Part I - Geographies of Environmental Violence

1 Chornobyl Body Politics Making Environmental Violence Visible

Nathaniel Ray Pickett and Shannon O’Lear

Engaging Environmental Violence

The framework of environmental violence (EV) seeks to address the environmental and human health harms inflicted by the processes of production, especially climate change and pollution. This chapter brings a slow violence and critical knowledge production approach to strengthen the theoretical and methodological foundations in the EV framework. We emphasize the contingent, political processes of the production of scientific knowledge and how those processes change understandings of both violence and the environment. The 1986 Chornobyl disaster, our case study for this chapter, illustrates the mutually constructive processes of politics and knowledge production and how understanding that mutual dynamic reveals the ways in which the slow environmental harms of Chornobyl were made visible. We aim to accomplish this task by using examples from the social monitoring program of the Department of Social Expertise (DSE) in the Institute of Sociology in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in its tracking of the embodied environmental effects among sufferers of the Chornobyl disaster. Using the DSE’s data on Chornobyl sufferers, we demonstrate how focusing on the processes of knowledge production is a useful tool in assessing the harms of slow EV.

1.1 Introduction

How are environmental harms made visible? The other chapters in this collection offer many excellent examples of tracing sites and processes of EV. The contribution of this chapter is to discuss the ways in which the effects of EV are rendered either visible or invisible. The visibility of EV is not a foregone conclusion; the temporal and spatial elements of EV – such as long-term or delayed effects, sociomaterial relationalities, jurisdiction, and volumetrics – often obscure its harmful effects or make their obscuration easier. For this reason, we connect the processes of rendering visible the harms of EV to the literature on slow violence. Our aim in this chapter is to draw together themes and threads of EV research to present a cohesive and flexible theoretical and methodological foundation – critical knowledge production – for continued work in this field by emphasizing how political processes and scientific knowledge production mutually construct each other. These processes of mutual construction are not as simple as political pressures to suppress scientific findings; these processes are much messier and less straightforward than that. Tracing the many ways that politics and science co-produce each other over long periods of time can show how the creation, presentation, and dissemination of different types of knowledge can hide or highlight environmental harms.

To put this foundation into practice, we will use examples from the 1986 Chornobyl disaster in northern Ukraine to explore ways in which the bodily, social, and environmental effects of the largest nuclear accident in history were made visible.¹ Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from what became the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Exclusion (hereafter the Zone) that has, since 1997, covered approximately 2600 km² (1000 mi²) of the Kyiv oblast (province) along the Ukrainian border with Belarus (Figure 1.1). Best estimates, using models based on soil testing done between 1986 and 1996, set the total amount of radioactivity released during the disaster at approximately 5300 peta-becquerels (PBq) (excluding noble gases) [1, 2].

Figure 1.1 Map of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zones, including the cities of Pripyat and Slavutych. Inset shows the location of the current area of the Zone in Ukraine

Source: The author.

The world’s largest nuclear accident is notable for the role that knowledge politics – including questions such as: Who controls access to what knowledge? Who gets to know what when? Who controls the knowledge production processes? – played in the management of the crisis and its long, slow aftermath. Understanding the processes and practices of making EV harms visible involves analyzing the ways in which knowledge about the effects of the disaster was produced, how that knowledge was intended to evoke specific political responses, and how those political and knowledge-producing processes mutually constructed each other.

Adriana Petryna [3] makes some insightful connections between the scientific knowledge of nuclear radiation – or rather the lack thereof – and Soviet governance strategies. The historical and geopolitical contexts of the disaster in the mid-1980s, in the midst of Reagan’s “evil empire” rhetoric, necessitated that Soviet officials maintained at least an image of control over the situation so that they could maintain control within the Soviet Union as a whole and avoid losing face to the world outside the Soviet bloc. Presenting the situation at Chornobyl as under control was a monumentally hard task in and of itself, only compounded by the fact that, on the one hand, there were myriad unknowns – scientific, technical, political, institutional – while, on the other hand, the limited amount of knowns had to be kept secret in order to maintain control and save face. The Soviet response was hindered by knowledge gaps, and the bridging of said gaps was, in turn, hindered by Soviet policy in a self-defeating cycle. In other words, the knowledge-making and political processes regarding Chornobyl employed in the Soviet Union worked against each other and compounded the harmful effects of the violence of the disaster. Soviet officials and organs tried to render harms caused by the reactor’s explosion invisible to others while at the same time having to produce and act on new knowledge regarding the effects of radiation via rendering those effects visible to themselves. Petryna [3] states that:

The sciences, politics, and international cooperations that informed Soviet state responses to Chernobyl produced an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk …. What was known or not known about the scale of the disaster was the result of policy choices, supported by a base of scientific knowledge that was provisional at best …. The apparent arbitrariness of the situation prompted people to search for other resources and clues to render an uncertain and unknowable world knowable and inhabitable in some way.

(p. 63)

After the Soviet Union admitted that there had been an accident at Chornobyl 19 days after it had occurred – no longer trying to render the disaster invisible to the rest of the world – researchers, officials, scientists, and sufferers were faced with having to address the effects of the disaster, despite the paucity of knowledge on the harms of radioactive contamination. Where people looked for experts, either scientific or political, to determine maximum exposure limits or even to outline possible symptoms, none were to be found, as there was no consensus regarding the treatment or the classification of radiation contamination in humans in either community. The lack of consensus among both scientists and officials muddied the processes of making the disaster’s multiple forms of harm visible and compounded the violence done to the environment and to the people living and working in the Zone.

Olga Kuchinskaya [4] discusses the role that this invisibility played in the social and biological effects of the disaster. This includes the invisibility of the radioactive particles and waves but also how sufferers and their symptoms were rendered invisible by political actors who leveraged the unknowns regarding the effects of radiation to conceal or minimize those effects that could be accurately recorded. She emphasizes the role of government officials in how the radiation from Chornobyl was rendered visible, stating:

Because radiation is not directly perceptible to the unaided human senses and we do not encounter it as a tangible phenomenon, formal representations of what should be considered dangerous become doubly important in defining the scope of contamination and its risks. By formal representations I refer to standards, categories, and thresholds used in radiation protection. They help us interpret raw numbers by providing a context of what constitutes radiation risks. I also refer to visual maps that systematize quantitative data into graphic representations based on these definitions. These formal representations – including such things as acceptable thresholds of human exposure and acceptable levels of food contamination – are the language of legal and administrative decision making. They also set the general public expectations for what is dangerous.

(p. 95)

This chapter similarly evaluates the mutually constructive processes of scientific knowledge production and political action, albeit from a slow violence perspective, where we take seriously the ways knowledge can produce unintended harms. We do this by examining the decades-long work of a network of researchers centered at the DSE. The DSE was an official site of knowledge production regarding the social harms of the Chornobyl disaster, and an analysis of its publications demonstrates the mutual construction of knowledge and policy in the processes of making the long-term harmful effects of EV visible. Gaining a better awareness of these processes and their relations allows us to create a better understanding of how different types of knowledge can obscure, reveal, address, or cause more harm to people and environments.

The DSE has long been involved in the study of Chornobyl sufferers as a distinct social group via a methodology they term “social monitoring.”² Their knowledge production efforts on the harmful effects of radioactive contamination were instrumental in making the slow violence of Chornobyl visible to Ukrainian state actors and the broader scientific community. In addition to their publications, the DSE provided reports to Ukrainian government ministries and elected officials, including regular presentations to the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. Through their social monitoring program, the DSE systematically collected longitudinal data on Chornobyl sufferers from 1991 to 2011 with the explicit intention of making the problems sufferers faced visible both to the state and to the public. Radiation is invisible, requiring specific (primarily technoscientific) instruments to detect and measure it. The harms of radiation can also be invisible, especially to those not directly experiencing them and, in the same way, require specific (primarily political) instruments to detect and measure those harms. Making both radiation and its harms visible to others involves political and technoscientific processes. The politics of visibility invites questions – Visible to whom? To what ends? How to fill knowledge/visibility gaps? – that entail competing narratives of power regarding the mutually constructive processes of the production of knowledge and action.

