discussed, the delegation toured and spoke at demonstrations: the so-called “Journey of Peace.” German and Native American activists found a common cause in the (potential) environmental devastation inflicted on their communities as a result of the US drive to win the Cold War nuclear arms race. In her report of the Journey, LaDuke connects the colonial exploitation of uranium, which casts Native lands as sacrificial zones for the colonial greater good, to the events that placed German populations at risk through their proximity to nuclear warhead holding facilities.¹⁵ At that time, the majority of the uranium mines exploited by the US were on Native reservations, with life-threatening and life-ending health impacts for those working the mines as well as those living in communities surrounded by the mines.¹⁶ During the Journey of Peace, LaDuke learned that West Germans were suffering the negative health consequences of industrial development, for example in the form of acid rain, and that they feared the high risks caused by the storage and the plans for deployment of uranium weapons so close to their communities.¹⁷ In 1983, there were still close to 6,000 US nuclear warheads stored in West Germany. LaDuke, in a speech at an event in Munich attended by more than 2,000 people, recognized that through the travel of uranium extracted from Indigenous lands to West Germany, these two populations were connected:

We are … already the first victims of nuclear war, surrounded and contaminated by the very same radioactivity which [h]as been packaged in warheads and installed in Germany. What has been done to us is now being done to you.¹⁸

The uranium mining that was wreaking havoc in Native communities, such as the Diné who were suffering from the effects of uranium exploitation on their lands, made the storage of nuclear bombs on West German lands possible in the first place. This connection offered a concrete basis for solidarity between Native American and West German activists. The lived knowledge of nuclear colonialism the Indigenous delegates shared deepened the analysis and understanding of the West German experience in the bigger picture of US radioactive imperialism, strengthening the struggle against the US’s radioactive military presence in West Germany. This expression of solidarity between different peoples in very different positions, yet who were affected by the same radioactive colonial power, is one illustration of what attention to the nuclear relations of coloniality might generate.¹⁹

Through “The Irradiated International,” Cornum recalls a different kind of example of “nuclear relations of coloniality,” namely that of the Sahtu Dene who, in August 1998, sent a delegation to visit Hiroshima, to attend the annual peace ceremonies there. The Sahtu Dene understood their experiences as a consequence of uranium mining and transportation on their lands as connected with the experiences of those who suffered that uranium in the form of a deployed nuclear bomb.²⁰ Despite not having known that the uranium they worked with was going to be used in nuclear weapons, they nevertheless felt an “ethical obligation to ‘make amends’ for the role that their land and labor played in the violence unleashed.”²¹ Extensive uranium mining at Port Radium took place near the village of Délįnę in the Canadian Northwest Territories on Great Bear Lake from 1930, leaving an estimated 1.7 tons of radioactive waste in the region.²² Many Dene worked to transport uranium ore for the U.S, unaware of the risks they were exposed to. Peter Blow’s 1999 documentary, tellingly titled Village of Widows, notes the devastation caused by radiation to the workers and their families, with some families losing half of their children to cancer or other radiation-related diseases. “Unable to undo the bomb but willing to witness its route,” the delegation apologized for their role in supplying some of the uranium used in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the US in 1945.²³ Through their visit and apology, they transformed a connection of pain into a relationship of friendship. The “irradiated international” thus does the work of rendering visible the connections otherwise made as invisible as radiation itself.²⁴ The enduring radioactivity of coloniality is not so easily undone, but we ask with Cornum: “What happens when people across great swaths of time and space witness if not together then in tandem?”²⁵

A focus on “the nuclear relations of coloniality” allows us to expand beyond a focus on siloed experiences, and rather, to bring diverse spaces and temporalities of nuclear (de)coloniality into dialogue with each other, often following the impulses and actions of activists who have already carried out this work. We posit that centering relationality allows us to see the many ways that different peoples–both human and more-than-human–in different locations and temporalities exist in direct relation with each other through their shared connection to the nuclear colonial project. Comanche scholar LaDonna Harris and Jacqueline Wasilewski define relationality as “the kinship obligation,” or, as meaning that we must recognize everyone and everything that is alive as if they were our blood relatives and treat them as such.²⁶ Though theorized in different ways by scholars from across Indigenous nations and cultures (including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Zoe Todd, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Teresia Teaiwa), this form of relationship is understood to involve ethical responsibilities to care for others within an extended community, in ways that honour difference rather than dissolve it.²⁷

In situating our own positions within the nuclear relations of coloniality, we reflect on the Martinican poet and theorist Édouard Glissant’s approach to relationality, which acknowledges that relation often emerges from instances of extreme historical violence. In Poétique de la relation, colonial violence is registered simultaneously as a womb and an abyss, sites that are conducive to dissolution and to unpredictable formation.²⁸ As four white scholars based in Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom), we each inhabit our own specific relations to the radioactive empires that stem from the long tentacles of European colonialism. Our relations to these histories are not abstract; rather, they manifest through our political experiences and ancestral histories.²⁹ Conscious of the many violences in which we are implicated, we seek to examine these entanglements and understand the necessary responsibilities they bring. Following Carol Edelman Warrior, we recognize the transformative possibilities that being in relation necessitates: if, as Warrior suggests, relationships are “a series of exchanges […] in continual motion,” we ask how we can attend to our inherited relations of harm to fulfil our kinship obligation.³⁰ What steps must be taken if we are to nurture new relations that are reparative and alimentary?³¹ As a starting point in the rebuilding of these relationships, we suggest that power asymmetries must be more than acknowledged; they must be consciously addressed to avoid reproducing colonial relations of power in our efforts to imagine and build otherwise.