This approach to EV research seeks to tackle the politics of visibility of environmental harms by exploring how a slow violence perspective affects investigations of knowledge production processes. Slow violence approaches to EV go beyond taking a long-term view of environmental harms by looking at how mutually constructed scientific and political processes alter the visibility of those harms, and the responses to those harms, over time.

The methodological framework of critical knowledge production [5] is a valuable tool for understanding the processes by which scientific knowledge is produced and why those processes and that knowledge matter in the EV framework and in the case of Chornobyl sufferers. Below, in a review of the literature, we discuss the concept of slow violence, why it matters to the framework of EV, and the political nature of the construction of knowledge. Following that, we introduce the DSE as a site of knowledge production on the human impacts of Chornobyl and an analysis of how its data on sufferers depict slow violence through the lens of critical knowledge production.

1.2 Slow Violence and the Environment

The term “slow violence” was popularized by Rob Nixon in his 2011 book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor [6], in which he draws attention to the importance of the overlooked experiences of vulnerable people around the world who suffer disproportionately from environmental mismanagement. According to Nixon, time plays a part in making this damage to groups of people and to ecosystems invisible. Nixon positions time as an actor, because it shapes how violence unfolds by separating direct cause from effect [7]. Nixon does not focus on direct and immediate harm inflicted by sudden events, but rather considers damage that emerges slowly over time resulting from, for instance, industrial dumping or the altering of landscapes. He emphasizes the importance of generating compelling images and stories of these untold, lived experiences resulting from decisions made elsewhere. He argues that it is through these images and stories that this otherwise invisible suffering becomes seeable.

Nixon’s work has roots in the earlier work of Johan Galtung, who challenged the binary of war and peace to look at violence in various forms [8]. Galtung argued that if we are to understand the roots of violence, it is important to see beyond the immediacy of war to view violence, not only as direct, but indirect; not only as physical, but psychological; not only as intended, but unintentional; and not only as manifest, but latent. By offering this perspective, Galtung introduced a different way of understanding and examining violence. In his later work, Galtung went on to describe cultural violence [9] in which harm towards some groups of people is embedded in religion, language, art, empirical science, and other societal practices. These social norms and structures legitimize violence and harm and make it seem ordinary or unavoidable. Cultural violence relies on society’s acceptance or ignorance to maintain its relatively widespread invisibility.

This seemingly invisible harm, however, is not invisible to the people whose lives it alters. In his work with people enduring the environmental damage of Louisiana’s aptly named “Cancer Alley,” Thom Davies [10, 11] has suggested that slow violence is a matter of perspective. For people who are dealing with degraded health caused by environmental conditions, the harm inflicted on their lives is very visible, palpable, tangible, and real. In order for researchers and other outsiders to see this harm, it is necessary to take the approach of slow observation. This approach aims to see through the eyes and life experience of people suffering various forms of slowly unfolding harm in order to appreciate the changed conditions and prospects of their lives and livelihoods.

The label of “slow violence” might seem to set up as a binary opposite fast or immediate violence [12], but what an approach of slow violence does is to pay attention to forms of harm that might not be immediately obvious. As noted, with the idea of slow observation [10, 11], slow violence as an approach pays attention to multiple simultaneous ways of seeing, and it also signals other multiplicities. For example, policy-making processes tend to consider finite and linear aspects of decision-making. Our understanding of any decision- and policy-making process expands when we consider phenomena beyond the immediate focus. For example, Erin Fitz-Henry [13] studied the narrow linear view of policymakers in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the focus on returning the measurable oil spill closer to previous “normal” conditions. She points out that this view completely overlooked other spatialities and temporalities of aquatic life at deeper levels of the ocean and in the context of migratory and reproduction cycles. The chosen variables of the standard clean-up response were not only extremely limited, but they also perpetuated forms of environmental harm and violence by not bringing them into the response process.

Another related form of multiplicity that a slow violence approach allows us to consider is found in the types of data and knowledge brought to bear in any context of unintended harm inflicted on groups of people and environments. That is, how can slow violence be measured and otherwise assessed? Taking into account that multiple perspectives, spatialities, and temporalities are all critical steps toward a better understanding of harm and violence, we also need to pay attention to what kinds of information or data are available, gatherable, and capable of contributing to an understanding of or a response to a situation. It is important to critique scientific practices and ways of knowing because even the very methods by which scientific assessments are made can obscure harm and violence or bring it to light. This point harkens back to Galtung’s [9] concern with how practices that are considered standard or state of the art can actually embed structural forms of harm and violence. What is more, gaps in knowledge and data that are not collected can also contribute to “ignorance loops” [14] that perpetuate forms of harm, degradation, and violence, even while ticking the check boxes of “good science.” Since slow violence comes into play across a wide range of human experience and environmental contexts, there is no single methodology or framework by which to study slow violence. Instead, there is ample room for researchers from a variety of disciplines to question how avoidable harm is generated, to apply different methodologies that make slow violence visible, and to expand awareness of slow violence in its many forms [15].

1.3 Politics of the Construction of Knowledge

Our point of entry in critiquing the scientific practices and ways of knowing about EV and the harms it causes is a research framework we call “critical knowledge production.” We, along with Samuel Henkin [5], developed this framework as a way to place the processes and practices of scientific knowledge production in their political, historical, and geographical contexts. Context, as well as discourse, connection, and social and material relations, are central to tracing the ways in which scientific knowledge and political agendas and actions help produce each other.

Science, the systematic production of knowledge, is inherently and actively social. A central tenet of the field of Science and Technology Studies (or alternatively, Science, Technology, and Society) is that knowledge production does not happen in a vacuum. From research design to methodology to data collection to analysis, the processes and practices of “doing science” are shot through with contextual social and material relations – such as biases, norms, funding sources and amounts, discourses, power relations, previous experience, time constraints, available technology, and so on – that bear heavily on knowledge production, whether those doing the producing realize it or not. Recognizing these embedded contexts points to the messiness, complexity, heterogeneity, partialities, and contingencies that producers of knowledge must contend with, account for, embrace, ignore, suppress, or passively accept.

Critical knowledge production focuses on process rather than product. We developed this framework to analyze the constructive relationships among knowledge, political action, and discourse. In other words, this framework illuminates the politics of knowledge-making. For those interested in studying the effects of EV, critical knowledge production allows us to better understand the ways in which the sources, contexts, and harms of EV are obscured, made visible, perpetuated, interrupted, and addressed.

Making something visible is both a political action that requires the tools of knowledge production and an act of knowledge production that requires the tools of politics. The research methods, data collection instruments, and analytic tools used to create knowledge cannot, on their own, make that knowledge visible to others who are not personally involved in its creation. Making that knowledge be seen by others, especially in a format that is accessible and actionable, involves the political work of placing that knowledge in its relevant contexts and addressing sociomaterial realities for it to have an effect on the intended audience. Visibility is an emergent property, a result of the political and scientific work of having rendered a thing visible. When we are discussing making EV and harms visible, different, and less immediate forms of violence – indirect, psychological, unintentional, latent – require different tactics or methods to become visible.

Visibility also necessitates action in response. Once a harmful effect of EV is made visible, those seeing it must choose to ignore it, to work to resolve the causes and repair the damage, or to do something in between. Critical knowledge production extends its critique through these processes as well, asking questions such as: “What political actions did the researchers intend their audience to take?”; “What choices did the researchers make in their knowledge production processes to better appeal to their chosen audience?”; “How did the reaction of the intended audience impact subsequent processes of knowledge production?”; or “How did unintended audiences, reactions, and changing contexts alter later processes involving this knowledge?” The capacity of critical knowledge production to analyze mutually iterative constructions of knowledge and action over a longer time and broader space situates the framework as a productive research tool in investigating slow violence and harm.

Approaching investigations of slow violence from the framework of critical knowledge production allows us to show, in a granular way, how knowledge about, and the politics of, slow violence are constructed. Political actors, including researchers of the harms and other effects of violence, make decisions based on what is known and valued and what pieces and forms of knowledge can help advance the actors’ agendas.

In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss the role of the DSE in making visible the effects and harms of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster on Ukrainian evacuees and residents of the Zone. For over two decades, the DSE was the primary entity researching the slow, long-term effects of the EV of Chornobyl. Applying the critical knowledge production framework to the knowledge production work of the DSE highlights not only the political nature of their research and the politics of addressing slow EV, but also how changing political, economic, and social contexts and research on Chornobyl sufferers co-produced each other.

1.4 The DSE and the Sufferer Population

The DSE [Ukrainian: Відділ соціальної експертизи] is one of eight departments of the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). As a public research department in the NASU, the DSE is funded by the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. The DSE faculty often undertakes research projects requested by organs of the state, including the Verkhovna Rada and other government ministries. Analyzing the DSE’s publications and scientific practices from a critical knowledge production framework can reveal important insights into the ways that their knowledge-making processes obscured, or made visible, the harms and violence of Chornobyl.

For the first half of the department’s existence, until roughly 2007, the primary research objective of the DSE was concerned with its program of social monitoring of people affected by the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. While social monitoring remains a major function and methodology of the department today, the past decade has seen a diversification of the faculty’s research efforts and an expansion in departmental publications on HIV/AIDS research and the impacts of market liberalization in Ukraine.

The work of the DSE faculty is largely structured around their definition of social/society. Of particular importance is the distinction between the two words in Ukrainian that mean society, sotsium [соціум] and suspilstvo [суспільство]. On this topic, Chepurko has stated that while authors often equate the two words, using them interchangeably, соціум is used more to describe society as a formation that determines the subjectivity of individuals in social structures, including the construction of communities and networks of cooperation, while суспільство emphasizes the systems of social organization, including “objective social laws” [16]. The program of social monitoring developed at the DSE is intended to navigate the distinctions between these two terms by taking seriously the agency of its research subjects and their interactions with social systems. Put another way, social monitoring is a method of analyzing biopolitical relations, regulations, and resistance.

Between 1995 and 2011, the DSE published a number of edited volumes of research related to its social monitoring program, including 13 volumes of Chornobyl and Society [17] [Чорнобиль і соціум; ChiS hereafter], and four other books: Social Consequences of the Chornobyl Disaster [18] [Соціальні наслідки чорнобильської катастрофи]; Socioeconomic Consequences of Technogenic and Natural Disasters: Expert Evaluation [19] [Соціально-економічні наслідки техногенних та природних катастроф: експертне оцінювання]; Postchornobyl Society: 15 Years after the Accident [20] [Постчорнобильський соціум: 15 років по аварії]; and Social Consequences of Chornobyl: A Time for Rebirth [21] [Соціальні наслідки Чорнобиля: Час відродження]. After this period, as mentioned above, the DSE’s research and publication activities on Chornobyl sufferers fell off dramatically, in favor of the department’s other focus areas. This transition came after governmental priorities and funding shifted away from studying the Chornobyl disaster and those suffering from its effects.

These publications were a conscious effort to make the harms of the Chornobyl disaster visible. The crux of the technocratic mode of (post-)Soviet governance is the space where treating classes or populations as the base unit of study and measurement and the calculation of state responsibility to those populations meet. This mode of governance is reflected in the research aims of the DSE and the methodology of their social monitoring program by collecting longitudinal data on the harms of Chornobyl among representative samples of the different categories of sufferer populations. Who can be classified as a sufferer and the determination of which category an individual belongs to is yet another example of technoscientific knowledge and politics co-producing each other. In the case of the Chornobyl sufferer population in Ukraine, the Soviet and later Ukrainian governments explicitly outlined the criteria for membership of both the population itself, and the categories thereof. The relevant, and oft-amended, piece of legislation, “On the status and social protection of citizens that have suffered as a consequence of the Chornobyl disaster” [“Про статус і соціальний захист громадян, які постраждали внаслідок Чорнобильської катастрофи”] [22], enacted five years after the disaster, established four categories of sufferers. Though this law has been amended 65 separate times, including major amendments that redefined the criteria for category membership, this structure has remained intact to this day. This law indicates that liquidators, “citizens who directly participated in any work connected to the elimination of the disaster or its consequences in the exclusion zone” and sufferers, “citizens, including children, that have experienced the effect of radioactive exposure as a result of the Chornobyl disaster,” are to be counted separately, though they are grouped together in categories for purposes of benefits ([22]: articles 9–10). From these general definitions, additional temporal, spatial, exposure, and medical conditions determined a person’s membership of one of the four officially recognized categories of sufferers. Category 1 sufferers are recognized as experiencing the most harm as a result of the Chornobyl disaster and are entitled to the highest level of benefits in comparison to the other categories, with those in category 4 receiving the least amount of benefits. Series H [Серія Г] includes those who were never in the Zone, but have a proven Chornobyl-related health disability and Series D [Серія Д] includes children affected by the disaster. To be a recognized Chornobyl sufferer, a person must prove that they meet the requirements to belong to one of the categories; without that official recognition, a person cannot access the means of social protection the government has committed to provide. This situation has resulted in a contested liminal space of identity, where many feel as though their lives have been directly negatively affected by the Chornobyl disaster, but because they cannot produce the necessary documentation to prove as much, they are barred from accessing the entitlements of sufferers.

The social monitoring program was intended to understand the effects of the Chornobyl disaster on populations, with the expectation that this research would primarily inform the role and responsibility of the state to those classified as sufferers. The authors of these DSE volumes present their analyses of sufferer populations to an audience that understands that expectation. Each of these volumes contain, in the front matter, a short statement that explicitly identifies its audience and purpose. Though the exact wording varied slightly in the first two issues, the version of this statement in ChiS 3–13 reads,

Для фахівців, управлінців, широкого кола читачів, що цікавляться соціальними проблемами потерпілого населення та вирішення управлінських проблем його соціального захисту.

For experts, administrators, and the wide circle of readers who are interested in the social problems of the sufferer population and the solution of administrative problems of their social protection.

([17]: p. 2)

The purpose of social monitoring at the DSE was not just to keep tabs on the social well-being of Chornobyl sufferers, but also to establish and then execute a method of scientific knowledge production that could provide trustworthy and expert information – if not outright recommendations – to policymakers. From the perspective of the DSE, social monitoring is an explicit intervention into the co-constructive processes of politics and science. Knowing the DSE’s perspective and their intended audience is relevant for understanding their processes of knowledge production. The DSE’s research intentions were to make the social effects of Chornobyl visible and to improve the administration of social protections afforded to the Chornobyl sufferer population. The data they collected, as well as the forms and contents of their analyses, were meant to serve both of those ends.

Analyzing this body of work as a whole from a critical knowledge production perspective reveals the changes in the knowledge-making processes that the DSE employed; it marks the shifting political and social contexts in which their work was embedded; and it provides chronological pointers to related political events external to the DSE that, nevertheless, influenced the shape of its work. By connecting the content of these publications to, for example, parliamentary actions, presidential decrees, ministerial changes, and media coverage regarding the Chornobyl disaster and its sufferers, we can get a sense of the political responses to the data on sufferers that the DSE produced. As the DSE, acting as an official point of knowledge production on sufferers, presented its research on what is known, what matters, and what remains unknown to government bodies, the press, and other academics, we can trace the effects of their knowledge production efforts. The social monitoring program outlined what kinds of data on sufferers were collected and what was cultivated and what was disregarded. Changes in the laws regarding the long-term effects of the Chornobyl disaster, ministerial reorganizations and policy shifts, and adjustments to research funding allocations had their own effects on what knowledge about sufferers had value and was actionable. One result of this co-constructive relationship between knowledge production and political action was that the program of social monitoring of Chornobyl sufferers was shut down at the DSE after years of dwindling resources and funding for the work.