The articles in this special issue question what it means to decolonize nuclear relations and whether in fact this is ever possible, through reconsidering the possibilities of sovereignty, materiality, kinship, and solidarity. Despite critiques that the coloniality framework risks presenting “systems of oppression and domination” as “uniform” and “unitary,” we argue that it remains a productive analytic for understanding the material and epistemic structures generated by radioactive colonialism, the global nuclear order they enabled, and the multiple forms of resistance that have emerged in response.³² To quote Fahrana Sultana’s work on climate coloniality, attending to coloniality requires that we not only attend to “centuries of varied and overlapping oppressions, [but] also concomitant existing and emerging sites of resistance.”³³ Challenging the idea that coloniality “invisibilises particular forms of anti-colonial resistance” such as “the ongoing struggle of Indigenous peoples in settler states for their (political) sovereignty and (related) return of their lands,” we posit the framework to facilitate a deeper engagement with transnational and cross-cultural relations of resistance that transcend the so-called Global North and Global South, along with nation-state and continental borders.³⁴ Attending to coloniality also requires making visible decolonial relations and projects, in all of their material and epistemic forms.

By tracing the movement of nuclear matter across space and time, this special issue invites attention to human and more-than-human agency in the relations of nuclearity that are simultaneously destructive and generative, whether emergent or pre-existing. As articulated by Eben Kirksey, though emergent dynamics carry the potential for expansive destruction they can also “figure into collective hopes.”³⁵ From the “Journey of Peace” in which LaDuke participated, to the radiotrophic fungi growing at Chernobyl, the emergent relations that stem from nuclear coloniality demonstrate generative and even life-giving potential in the face of life-ending radioactivity.³⁶ Kristen Simmons’ work expands on this potential, arguing that colonial beliefs can be “unsettle[d] in relation with others” by “becoming open,” framing porosity as at once “a site of potential, exposure, and entanglement.”³⁷ She writes: “In a porous relationality—attuning to how others (cannot) breathe, our haptics are enhanced and we develop capacities to feel one another otherwise.”³⁸ Building on Cornum’s assertion that interconnected experiences of radioactive harm can become a creative force of solidarity and collective witnessing, the articles in this special issue are interested in the possibilities offered by artistic and cultural expression in navigating, documenting, and resisting shared experiences of radioactive colonialism. Spanning its generative and destructive workings, they document, imagine, and bear witness to the forms of violence that are leveled through nuclearity, as well as the modes of resistance, survivance, and kinship that form in their wake.

Radioactive Empires and Nuclear Coloniality

“Radioactive Empires” follows the work of Rebecca Hogue and Anaïs Maurer, who suggest that “nuclear imperialisms” better describes “the state-sponsored, systemic mode of oppression in current or former sites of empire through any use of the nuclear complex” than “colonialism” does.³⁹ Our use of the plural “empires,” similarly seeks to “emphasize the simultaneous and overlapping modes of nuclear oppression that involve multiple empires, technologies, and ideological framings that exist and extend beyond geographic, temporal, and national boundaries and borders.”⁴⁰ We understand radioactive empires to exist in shifting relation to one another, situated within a global nuclear order that is built on a framework of coloniality and the (contested) assertion of European and American dominance. Necessarily, the relations between radioactive powers are co-constitutive.

Consider, for example, how South Africa and the Belgian Congo provided uranium for the US and UK from the 1940s onwards to support military requirements during the Second World War and the years following. In 1950, South Africa signed an agreement to exclusively produce and sell uranium ore for the US and UK. In return, American and British governments materially supported the continuation of apartheid and colonial rule. The Belgian firm Union Minière du Haut Katanga supplied two thirds of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project with ore mined by harshly exploited workers near the Congolese town of Shinkolobwe.⁴¹ Despite the Nazi occupation of Belgium during the Second World War, the Belgian colonial power ensured that Congo’s uranium remained “in hands friendly to the allies” to be utilized by the US empire.⁴² The co-constitutive nature of radioactive powers, too, necessitates the policing of which countries are permitted–and crucially not permitted–to have access to nuclear technologies, as we have seen in, for example, NATO policies and International Atomic Energy Agency and European Union actions. It was also the perceived risk of nuclear weapons development that was used as part of the pretext for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, as well as the Israel and US war against Iran that began in March 2026.