At the beginning of the ChiS project in 1992, the DSE received funding from the Ministry of Ukraine for the Protection of the Population from the Consequences of the Accident at the Chornobyl NPP [Міністерство України у справах захисту населення від наслідків аварії на Чорнобильській АЕС, hereafter the Chornobyl Ministry].³ By as early as 1995, however, in the introduction to ChiS 2, the volume’s editors Sayenko and Pryvalov were already lamenting a shortfall of funds, stating that “it has been two and a half years since the sociological survey of 1992. Much has changed over these years. It is only thanks to the Chornobyl Ministry of Ukraine ([Vladislav Fedorovich] Torbin) that it was possible to conduct even a short sociological study – science funding is far too reduced” ([17]: p. 4). They had to settle for a sample size of 1200 respondents residing within the Zhytomyr oblast, which borders the Kyiv oblast and the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone to the west, instead of the large-scale survey they initially planned. Similar statements appear in a number of the ChiS volumes, including in number 5 (p. 7), where the editor bluntly states that there was insufficient funding to survey enough respondents to enable a full comparison of all groups of sufferers.

Funding cuts, state budget and political crises, and shifting public interest had resulted by 2011 in an almost complete reorientation of the DSE’s research efforts from the social effects of the Chornobyl disaster to other research programs. As Chepurko explained in personal correspondence [16], the faculty of the DSE is proud of the work it has done, but after governmental priorities shifted away from the Chornobyl disaster and those suffering from its effects, there has been neither the will nor the funding to continue that work.

These examples highlight the reliance on personal connections within broader networks of collaboration and the politics of post-Soviet knowledge production. Even after three decades, despite incremental reforms, academics in the highest bodies of scientific research can only investigate those topics of which the government approves, from the micro level such as Torbin’s individual ministerial backing of the project, to the macro, such as administrative and bureaucratic funding cuts to entire Institutes of the NASU. This research system is also reflected in the politics of visibility: When research funding and permissions are, at least in part, contingent on personal connections and cashing in favors, how much can truly be made visible from within that system? Who and what gets un- or under-studied?

The Chornobyl sufferers social monitoring program was a research methodology explicitly designed to make the invisible visible. The variables the DSE tracked for decades, including hunger, feelings of helplessness, psychological health, the stress of not knowing exactly what effects radiation from Chornobyl has had on one’s body, and other harms caused by the violence of Chornobyl, are not immediately obvious. The DSE’s data, analyses, and knowledge-making practices over decades engaged in a limited form of slow observation. The political, academic, and scientific traditions from which the DSE developed their social monitoring methodology were technocratic and concerned with the state of populations rather than with individual experiences. This methodology categorically limits what kinds of data can be made visible by their research. While the longitudinal nature of social monitoring addresses, to some extent, the slowness of the violences of Chornobyl, or how Chornobyl’s harmful effects are felt over time, its methodology cannot account for the granular multiplicities in perspective, identity, and space.

This analysis of the understanding of the methodology of the DSE in its social monitoring work with Chornobyl sufferers involves two related tracks. The first is in critiquing the ways social monitoring takes lived experience and specific circumstances and turns them into actionable knowledge. The second is reflexive, in seeing how the DSE incorporated the products of the actions taken in response to the knowledge they produced in their social monitoring practices.

1.5 Making Visible the Slow, Environmental Harms to Sufferers

The knowledge production processes the DSE engaged in reveal a systematic attempt to make visible the harms of the Chornobyl disaster over a period of decades by running a series of surveys. While the authors of the DSE’s publications do not use the term “slow violence,” they are nonetheless treating the disaster as an instance thereof and are interested in not only the physical and environmental harms caused by the disaster but also the less-immediately obvious social harms. In fact, of the 271 chapters in these 17 volumes, 109 are concerned with the social and psychological health of sufferers – their mental and emotional states, adjustments to resettlement, dealing with the social stigma of being a Chornobyl sufferer, feelings about the future, and even questions of faith. Other chapters focused on some of the less immediately obvious harms of EV, such as economic damage, differences in how age and gender groups experienced those harms, and attitudes to personal risk management. Table 1.1 shows the breakdown of how these chapters were coded in our analysis.

Table 1.1 Code counts by chapter in DSE publications.

Category	Code	Count	Single Coded
Social and psychological health	PSYC	109	45
Social assistance and social protections	PROT	46	27
Agricultural, industrial, and economic effects of the disaster	ECON	44	18
Physical and material health	PHYS	43	8
Handling risk and extreme situations	RISK	38	8
Gender, family, and children’s issues	FAMS	33	7
Mass media, culture, and mass consciousness	MASS	33	18
Methods of social expertise	EXPT	26	15
Comparative analysis	COMP	15	2
Social models and modeling	MODL	14	2

This table illustrates the kinds of data that the DSE valued, and that the DSE perceived its intended audience would value. At no point in these volumes are there personal stories or interviews; ethnography was never the point. The parameters of data that the DSE set in its social monitoring program shaped how forms of harm unfolded and were disregarded. The analyses of this data, recorded in these 271 chapters, also shaped how those harms should be addressed by choosing which forms of harm were to be made visible.

The overwhelming majority of chapters in the ChiS series are analyses based on data collected via social monitoring. As mentioned above, the methodology of social monitoring employed by the DSE is designed to produce data on how a population – in this case, Chornobyl sufferers – sees itself in relation to other social processes. This was largely achieved with the use of self-evaluations: The DSE provided assessment forms annually to their respondents, asking questions about their sociopsychological and physiological state (how are they feeling), way of life (how are they living), cultural and economic situation (how are they participating in society), and the quality and conditions of their lived environments. In volume 3 of ChiS [17], Sayenko explained the purpose of social monitoring: “The tasks and functions of monitoring are not only the recording of facts and accumulating a data bank, a knowledge bank, but also the analysis of a situation, predicting the consequences of accepted and developed decisions, as well as suggestions for correcting and preventing adverse consequences” (p. 6). First, this research design understood the dynamics of change in the sociopsychological and sociocultural “orientations” and behaviors of sufferer populations and, second, when combined with demographic and economic data from other sources and studies, informed policy decisions regarding the management of a post-Chornobyl society. Understanding this design establishes a foundation for critiquing the DSE’s social monitoring program. By knowing what kinds of data the DSE were most interested in, and that their data were intended to inform policy, we can gauge the efficacy of the program on its own terms and identify the limits of social monitoring with more clarity.

The overall picture of the state of Chornobyl sufferers that these chapters paint is one of frustration, uncertainty, and distrust. Frequently, the authors of these chapters indicate that many of the sufferers’ issues are a direct result of the gap between word and deed, namely, the disconnect between the benefits guaranteed to sufferers and what the state was actually materially able to provide. A chapter titled “Social protection of sufferers of the ChNPP accident” in ChiS 2, for example, prefaces its survey findings with a short overview of the history of sufferers’ social protections; it states that, although a number of laws had been passed guaranteeing sufferers certain rights and benefits, they have been falling far short of the promises. “Four years have passed [since the ChNPP sufferer laws were implemented], and although amendments have been made to these laws, during this time significant contradictions have accumulated between the proclaimed and legally enshrined benefits and compensations which should be provided to the different categories of citizens, and the real conditions of their implementation” ([17] [1995]: p. 60). Writing at the end of a decade of economic turmoil in Ukraine, the authors note that these laws were written when the country was still part of the Soviet Union and could rely on its immense budget to support the sufferers. Within six months of the passing of these social protection laws, the Soviet Union was gone and Russia declined to contribute any resources to the enforcement of these laws. Reflecting on this period 16 years later, one of the authors of this chapter, Chepurko, states:

Changes in the socio-economic conditions of life, the drop in production, and the deepening of the socio-economic crisis in the 1990s led to a marked lowering in the quality of life for the population of Ukraine. The crisis covered all regions of the state, but most deeply the Chornobyl sufferers. In fact, over half of all Ukrainians fell below the poverty line. The suddenly impoverished country, its production ruined, was not able to ensure real and essential assistance for the majority of the poor and unprotected strata of the population (pensioners, invalids, the unemployed) and Chornobyl sufferers.

([19]: p. 158)

The situation for virtually all Ukrainians was so dire in the 1990s that across all the questions the DSE asked, among both groups of sufferers and the control group they surveyed, the only question that registered a majority response for “It got better” was faith in God; Table 1.2 is reproduced and translated.

Table 1.2 “What happened with you in the last year? Which conditions of your life, like financial situation, health, income, and other matters got worse, got better, or didn’t change?” ([15] [1995]: pp. 62–63).

	Category 3 sufferers (n = 300)			Category 4 sufferers (n = 300)			Control group (non-sufferers, n = 300)
	Worse	Better	Same	Worse	Better	Same	Worse	Better	Same
Financial situation	72	3	21	90	1	8	83	1	10
State of health	80	1	15	89	1	6	84	1	10
Psycho-nervous state	66	2	28	76	0	19	72	1	20
Generally how you feel	68	1	24	84	1	10	71	3	19
Income	74	6	16	91	2	5	86	2	10
Nutrition	72	2	22	79	2	16	61	1	34
Living conditions	22	9	67	31	5	62	20	7	70
Household management	10	10	76	21	11	65	10	11	72
Dacha	5	5	80	13	8	69	5	4	58
Business activity	10	5	68	14	7	57	9	2	47
Work conditions	38	4	51	52	5	38	36	7	41
Professional level	9	13	66	19	13	63	15	12	53
General cultural level	21	9	59	32	12	53	26	6	42
Achieving life plans	30	9	45	51	4	32	30	2	44
Relations with family	14	16	63	30	9	55	21	15	61
Relations with people	22	14	55	20	8	66	15	12	67
Leisure, vacation	57	9	29	62	0	32	43	4	35
[Health] treatment	79	2	15	86	2	12	75	2	20
Faith in God	6	47	38	10	47	36	5	50	34
Faith in science	27	9	50	34	8	47	23	10	41
Faith in authority	69	2	20	77	2	12	71	2	13
Faith in family	9	35	47	10	34	52	8	38	44
Faith in one’s self	16	27	41	17	27	46	7	28	43

The data presented in Table 1.2 are useful in that they show how the DSE tracked a variety of variables to assess the harms of the Chornobyl disaster. By including a control group, the DSE could demonstrate the contexts in which sufferers experienced the slow violence of Chornobyl. The results of this 1995 survey show that the social, economic, health, and other circumstances for Ukrainians were so poor that the added burden of dealing with the effects of Chornobyl did not make much difference in the daily lives of sufferers compared to the general population.

By 1999, however, Ukraine’s economic decline had finally started to show signs of stopping, which resulted in a growing gap between the responses from sufferers and control groups to the DSE’s surveys. In ChiS 5 (1999), Sayenko provides an executive summary of the findings from that year’s survey. Across the board, respondents continued to report negative, deteriorating sociopsychological states; the highest rates of negative responses came from the resettled population. He writes in his summary: “The ‘Chornobyl factor’ still has a very negative impact on the social-psychological state of all categories of victims and, especially, on residents of places of resettlement …. The distance from the disaster is still too small to cure the social-psychological trauma. And already far enough to forget about material losses” (p. 9). In stark terms, the DSE’s director reports that overwhelming majorities of groups of sufferers exhibit “distrust of the power structure and active discontent with the social policies of the government” and “distrust of authority” (p. 9); they were not provided with adequate information on how to conduct everyday life activities in a contaminated environment (p. 10); they felt that “people’s wishes were not considered during resettlement” (p. 11); and they were in desperate need of material and medical assistance. For example, Sayenko states,

Among inhabitants of zone 2,⁴ the main necessities are: 1) “financial support” and “individual treatment [of disease]” – 80–82%; 2) “treatment of children” – 46%; 3) “job retraining,” “a workplace,” and “relocation” – 34–38%.

“Among inhabitants of zone 3 the main needs are:⁵ 1) “individual treatment” – 63%; 2) “financial assistance” and “treatment of children” – 53–54%; 3) “a workplace” – 44%; 4) “help with unemployment” – 34%.

Among the resettled the main needs are:⁶ 1) “a workplace” and “individual treatment” – 84%; 2) “financial assistance” – 79%; 3) “treatment of children” – 78%; 4) “help with unemployment” – 71%.

(p. 12)

These responses show a devastating breakdown in the relationship between the state and the sufferers. Promised benefits were slashed in practice, though left in the wording of the law, and the sufferers dependent on those benefits suffered even further. As the DSE turned over its reports to the Chornobyl Ministry and made proposals to the Verkhovna Rada, the law – with its reparative and restorative spirit – remained the same. To again quote Chepurko reflecting on the work done by the DSE, the poor economic situation and decimated state and local budgets “necessarily led to leaving only those types of social assistance that were directly tied to the preservation of sufferers’ health (treatments, rehabilitation in the summer, clean products, children’s nutrition, etc.). All other kinds of assistance were subject to cancellation. But, despite our proposals in this direction, which have been expressed for many years, a new concept of the law on the social protection of Chornobyltsi has not been developed” ([21]: p. 159). By their own admission, despite presenting compelling data that the social protection obligations to sufferers were not being met, the DSE’s social monitoring program was unable to produce the desired political result. Social monitoring did make visible some of the slow social harms of the Chornobyl disaster, but those knowledge-making processes – tailor-made for their audience as they were – not only failed in their objective to alleviate those harms but also, in that failure, compounded the harmful effects of the disaster. The sufferers continued to live with the slow harms of Chornobyl with the super-added burden of knowing that even a respected academic department speaking directly to the Verkhovna Rada and heads of ministries was insufficient to relieve that suffering. In this case, the limits of the social monitoring methodology, the inherited technocratic mode of governance in Ukraine, and the contexts within which both operated and produced each other, in fact, served to legitimize the violence and harm caused by the disaster, or at least to legitimize state inaction in addressing those harms.

The inability of the Ukrainian state to fully administer the social protection benefits that were owed has further compounded the harm done to Chornobyl sufferers. Ceasing funding for continued social monitoring of sufferers also works to obscure those harms, making it even harder for those experiencing the slow EV of Chornobyl to achieve the redress that was promised. The survey responses collected by the DSE also highlight other factors that compounded those harms. For example, in Sayenko’s summary in ChiS 5, he records: “Half of the respondents were not informed of the special measures of living in contaminated territories. The other half were divided thus: 25–40% of the residents of zones 2 and 3 know that it is necessary to put potassium fertilizer in the soil, but only 15% actually do this” ([15] [1999]: p. 10). This finding points back to those base questions about the process of making something visible: If knowledge exists, but it is not shared with those that can make use of it, why do they not know it? Who is responsible for making that knowledge visible to them? What obstacles to visibility exist, and what factors perpetuate those obstacles? Beyond simple visibility, even if something is known, what educational processes are required for people to understand why taking action based on that now-visible knowledge is valuable, beneficial, or necessary?

Slow EV does not just entail a gradual unfolding of harms, but also includes the acceleration and deceleration of compensatory and reconciliatory action as a function of the fluctuations of the visibility of that violence. It takes consistent, dedicated work to render the harms of slow violence visible, and when the spotlight moves away from those harms – whether that is in the form of declining social consciousness, funding cuts, or other crises and violence that emerge and are deemed by various political actors to take precedence – they are much easier to ignore or dismiss; the violence is compounded.