And yet, historically, Indigenous and colonized communities have been caught in the middle of overlapping forms of nuclear violence, at times perpetrated by distinct colonizing powers. One such territory is Amchitka Island in the Aleutian chain, where the Unangax̂ Alaska Native population was already largely displaced following Russian settler colonization in the 18^th century, before the US took control. In 1913, the US turned the Aleutian Chain into a wildlife reservation, before using Amchitka as military staging grounds during World War II, and starting in the 1960s, as an underground testing site for three nuclear bombs deemed too big to test in Nevada.⁴³ Like other forcibly removed groups, the Unangax̂ were given no access to pushback nor solidarity in the name of national security.⁴⁴ Due to censorship, much of the US’ militarization of Alaska, and the displacement and internment of Unangax̂ to clear the land for these purposes, remained largely unknown to the general public.⁴⁵

As theorized by Aníbal Quijano and expanded on by Walter Mignolo, we understand coloniality as the constitutive, hidden side of modernity.⁴⁶ Coloniality, since the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, has shaped global social and material relations, often outlasting the temporality of political figurations of colonialism. As Quijano writes, even where colonialism has been eliminated or largely invisibilized, coloniality continues to structure our world in such a way that the power asymmetry between the so-called Global North and Global South is maintained.⁴⁷ Coloniality necessarily entails the colonial production of knowledge: the process by which knowledge is transformed and hierarchized according to colonial logics. As Quijano suggests, it was a Eurocentric colonial structure of power that:

produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘anthropological’ or ‘national’, […] to be ‘objective’, ‘scientific’, categories […] That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes.⁴⁸

The coloniality of power and knowledge takes shape in material form, transforming land, peoples, and more-than-human worlds. As Andrew Curley observes: “Our modern ways of viewing the world through ideas of modernization, capitalist expansion, and development convert subjective relationships with the earth […] into objective ones.”⁴⁹ Through a colonial, extractive worldview, substances such as oil, coal, and uranium are no longer understood as animate materials but instead become resources “to be exploited for abstract notions of energy that are in turn transported, stored, and used across vast amounts of space.”⁵⁰ Through this process, Indigenous territories are designated wastelands, a process that “render[s] certain bodies and landscapes pollutable,”⁵¹ so that the lives and lands of Indigenous or colonized subjects become “key sites and subjects for the performance of militarization and scientific development,” including nuclear technologies.⁵² Coloniality intensified the development of extractive capitalism, nuclear science, and the privileging of nuclear military capability by select nation states–and accordingly, the prevention of other states from gaining nuclear power.

Within a broader context of coloniality, the violence that stems from nuclear technology is frequently impossible to disentangle from other environmental, cultural, and health impacts of colonial systems. As Perez observes, communities in the Pacific, especially Guam and Hawai‘i, face the combined health consequences of “exposure to military contamination and waste, nuclear testing and radiation, GMO agriculture and pesticide drift, and even the consumption of unhealthy imported foods.”⁵³ These are the embodied and material manifestations of the genocide-ecocide of nuclear coloniality, even if the components are not specifically radioactive in themselves.⁵⁴ Feminist scholars Catherine Eschle and Shine Choi make a similar observation, noting “if we pay attention to the view from the radiogenic communities most affected by nuclear politics, we are reminded that the destructive impacts of nuclear weapons and the nuclear fuel chain compose just one moving part in a series of catastrophes inflicted by coloniality.”⁵⁵ Similarly employing a framework of coloniality to theorize the global nuclear order, they suggest “it becomes difficult and indeed undesirable to separate out the nuclear issue from the broader challenges facing the people entangled in these specific locations.”⁵⁶ Any attempt to isolate anti-nuclear struggles from other demands for sovereignty, decolonization, and justice would only serve to further naturalize the colonial logics that sustain hierarchies of violence.

Since Günther Anders’ articulation of endzeit or “endtime” in 1959, scholars have sought to reckon with the shock of nuclear technologies through the theorization of temporal rupture.⁵⁷ Frequently, this is articulated through a lens of modernity. Joe Masco argues that the advent of nuclear technologies – epitomized with the Manhattan project and the 1945 Trinity detonations in New Mexico – brought with them a new kind of modernity, in which Western science and military powers together “engendered new forms of consciousness, new means of being in the world distinct from those that came before.”⁵⁸ And yet, Hecht critiques narratives of “the nuclear age” that represent the emergence of the atomic era “as a technological and a geological rupture,” whereby “splitting the atom promulgated a new world order that replaced imperialism with ‘the bomb.’”⁵⁹ Instead, echoing LaDuke and Churchill, she writes that “colonialism remained central to the nuclear order’s technological and geopolitical success.”⁶⁰ Our turn from nuclear modernity to a framework of nuclear coloniality, then, centers these social and material relations and builds on the work of Indigenous anti-nuclear activists, including LaDuke, Principal Man of the Western Shoshone Ian Zabarte, and Mā’ohi author Chantal Spitz, who foreground the colonial relations that undergird global nuclear infrastructures. We argue that nuclear coloniality reveals the nuclear structures that connect diverse peoples and spaces, across current and former sites of empire, (settler) colonial contexts, and imperial centers. This understanding necessarily includes the recognition of nuclear coloniality as “an epistemological site of struggle.”⁶¹

If, as Ele Carpenter suggests, nuclear modernity can be understood as “an ideological commitment to nuclear technologies based on enlightenment rationality and control of nature,” this commitment cannot be disentangled from the subjugation of colonized populations based on the same enlightenment principles.⁶² “Nuclear” came into use in the 19th century and was derived from the early invocation of the term nucleus, used to describe the core of celestial objects since the 17th century. The term can be traced to the age of reason and enlightenment where Europeans were interested in exploration, scientific reason, and the development of a global human story. Scientific explanations for phenomena in the so-called natural world also included “scientific” explanations for human difference that naturalized racial hierarchies.⁶³ Documenting a nucleus at the centre of a comet thus ran parallel and emerged out of the same intellectual traditions as racial and social evolutionist explanations of Indigenous people(s). The atomic nucleus, documented in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford, traces to nuclear activities at the fore of this special issue. Rutherford was born in New Zealand to parents of Scottish ancestry; like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he sought scientific and rational explanations for human experience, largely continuing to ignore Indigenous explanations for human experience and the cosmos.⁶⁴ “Nuclear” and “nuclearity” thus are informed by the Western traditions of thought from which they emerged that facilitated the European colonial projects.