In evaluating the DSE’s processes of knowledge production and their goal of making the many kinds of harm caused by the Chornobyl disaster visible, we can draw a few conclusions about their knowledge production practices. The first is that the methodology of the social monitoring program was shaped and limited by both the academic and scientific traditions within which the faculty of the DSE operated, and the political decisions regarding which data were to be collected. The DSE’s focus on population data is symptomatic of this dynamic, as the concept of social monitoring emerged from the technocratic mode of Soviet knowledge production and the results of the program were primarily targeted at the decision-making bodies of the Ukrainian state. The second is that visibility cannot force desired political outcomes. Simply presenting survey responses and data analyses to the Verkhovna Rada and publishing results did not force the creation of new social protection laws for sufferers or even guarantee that existing legally defined benefit obligations were being met. While visibility does require political action in response, there is always a possibility that that response is to ignore the harms of violence, or to act to reduce the visibility of those harms. The third is that the processes of knowledge production are social – there is no such thing as “pure science.” The faculty of the DSE, the 138 authors of these 271 chapters, are real people with their own internal lives, preferences, cares, worries, and ways of doing things, even if they are engaging in structured systems and processes. Their sympathies and frustrations are laid out on the pages of these academic–scientific volumes, as is the sense that these researchers did not lose sight of the fact that their survey respondents were real people with very real problems. These conclusions are not unique to the work of the DSE. Broadly, they demonstrate how a critical knowledge production approach to assessments of slow EV is useful to understanding how ways of knowing and political action co-construct each other, and how a critique of those co-constructed processes can inform researchers on slow and EV as to the ways by which scientific assessments can either obscure and exacerbate harms or make them visible and motivate action.

1.6 Conclusion

The DSE was but one of many official and unofficial points of knowledge production on the human and environmental impacts of the Chornobyl disaster. However, their social monitoring program and regular access to Ukrainian governmental bodies does situate them in a unique position for discussing how the harms of Chornobyl were made visible. The size, notoriety, historical context, and still-unresolved questions (especially regarding the long-term effects of ionizing radiation) arising from the Chornobyl disaster have attracted many other groups and individuals who have engaged in different knowledge-making processes than that of the DSE. International organizations, such as the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Greenpeace, and charities such as Chernobyl Children International, all have produced regular official reports on various aspects of the effects and harms of the disaster, from the environmental to the human to the regulation of the nuclear industry. Personal narratives of survivors and liquidators, such as those recounted in the works of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich [23], former Chornobyl liquidator Sergiy Mirnyi [24], or anthropologist Adriana Petryna [3], illustrate a human cost of the disaster that is not often captured in those reports, and sometimes directly contradicts their findings.

Each of these knowledge production efforts should be read critically and as mutually creating a new context for understanding the harms of the Chornobyl disaster. For example, the gulfs between official reports on the effects of the Chornobyl disaster and collections of people’s experiences with the effects are large and stark. In the preface to The Politics of Invisibility [4], Olga Kuchinskaya explains how her attempts at bridging those gaps became the basis of that book:

I had taken it as indisputable that Chernobyl had devastating consequences and that Belarus, the country in which I grew up, was most affected by it. The UNSCEAR reports confronted me with the fact that what I considered obvious from my perspective was interpreted as nonexistent from a different—expert and institutionally powerful—position; their judgment was buttressed by claims to objectivity.

(p. ix)

Kuchinskaya’s lived experience, and her friends’ and family’s experiences and narratives of the disaster and its effects, did not match the official findings supported by the United Nations and other groups such as the IAEA and World Health Organization. The specific report she cites, UNSCEAR’s Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation [25], takes a conservative approach to attributing specific health consequences to Chornobyl, excluding from any accounts those effects that cannot solely be attributed to radiation from Chornobyl and only counting radiation sickness and cancer as health consequences.

For people like Kuchinskaya, the language of this report is understandably insufficient for an explanation or investigation and, as she states: “Connections between UNSCEAR and the international nuclear industry became apparent rather quickly; it was not surprising that nuclear industry experts might be motivated to downplay the perceived consequences of a nuclear accident” ([4]: p. viii).

The global nuclear industry certainly took, and continues to take, the Chornobyl disaster seriously. Most prominently, once the causes of the disaster became clear, the IAEA crafted new safety regulations for nuclear power plant operation and the storage and disposal of nuclear waste [24] and worked with the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) to produce a comprehensive report on how Chornobyl changed international law [25]. However, Kuchinskaya’s point is salient – it is in the political interests of the nuclear industry to minimize the harm of the disaster, to check radiophobia tendencies, and to continue to promote the operation and opening of new nuclear plants. Similarly, one can argue that it is in the interests of the Ukrainian government to minimize the effects of Chornobyl. At the time of the disaster, the liquidation efforts were borne by the Soviet Union as a whole. After 1991, the significant costs of maintaining the Zone, operating the remaining three functional reactors at ChNPP, and caring for the sufferer populations fell solely on the Ukrainian state. Even before that, however, the Soviet government was also motivated to minimize the official counts of individuals suffering from the effects of Chornobyl. For example, there is still disagreement between different camps regarding the death toll of the accident, as evidenced by Imanaka’s [28] comparison of the claims of estimated cancer deaths: Greenpeace counts 93 000, the WHO 9000, and the Chernobyl Forum, established in 2005, puts the number at 3940 (p. 18). Each of these three organizations worked to make the effects of Chornobyl visible but, as a result of different methods of knowledge production and different political agendas, they each resulted in wildly different conclusions.

Making the harms of slow and EV visible is a crucial step in assessing those harms. Understanding the ways of knowing and knowledge production processes that go into making harms visible will also reveal the political decisions and actions that shape and are shaped by those processes. A critical knowledge production framework, therefore, is also a tool for analyzing the power structures around the emergent property of visibility of the harms of violence. It can illuminate how the politics of knowledge production can compound and exacerbate harms. It can also serve as a foundation for engaging in direct political action targeted at addressing, reducing, eliminating, and compensating for those harms.

As we have been writing this chapter, the genocidal war of imperialist aggression that Russia is waging on Ukraine entered its eighth year. When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, one of the first areas Russia captured was the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. The mass mobilization of troops and armored units through the sparsely populated Zone kicked up clouds of radioactive dust, reintroducing harmful particles into the air, injuring many, and in their capture of the plant, the Russian army prevented Chornobyl plant workers from leaving the facility for almost a month, forcing them to work to keep the reactor cooling systems running. The Russian occupation of the Zone led immediately to concerns of large-scale contamination events. After Ukrainian forces retook the plant and the Zone on April 3, they discovered that the occupying troops had destroyed 698 computers, 344 vehicles, and 1500 dosimeters in addition to causing significant structural damage to many buildings [29] which will undoubtedly hinder Ukrainian officials’ efforts to monitor and maintain the radioactive safety of the Zone. Time will tell the full scale and scope of the environmental damage perpetrated by the Russian army. When this war concludes, a whole host of actors – the Ukrainian government and the governments of other states, the IAEA and other nuclear safety bodies, scientists and researchers from many disciplines, the International Criminal Court, financial institutions, environmental activists and human rights groups – will all have a part to play in the future of the management of the Zone, the mitigation of the continued environmental harms of the Chornobyl disaster, and the reparations owed to those who continue to suffer from the effects of the radiation from Chornobyl. This war highlights, among many other issues, how the smoldering harms of EV can be reignited and exacerbated much more quickly than they can be mitigated.