The colonial relations of nuclear modernity are evidenced across global histories of nuclear development. This includes “testing” programs on colonized territories by aligned European and settler colonial powers–though, as Kathryn Yusoff reminds us, “there is no such thing as a nuclear ‘test,’ as all nuclear explosions result in radioactive fallout.”⁶⁵ More than sixty years on, the material legacies of the “tests” continue to impact the Indigenous populations that call these territories home, as well as those that live downwind. They can also be traced across less-visible histories of uranium mining, transportation, and the disposal of nuclear waste. The slow violence resulting from radiation and exposure to contaminated matter is less widely recognized, particularly when populations are marginalized or living under (settler) colonial conditions. For example, the 1979 Church Rock disaster saw United Nuclear spill more than 100 million gallons of radioactive water into the Rio Puerco, the primary water source for downstream Diné populations.⁶⁶ As Cornum writes of this history: “The enormity of this nuclear disaster is outmatched only by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Yet Rio Puerco largely remains unheard of outside New Mexico.”⁶⁷ The usage of uranium in wars is also frequently hidden from wider public view. The US military first used depleted uranium during the 1991 Gulf War, prioritizing the density and durableness of the radioactive metal over possible consequences to people’s health and the environment. Though it is suspected that depleted uranium ammunition fragments still permeate the landscape, there has been no comprehensive investigation of potential sites or effective cleanup effort.⁶⁸

Siobhan Angus observes how a collective visual imaginary of nuclear development has been curated so that the dominant image associated with this history is that of an abstracted mushroom cloud in the sky, rather than the impacts of radiation on the lands, waters, and populations below.⁶⁹ In one of the rare photographs that documents the Bikini Atoll population being displaced to Rongerik following the 1946 missile tests, the group carries thatching to rebuild their village anew. And yet, in her analysis of the image, Siobhan Angus suggests the photograph places emphasis “not on the humans who are being displaced,” who appear only as shadowy blurs, “but on a speculative, future-oriented vision of the rebuilding of the community.”⁷⁰ She writes: “the bomb embodied progress and the photograph confirms that the resettlement it necessitated was in the service of progress.”⁷¹ As in other colonial contexts, the forced removal of Indigenous populations was framed as a necessary condition to make modernity and progress possible.

Not only deployed for military power and scientific advancement, colonial applications of nuclear technology also extend to the role of nuclear energy. In this special issue, Heba Taha draws on Timothy Pachirat to argue that nuclear reactors are one of the unseen, “violent institutions of modernity,” alongside “the industrialized slaughterhouse or other zones of confinement that are invisible and inaccessible to the public, such as spaces of detention, interrogation, execution, or extermination.”⁷² In our present moment, questions as to what role nuclear energy will play in a Net Zero future are being asked on a global stage, but the production and waste cycle of nuclear fuel will reproduce and exacerbate colonial relations unless explicitly designed not to. A 2024 article by Cynthia Boyer, Henry H. Fowler, and Kelly Tzoumis suggests that “a new nuclear arms race is beginning with the US building new enrichment plants for producing nuclear fuel.”⁷³ They warn that “the cautionary lessons learned from performing extraction without designing plans for restoring ecosystem functioning” have not been heeded.⁷⁴ Writing of the ongoing impacts of historic uranium mining on Diné lands, Boyer, Fowler, and Tzoumis argue that any new energy projects must be designed in dialogue with local populations and in accordance with Indigenous epistemologies to “prevent future degradation of the earth and protect the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.”⁷⁵ It is now clear that climate change and the neoliberal energy transition are exacerbating and intensifying the harms of nuclear coloniality in manifold ways for Indigenous and other marginalized communities. With this understanding comes a renewed urgency to recognize the colonial relations of nuclear modernity, so the harms of the past are not reproduced.

Relations of Resistance

By foregrounding relations and the forms of nuclear colonialism that are embedded within social life, we ask what we can learn from the cross-cultural and more-than-human relationships that are built and maintained in the face of nuclear coloniality. Here we recognize and adopt Michelle Murphy’s premise of the “alterlife” which

names life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. It indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future. It is a figure of life entangled within community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories that have profoundly shaped the susceptibilities and potentials of future life.⁷⁶

Murphy’s identification of ‘alterlife’ recognizes that even human bodies are not “singular organisms but instead always collectivities.⁷⁷ The alterlife reminds us of Simmons’ invitation to cultivate porosity to find openings that allow us to build relations across difference.

In this context, the terms nuclear and radioactive are conducive to an alterlife where relations of resistance, hope, and futurity remain generative despite the planetary reach of colonial-capitalist violence. Through dispossession and contamination, nuclearity–much like colonialism and climate destabilization–ruptures pre-existing relations, while also producing new forms of relation.⁷⁸ We might typically think of the destructive points of contact that result from the spread of radioactive matter across vast distances. However, following Cornum, conceptualizing generative relations can create openings for hope and futurity. An emphasis on the generative is not an attempt to negate the significant and enduring violence that has been enacted on Indigenous lives and lands by colonial powers, or to deny the significance of relations that have been impacted. Rather, it is grounded in a desire to centre Indigenous survivance, sovereignty, and agency, further resisting damage-centred narratives or stories of victimry.⁷⁹ Attention to generative relations reminds us that empires are never totalizing and settler colonialism is never complete.

Per Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor, “Survivance creates an actual sense of [N]ative presence over absence, over nihility, and denies the reductive themes of victimry that are all too common” in representations of Indigenous peoples.⁸⁰ Building on this work, Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck has called for a turn away from damage-centred research produced on or with Indigenous communities, which reproduces narratives of victimry, to a focus on desire-based research. Crucially, Tuck argues that “a framework of desire recognizes our sovereignty as a core element of our being and meaning making; a damage framework excludes this recognition.”⁸¹ In the case of nuclear coloniality, where survivors are frequently defined through their relation to trauma and violence, turning to desired-centred research is necessary. Tuck’s theorization of desire does not posit desire as an antonym to damage, “as if they are opposites,” but instead “accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities.”⁸² Indigenous relations of nuclear survivance can be identified in anti-nuclear, anti-colonial activist networks and in legislative efforts that assert Indigenous self-determination and tribal sovereignty, such as the 2005 Diné Natural Resources Protection Act, which banned uranium mining in the Navajo Nation, and the 2012 Transport Act, which successfully limited uranium transport but has not completely stopped companies from using interstate highways. These ongoing challenges to tribal sovereignty reflect the Navajo Nation’s continuous efforts to prevent further harm from nuclear activity on their lands.

Through the concept of “Wiindigo infrastructure,” LaDuke, writing with Deborah Cowen, posits that infrastructure is the site in which colonial economy and sociality are reproduced, entrenching and hardening “the very means of settler economy and sociality into tangible material structures.”⁸³ And yet, they argue, “infrastructure is not inherently colonial–it is also necessary for transformation.”⁸⁴ International, anti-nuclear solidarity networks, such as the Nuclear Free Pacific Movement or the International Indian Treaty Council, can be examples of “alimentary infrastructure—infrastructure that is life-giving.”⁸⁵ As Maurer and Hogue observe, antinuclear activists have historically “striven to connect with other activists from formerly or currently colonized countries, to create and also to build on South–South antinuclear networks of resistance.”⁸⁶ Such solidarity networks, often led by feminist and/or Indigenous activists, offer models for different forms of global or planetary relations that are alternatives to the “Wiindigo infrastructure” of global extractive capitalism and military dominance.

Survivance also takes shape in literary and cultural narratives that articulate ethics of care across shared experiences of nuclear violence, bringing together distinct territories, cultures, and temporalities. In the poem “Nuclear Family,” CHamoru poet Craig Santos Perez recalls a series of Indigenous creation stories, each stanza starting with the familiar phrase: “In the beginning.”⁸⁷ These creation stories, however, are quickly followed with a tale of men who “claimed to be gods.”⁸⁸ Instead of creating a world, these men bring nuclear power into being, with all of its worldending capabilities:

In the beginning, ________ and ________

ascended from the First World of darkness

until they reached the glittering waters

of this Fourth World, where the yellow snake,

________, dwelled underground.

Then one day, men who claimed to be gods

said: “Let there be uranium,” and they dug

a thousand unventilated mines. They unleashed

________ and said: “this will enrich us all.”

Perez traces the ways in which radioactive colonialism produces new relations, just as it destroys others. The names of gods and figures of creation are replaced with blank spaces; transcribing loss into the poems, Perez represents the ruptures that nuclear coloniality enacts.

Playing on the idea of the “nuclear family,” Perez reframes the various sites and cultures impacted by radioactive colonialism as familial relatives. In doing so, he produces an emergent mode of co-existence that extends the traditional Western nucleus of care (the so-called ‘nuclear family’) to encompass a wider expanse of kin connected by the nuclear. This act of reframing challenges the “atomic cartographies” that are themselves products of colonialism, offering an alternative in doing so: a generative conceptualization of family that extends a relation of care to those across lands and cultures.⁸⁹ Recognizing those wider relations that occur through processes of radioactive colonialism and re-creating them, the poem reframes a mode of relation that is grounded in violence to instead center an ethics of care. Perez’s poem ends with a wish for the future: “Let there be the disarmament of the violent nucleus within nations […] Let there be peace and justice for the downwinders, from Utah to Guam to every irradiated species.” Looking ahead to a world that is free of the grip of nuclear coloniality, Perez’s poem concludes with a vision of futurity that is informed by the generative possibilities of the reimagination of nuclear relations.