Critical knowledge production contains within it the opportunity, if not the tendency, for social justice–based research and scholarly activism. From this approach, investigations of knowledge production explicitly challenge or interrogate the politics of expertise, encourage exploration of nonhegemonic narratives and ontologies, and, in prying open knowledge gaps, create opportunities to disrupt Western academic norms, assumptions, and methods. If we incorporate this framework into our research efforts, not only will we find a greater “potential to foster deeper and richer explanations of the interactions of people and things in various places and spaces” ([5]: p. 261), but we will do so responsibly and ethically. As for the future of the slow EV of Chornobyl, there are no easy solutions or quick fixes, but the new harms resulting from the war, made visible by the preponderance of coverage from news outlets, soldiers’ mobile phone videos shared on social media, and official statements, will necessitate new actions. In our role as knowledge producers concerned with the effects of slow EV we should continue our work to make these harms visible and to forge productive political relationships to minimize the effects of those harms, and to work toward equitable outcomes for sufferers.

2 Cleaning Our Messes The Unprotected Workers Keeping Climate Change at Bay

Jessica McManus Warnell

Engaging Environmental Violence

The chapter examines the communities and workers most impacted by acute climate disasters within the context of business’s role in human rights, stakeholder well-being, and resilience, featuring illustrative examples from Japan and the United States. The disproportionate impact of climate change on the poor and vulnerable is clear, though the role of disaster “first responders” and essential workers is largely missing from academic discourse and policy solutions. Globally, recovery in the wake of environmental disasters falls on underprotected workers. Workers are largely transient, underpaid, and often work without legal protections. These considerations are inextricably linked to business with its tremendous potential for impact. The role of business in climate change, indicted as much of the problem’s genesis and hailed as the source of innovative solutions, is clear. Its responsibilities to these workers and their communities, reflecting a stakeholder conception of business, are significant. The toll of environmental violence and the human rights of those who clean our climate messes must be part of our discourse and our solutions.

2.1 Introduction

Witness the 2021 climate talks of COP26 in Scotland, and 2022’s COP27 in Egypt as this essay goes to press – while politicians meet to negotiate the nuances of climate strategy, people around the globe toil away, cleaning up the world’s environmental messes. The disproportionate impact of climate change on the poor and vulnerable is clear. We are at a better-late-than-never stage of universal reckoning with the implications of climate change, with increasing natural disasters like droughts, hurricanes, and other catastrophes not allowing any of us to look the other way. Climate change presents a curious manifestation of the impacts of psychological distance [1]. Decision-makers in advanced economies utilize temporal, uncertainty, and proximity biases to fail to act in meaningful ways – climate change is perceived to be distant on each of these dimensions. But this is a luxury and a blind spot. Across the world, the costs of doing the dirty work of recovery and rebuilding in the wake of these disasters fall on frontline workers who are largely missing from public discussion and from policy solutions. From the irradiated soil and metal still smoldering in the wake of the triple disaster in Fukushima, Japan, to the communities in the western United States ravaged by wildfires, the workers at the front lines, overexposed and underprotected, rebuild.

References to “frontline workers” have been in the headlines like never before since the COVID-19 pandemic unfurled. Coverage has largely been sympathetic and compassionate, with communities around the world praising workers’ efforts with rousing scenes of families clapping and banging pots on balconies to share their gratitude. Defined quite simply as “employees within essential industries who must physically show up to their jobs” [2], the popular discourse has only provided a glimpse into the vulnerability of this workforce and demands more thoughtful attention. Despite diverse contexts, the issues facing frontline workers have commonalities.

In 2019, I had the privilege of traveling to the Tōhoku region of Japan, including Fukushima, after several years of teaching a course on business and culture in Tokyo, and, for several years before that, examining business ethics in the United States and Japan with colleagues at a Japanese university. Studying business ethics in Japan is incomplete without looking at Fukushima. The disaster is part of the collective memory of the Japanese people. This tragedy touches each corner of the country. The triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown is arguably the most significant environmental disaster in recent memory and is a powerful illustration of natural and man-made disaster and its ramifications. Examining its lessons is more important now than ever as extreme weather events proliferate in the context of climate change. The impacts of these events are inconsistent. Not surprisingly, those communities that have the infrastructure and resources to mitigate them fare much better than those that are struggling even before these major disruptions. But no countries or communities are entirely immune. And when we look more closely at the ways communities of all types rebuild, we see vulnerable workers putting us back together – those workers who do not have the luxury of waiting for the outcomes of abstract policy debates.

At Fukushima Daiichi (plant number one), the cleanup continues, 10 years after the disaster. Since the early days of the tragedy, worker safety has been a concern [3]. Today, a rotating group of laborers are recruited by companies [4] contracted by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the owner and operator of the plant whose reactors were designed and maintained by General Electric. Here, I am not describing the brave and dedicated engineers and plant employees who worked around the clock in the hours after the earthquake and tsunami, who saved Japan from an even more destructive event, and whose efforts have been chronicled in major motion pictures. Rather, this is the clean-up crew. This employment system in practice translates to many workers who are subcontracted day laborers, who work for a short period of time, and who are recruited from temp agencies from among the un- and underemployed across Japan. Some are homeless and many are migrants [5]. They have been largely unprotected from radiation under “state of emergency” rules that lift recommended dosage limits and other worker protections [6].

Years after the disaster, in the communities that had been devastated by the earthquake and tsunami even before the radiation contamination, I saw workers in white protective gear pushing back as nature retook some of her land, with trees sprouting in alleyways and vines crawling across the rubble of flattened storefronts. Scholars note that, despite the magnitude and singularity of this event, the phenomenon of these “invisible” workers and the labor brokers who employ them is not unique to Fukushima, nor is it new. The most vulnerable have been cleaning up our messes as long as we have been making them. All the while, the world debates substantive action.

2.2 Climate Talks and the Business of Disaster

The already fragile hopes that meaningful consensus on the ways forward would emerge from 2021’s COP26 international climate talks faded fast, even while the events were still underway. While protesters swarmed (peacefully) through the streets of Glasgow, the scene was disappointing inside the conference hall. Countries walked back pledges [7] made earlier in the week. The COP26 President had to send a memo mid-conference to delegates who couldn’t seem to agree on much of anything, imploring them to stop quibbling and take steps toward tangible decision-making [8]. Despite some bright spots [9] such as the inclusion of language supporting a phase-down of coal and new rules for carbon trading, the consensus among global advocates and environmental policymakers is that COP26 was largely a failure [10]. The talks were long on promises and devastatingly short on details for implementation.

COP27 does not appear to be a cause for optimism. The talks have been described as “chaotic,” “exasperating,” and short on substance [11]. At the convening’s close, headlines described its ending in “tears and frustration” as attendees bemoaned the lack of meaningful progress [12]. If the guest list is any indication, it is illustrative to note that representation by delegates linked to the fossil fuel industry, including lobbyists, who even at COP26 in 2021 made up the largest single group represented, saw their presence increase by 25% at COP27, more than the combined delegations from the 10 countries most impacted by climate change [13]. With optimism we might note that this signals new levels of commitment. But representation matters, and those most impacted have been missing from the discourse and continue to do the work. While the talks continue, so does the suffering of those who are bearing the costs of environmental degradation.

This front-line worker vulnerability is certainly not limited to climate disasters. Witness the workers along global supply chains [14] getting necessary equipment where it needs to go, the warehouse employees [15] keeping shelves stocked, and the hospital cleaning staff [16] keeping our facilities free from germs. Frontline workers across sectors face low pay, little opportunity for advancement, and less benefits like sick leave, and their roles are disproportionately filled by workers of color [17]. This phenomenon of the most vulnerable as first responders happens around the world. Research on disasters and their impact on poor communities reveals a vicious cycle of heightened vulnerability. Poverty reduction should be considered alongside disaster recovery when it comes to policy response to both issues [18]. Disruptions like disasters and pandemics offer a silver lining of providing a clear look at what is working and what is not. Recovery can be more equitable and more environmentally sustainable [19], but these transformations after disruptions require commitment.