The question of nuclear coloniality radiates into our collective futures as new understandings of the long-term planetary impacts of nuclear activity are coming to the fore. Research into the Anthropocene evidences the prevalence of radionuclides in the lands, waters, and subterranean matter across our planet. The nuclear missile tests’ that began in 1952 and reached peak activity in the 1960s have been offered as one possible marker for the start date of the Anthropocene,⁹⁰ as “the fallout […] deposited large amounts of radionuclides in the environment and left a well-defined radiogenic signature.”⁹¹ In this century, as Ele Carpenter observes, “the deep storage of high level radioactive waste inserted into the fossil record, will create a new geologic layer 200–500 meters below ground, for hundreds of thousands of years.”⁹² Operating on more-than-human scales, the material and cultural resonances of nuclearity defy human colonial timescales. Redefining both the “nuclear age” and the “Anthropocene,” Carpenter notes that the “nuclear anthropocene” indicates “a shift toward the post-nuclear age; a time where the nuclear is embedded in every aspect of everyday life in its electricity production, global contamination, disruption of chromosomes and production of psychic fears.”⁹³ Operating from a similar critical perspective in The Ocean on Fire, Anaïs Maurer suggests our epoch should be understood as a “nuclearized Anthropocene,” where nuclear war and climate collapse are “inextricably linked” as they reshape our world.⁹⁴ In this way, both Carpenter and Maurer complicate understandings of the Anthropocene that register environmental change in a vacuum, instead emphasizing its inseparability from the colonial relations of nuclearity.

While the notion of the nuclear Anthropocene provides a new language for the geological changes of our planet over the past century, the dystopian futures that it prophecies are not new. From the Sahtu Dene of the Northwest Territories, to the Diné thousands of miles south, and beyond, Indigenous peoples have long warned of the dangers of extracting uranium ore from the earth. “More than one […] tribe had prophecies about the yellow strains in the rock, the ore that never had to be a weapon, but that these see-ers knew would be dug up and laid in lethal planetary designs,” writes Cornum.⁹⁵ The refusal to heed warning prophecies and stories associated with uranium ore across Indigenous cultures further reveals the way that selected forms of knowledge are rendered illegitimate within colonial knowledge production. This is just one of many critiques of the Anthropocene, which has been challenged for the way it privileges certain forms of knowledge over others, as well as its universalization of human experience.⁹⁶ Building on Davis and Todd’s work, Andrew Curley and Sara Smith critique the broader scholarly impulse to demarcate “new eras in the planet’s history,” arguing that central to the technology of colonization is the fracturing of time and space into separate segments, asking “if […] orientations to time are political, where can we go if we orient all of human time to Europe?”⁹⁷ Attention to other conceptions of time, such as spiraling or spiralic temporality, may offer other, possibly better ways of understanding the impacts of nuclear coloniality on many generations to come.⁹⁸

Following Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Zoe Todd argues for the importance of “countering white possessive settler claims to space, time and being.”⁹⁹ Todd advances a necessary turn in the context of energy materiality, suggesting that fossil fuels are “not inert chemical substances, non-renewable resources, or, in turn, waste, but in fact kin, ancestors, and relations that tie us to long ago more-than-human societies, existences, and obligations.”¹⁰⁰ What might it mean to understand nuclear materiality this way? The poem and performance piece “An Infected Sunset,” by Demian DinéYazhi (Diné) reckons with this question, as the speaker enters into conversation with uranium on Navajo lands. They register the ore as both animate and feeling, itself a victim of the violence of nuclear coloniality:

I talk to the uranium beneath my feet

It tells me it is lonesome

it is warmblooded and resilient

it is angry and it has been violated

and in this way I suppose it is just as angry as an Indian.¹⁰¹

Pointing to a deep past and a simultaneous deep future, rethinking nuclear relations and their resonances untangles radioactive empires’ limited, fractured, and linear imaginaries of nuclear futurity. The movements of nuclear relations show themselves as sentient, to be sensed and themselves sensing.

Nuclear fallout transgresses the constructed boundaries between human and more-than-human human space. From the U.S. National Parks created to dispossess Native Nations to the persistence of terra nullius as a colonial organization principle that renders all desired space in its path empty for imperial use, we have long learnt that ‘Nature’, as an idea, has its own colonial relations and movements.¹⁰² It follows then, that resistance to nuclear coloniality attends to more-than-human relations in a way that makes the nuclear relations of colonial violence visible beyond human subjects. As Cornum explains:

Movement marked by radiation cuts across life forms. You’ve maybe heard of the wolves taking back Chernobyl; the reindeer from the area have taken their trace contamination as far north as Norway. The species-related herds of caribou in Canada are similarly contaminated, having drank from the irradiated tailings left by and leaching into Great Bear Lake by Port Radium.¹⁰³

These “movements marked by radiation” become tangible in the work of writers and artists who reanimate and reshape nuclear relations. The glass installations of Kokatha and Nukunu sculptural artist Yhonnie Scarce embody the toxic aftermath of the atomic glass cloud. Their Thunder Raining Poison (2015), for instance, is made of circa two-thousand hand-blown glass pendants resembling yams, a bush food. In their fragility, hanging in clusters from the ceiling, they call attention to the nuclear testing at Maralinga in the 1950s that turned the sand around the detonation site into glass, the toxic nuclear remnants now seeping into all that grows in these soils. In “The Arts of Repair,” a conversation between Scarce and Craig Santos Perez in this special issue, Scarce explains that “when I’m making the glass objects, even though they start as molten in a liquified state then they become more solid, they’re always a living object. They’ve had breath that’s been used to create them.” Scarce’s breath shapes these glass pendants that were hand-blown, one-by-one, recreating the yams and breathing life into Aboriginal cultural practice, thereby undoing the linearity of nuclear toxicity as something that only halts time and space. Artistic practice and cultural expressions, like Scarce’s, call upon nuclear relations from diverse perspectives. The intercultural resonances of nuclear materialities show us how the nuclear relations of coloniality are made visible. Artistic, cultural, material, and social networks of solidarity and resistance reshape human and more-than-human colonial relations, creating planetary futures shaped by the alterlife of radioactive empires.

Foregrounding the colonial dimensions of nuclear projects, we propose the “nuclear relations of coloniality” as a way to understand the relations between ostensibly distinct occurrences of and experiences with(in) radioactive empires across geographic, temporal, and cultural contexts. Tracing the intercultural resonance of nuclear materialities, this editorial and the articles that comprise this special issue seek to develop a more expansive understanding of the global interconnectedness of nuclear (de)coloniality. In particular, these contributions attend to the cultural and material networks of solidarity and resistance that were brought into being in the wake of nuclear coloniality and that continue to take shape in, and shape, our present. The collective work of imagining and building worlds beyond radioactive empires will only gain in urgency as the resource wars continue to escalate, and too if radioactive powers (re)turn to testing for armaments and/or nuclear energy experimentation.

Article Overview

In keeping with the theoretical contributions of LaDuke and Cornum, this special issue holds subject matter and analytic in conversation with contributors exploring the material and heuristic qualities of radioactivity and nuclearity in the context of empire and coloniality. The essays in this issue consider particular aspects or examples of the nuclear relations of coloniality, how cultural products or forms can help make these relations visible or legible, and/or what real world or analytical impacts the recognition of these relations has.

In the Foreword to this special issue, Andrew Curley reflects on the contribution of LaDuke and Churchill’s original article in relation to the Marxist and environmental justice scholarship of the late twentieth century. It also provides important context relating to Ward Churchill’s controversial position within the academy, particularly regarding Churchill’s claims to an Indigenous identity that were found to be false. Nevertheless, Curley suggests there is a value in returning to the original essay in our current era of climate change, which poses new questions as to the potential dangers of a nuclear capitalist order.

Heba Taha’s essay “Art and the Atom in Israel/Palestine” explores a visual archive of the hidden yet physical presence of nuclearity in occupied Palestine. Works of visual art, photography and film offer critical interventions regarding the secrecy surrounding Israel’s nuclear regime. By interrogating the hidden violence of the nuclear archive and its absences, Taha suggests that a counter-archive of that which is meant to stay hidden might allow for those narratives that have been silenced to be integrated into the irradiated international.

Kaitlin Moore’s article “Caesium Spacetimes: Atomically-Standardized Time and Atomically-Irradiated Space in a Nuclear Pacific” centers its discussion of US nuclear imperialism on the element of caesium in organizing US nuclear imperial space-time. Focused on the radioactive isotope radiocaesium and the non-radioactive isotope caesium-133, Moore argues that while one isotope informs the conceptualization of temporality of US imperialisms, the other creates particular spatial topologies that make visible the “irradiated international.” Analyzing a series of artworks and literary texts that engage with this nuclear space-time, the article points to networks of relationality that must be built for strategies of redress and reparation to be made possible.

In “Town Destroyer: War and Waste on Haudenosaunee Land,” Scott Volz draws attention to how Haudenosaunee territories were implicated in the Manhattan Project, connecting the first colonial destruction of the lands with later chemical and radioactive destruction caused by chemical manufacturing, uranium processing, and waste disposal. Employing Ali Kadri’s theorization of the political economy of waste in combination with Indigenous and decolonial theory, Volz examines visual art by contemporary Haudenosaunee and non-Native artists in New York State who contest the theft and/or contamination of Indigenous land. He argues that their works not only interrogate the toxicity of militarism and the colonial capitalist process of what Kadri calls “accumulation by waste,” but also offer decolonial imaginings of liberated futures.

In 2023, the Cape Farewell expedition “Kõmij Mour Ijin/Our Life is Here” carried an international collective of artists, scientists, and activists to the irradiated atolls of Bikini and Rongelap in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, bringing attention to the nexus between nuclear colonialism and climate change. In “‘Blood Red’: Exploring Radioactive Colonialism in the Pacific through Indigenous Creative Writing and Visual Narratives,” Michelle Keown reflects on this expedition, alongside recent artworks by writers and artists from the Pacific. A body of this work stems from a collaborative project led by Keown, working with ri-Majel (Marshallese) activist and poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, and Native Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos, “to support the ri-Majel campaign for nuclear justice.” In foregrounding the potential for community-engaged scholarship to support youth education and sovereignty, the article demonstrates how collaborative arts-driven research can meaningfully support transnational and intergenerational antinuclear activism.

Jacob Tropp’s contribution, “Globalizing Diné (Navajo) Stories of Radioactive Injustice: Transnational and Settler Colonial Politics of Uranium Mining in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s” traces early instances of Indigenous transnational organizing against nuclear development through a focus on Diné activism. The global circulation of Diné stories resonated in other settler-colonial contexts and fostered solidarity among Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups resisting uranium exploitation, from Namibia (then fighting for independence from South Africa) to Australia’s Northern Territory.

Complicating the paradigmatic image of post-Apartheid denuclearization, Jessica Hurley’s article “Apartheid’s Nuclear Worldmaking” examines South Africa’s decision to maintain and develop new nuclear infrastructure post-1994, questioning how nuclear relations might be truly decolonized. While South Africa is posited as the quintessential example of the delinking of nuclearity and coloniality, through her reading of Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get A Life, Hurley shows how South Africa’s colonial nuclear relations continue to shape the country in the post-Apartheid era. Hidden from plain view, South Africa’s transnational nuclear complex is nevertheless critiqued by artists and activists, who imagine what genuinely decolonized nuclear relations might look like. In this way, the case of South Africa’s supposed denuclearization can be both a warning and an invitation to consider how things might be done differently.

In the Research Commentary, “Facing Nuclear Imperialism, Nuclear Colonialism, and Nuclear Paternalism Together,” Karly Burch and Emily Simmonds argue that generative collaborative scholarship in the field of nuclear research can subvert the limiting effects of “nuclear paternalism” into a drive to refine and redefine existing critical nuclear scholarship. When taking the form of what Eve Tuck calls “contingent collaborations,” this co-created scholarship can build a shared theory of change in order to create a common basis for fostering solidarities and for further refining theorizations and methods to better attend to the networked nature of nuclear power.

Finally, “The Arts of Repair” is a conversation that took place in 2023 between the Kokatha and Nukunu sculptural artist Yhonnie Scarce and the CHamoru poet and essayist Craig Santos Perez, facilitated by Rebecca Macklin and Susanne Ferwerda. Both artists reflect on their diverse experiences of growing up with the intergenerational legacies of radioactive colonialism. For Perez this was on Guam: an island downwind of the Marshall Islands and occupied by the U.S. military, for Scarce in Woomera: close to the Maralinga and Emu fields and used as nuclear ‘test’ sites by British and Australian governments. In this wide-ranging conversation, Scarce and Perez consider their artistic practices in the context of collective memory, family, and kinship, as well as the question of what “repair” means to them. Scarce discusses how repair needs to be in conversation with the afterlives of radioactive colonialism: “We have to remember what happened, what happens, and how it keeps going generation after generation. How are we meant to heal if that’s not happening?” Understanding creative practice as central to this, Perez explains that storytelling can be thought of “as a kind of medicine, as a form of healing, as a kind of community-centered reparation for these harms against us.”

The articles included in this special issue gesture to just some of the many ways that nuclear coloniality endures in the present and threatens our collective futures. Yet, through tracing the unexpected formations of hope and possibility that have been forged through the movement of nuclear relations, we are reminded of the futures that are yet to be built–or that are being built, as we write this. Tanana Athabascan poet and scholar Dian Million proposes that a paradigm shift is being forced upon us at this time of planetary capitalist catastrophe, compelling us to ask what path will “create the most life–not just for ourselves.”¹⁰⁴ Taking this question forwards, perhaps the irradiated international could have a role to play in the developing of liveable futures.

Acknowledgements

This special issue originated as a roundtable at the 2022 European Association for American Studies conference, chaired by David Stirrup. We then sought to invite a wider number of interlocutors into the conversation, which led to a roundtable at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, in 2024, chaired by Rebecca Macklin and Laura De Vos, with panelists Heba Taha, Natalie Owl, María Cristina Manzano-Munguía, Jacob Tropp, and Andrew Curley as respondent. We are immensely grateful to everyone that has contributed to this special issue in some way, including those whose work is published here, as well as other interlocutors who have helped to shape our thinking. Thank you to David Stirrup and Jayita Sarkar for their contributions especially at the early stages of this project, and to the reviewers who offered their time and expertise through the peer review process. We are grateful to Andrew Curley for his generous engagement with the project and for providing the Foreword to the special issue. We thank the Leverhulme Trust, who supported Rebecca Macklin’s research on this project through an Early Career Fellowship. And finally, many thanks to Stephanie Foote and Anthony Lioi at Regeneration, who have consistently provided enthusiasm and generosity through the process of creating this special issue.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Author Bios

Dr. Laura M. De Vos is a Belgian assistant professor in the American Studies program at Radboud University in the Netherlands with an academic background in North American Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, US American literature, and gender studies. Their research focuses on North American Indigenous social movements and international solidarity with those movements. Their writing has been published in Transmotion, Settler Colonial Studies, and other venues. Their Dutch language general audience book informed by their research titled “Voorbij Winnetou & Pocahontas” (co-authored with Katrien Demuynck) was published by EPO in September 2025. They are co-editor of Transmotion, Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies.

Dr. Rebecca Macklin is Interdisciplinary Fellow in Social Inclusion and Cultural Diversity at the University of Aberdeen. With a background in North American Indigenous and South African literatures, her research sits at the intersection of Indigenous studies and the environmental and energy humanities. She has published research in venues including Transmotion; ariel: A review of international English literatures; and Interventions; and co-edited a forthcoming special issue of Resistance on “The Arts of Energy Justice.”

Dr. Susanne Ferwerda is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research asks how we can understand the intersection of climate change and coloniality in the stories told from and with the ocean. She works on anticolonial and decolonial narrative disruption to Western colonisation in the Oceanic region via long and short fiction, visual and performance art. Her writing has previously been published in Environmental Humanities, the edited volume Extinction and Memorial Culture (Routledge 2023), and other venues.

Dr Sonja Dobroski is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research interlinks historical, archaeological, and anthropological methods and combines oral history, ethnography, museum, and archival research. She is interested in how material culture functions in settler colonial societies, paying particular attention to how power is maintained through materiality. Her writing has been published in History and Anthropology and American Ethnologist.