And still, there are so many unresolved catastrophes at Fukushima. At the forefront of most discussions these days is what to do with the more than a million metric tons of contaminated water. The Japanese government has announced they will begin discharging it into the ocean, with the area’s fishermen among the most vulnerable to, and impacted by, this decision [20]. Of course, other areas of the world could feel this impact, along with that of the millions of cubic meters of contaminated soil that no one wants to store. Workers, over 70 000 of them, removed the topsoil, branches, grass, and other materials in a drive to decontaminate so evacuees could return. I had the luck and privilege to witness the clean-up, briefly and from a safe distance, and to walk away.

So, what do nuclear clean-up crews in Japan and those who rebuild the US coasts after extreme weather have in common? [21] These laborers, largely transient, coming from communities other than those where they are working, are underpaid and under protected. They are often working without the coverage of labor law, often as subcontractors of the subcontractors, where no one is watching. Considering the United States alongside a country like Japan offers important advantages. Both countries have robust market systems, democratic governments, and critical economic and security relationships that can provide mutually informative lessons in environmental response in ways that other case studies may not. Profiles of migrant workers who follow climate disasters [22] shine a light on the backbreaking labor [23] done by this transient transitory workforce. They are often immigrants, largely ineligible for financial and healthcare aid.

And the business of disaster response is booming [24]. Consider recent history: In 2020, the United States set a record for the costliest disasters ever – with total costs reaching $95 billion – representing 22 billion-dollar disasters (including a record number of named tropical storms and the most active wildfire year on record) [25]. Projections for disaster costs in the years ahead are unsurprisingly dire. In the United States, disaster response and emergency relief consist of about 1100 companies representing a $11 billion industry [26]. Consolidation is increasing and the number of distinct enterprises is trending downward. Projections in the industry note a likelihood of increased vulnerability due to factors including rising sea levels. These factors should be considered within the context of their implications for human rights.

2.3 Environmental Violence and the Human Rights Framework

Marcantonio and Fuentes [27] review the existing inconsistent and insufficient descriptions of the term environmental violence (EV) and develop a useful definition and analytical model of EV that allows for tracking, measuring, and ultimately reducing it. Thus, EV is “direct and indirect harm experienced by humans due to toxic and no-toxic pollutants put into a local – and concurrently the global – ecosystem through human activities and processes.” As a framework, EV “specifies and centers excess human-produced pollution as a violent environmental health hazard,” recognizing that EV: arises as part of dynamic socio-ecological processes; is facilitated by structural and cultural contexts; is mediated by human vulnerability to it; and exacerbates and creates harm and power differentials at individual, community, regional, and global scales [27]. Here there is a profound connection between this conceptualization of EV and the experiences of the individuals and communities who respond to disasters. The frame of human rights, reflecting consensus on our responsibilities to one another in this context, provides useful guidance as we consider what ought to be done.

Worker rights are fundamentally human rights, and the most direct form of EV experienced by disaster responders is their disproportionate bearing of the costs of our economic and social activities. The natural hazards that escalate into disasters through the ways humans contribute and respond to them become tied to worker livelihoods without adequate protections. The human rights framework, outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) [28], offers guidance for the universal consideration of the rights of workers. This milestone document, developed through engagement with private, civic, and government leaders, recognizes that inherent human dignity is the foundation of just and peaceful societies. Work, the primary means for sustenance and survival, is addressed directly. Article 23 of the framework acknowledges the right to just and favorable working conditions, and just and favorable remuneration “ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity ….” While the UDHR does not provide all the answers to how these principles can be actionalized, it is clear that there is a moral obligation at play, one that rests on the fundamental conditions of human dignity.

An interpretive guide for business takes the UDHR a step further – and ensures it is accessible to business leaders, who are responsible for making most of the decisions on the conditions in which work itself will be done [29]. Additional consideration is prompted by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, Goal 8 advocates for the promotion of “sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.” Provision 8.8 makes clear its attention to vulnerable workers: “Protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments for all workers, including migrant workers, in particular women migrants, and those in precarious employment.”

Enderle’s (2021) work reminds us of the promise of the human rights framework – it allows for universal application, independent of citizenship, guaranteed simply through human birthright. It is accessible to all, a bridge between worldviews, and it liberates – and has provided the foundation for international law, platforms for NGOs around the world, and a model for bills of rights in countries across the globe [30]. The interpretive guide for business offers a “protect, respect, remedy” conception, translating the principles of human rights into actionable guidance.

Ruggie’s (2011) work developing this framework, informed by years of research and consultations with businesses, civic organizations, governments, and victims of corporate abuses, recognizes three key ideas. First, states have a duty under international human rights law to protect everyone within their jurisdiction or territory from abuses caused by business – this duty translates to effective laws, regulations, and mechanisms for access to effective remedy for those who have been impacted. Second, businesses have the responsibility to respect human rights where they operate, whatever their size or industry. This duty includes knowing actual or potential risks, preventing and mitigating abuses, and addressing adverse impacts. Finally, the framework recognizes the fundamental rights of communities and of individuals to access effective remedy when rights have been adversely affected by business activities. States must ensure that the people affected can access remedy through the courts or other legitimate processes. Companies are expected to establish or participate in these mechanisms [31].

Key here is the idea that the business community has the proximity, power and resources, and the inherent association through causality, to lead efforts to ensure humane conditions for workers. Inherent rights prompt the corollary of our duties to ensure they are protected. While robust regulations are fundamental, the intersection of power and responsibility calls on our business leaders to lead.

Disaster cleanup can certainly be good and noble work when paid fairly and done in conditions that have been made as safe as reasonably possible. However, far too often this rosy scenario is far from the reality on the ground. The workers rebuilding our communities after these catastrophes are vulnerable to harms from wage theft to labor trafficking, and other violations of human rights and dignity. In the wake of disasters, workers face barriers to healthcare access. They often work in conditions characterized by extreme temperatures [32], exposure to harmful bacteria, chemicals, and other contaminants, and hazards such as electrocution, falls, and other injuries [33]. These workers are at high risk [34] for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health impacts [35]. Underreporting of harms is rampant, often due to the workers’ fragile footing in their communities. Wage theft, in the form of underpaid or unpaid overtime, bounced checks, or other violations, is rampant. The status of the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), with significant funding cuts under the previous administration, even despite being historically underfunded, means labor inspection and compliance offices are underresourced and understaffed.

These considerations of environmental justice extend to diverse contexts, such as climate displacement and migration, issues which seem to merit some media coverage, at least if one knows where to look. The workers who are the first responders, however, seem to be exempt even from this cursory attention. Perhaps this invisibility reflects our assumptions that these workers are freely opting into this work and have calculated that the risk is worth the reward. However, this reading reflects a profound misunderstanding of what it means to “choose.” Kalleberg (2009) reminds us that precarious work “transfers social and economic risks from businesses and state institutions on to workers through common features like low pay, employment insecurity and insufficient social protection,” while particularly vulnerable to perpetuating a cycle of labor “opportunities” that offer no rights or protections.

There are many ways the dignity and human rights of workers must merit our attention. This is just one. The work we do connects us to one another and to the resources and abundance of our environment. Work is necessary for our sustenance, a vehicle for fulfillment, and a way to realize our humanity. A decent society requires decent work. Acknowledgement of those who rebuild after disaster feels missing as the world watches climate talks and the latest extreme weather event featured on the nightly news. Disasters and their intersection with human rights have many dimensions [36]. Worker dignity and protections are issues of human rights and, within the machinery of disruption and its management, those who are the closest to the response itself are often the most invisible.

2.4 Protecting Those Who Clean Our Messes

The business of disaster response is booming, and projections are dire. A throughline is the “invisible” laborers who represent our first response. There are steps we can take to better protect the human rights of these workers who are doing our dirty work.

The unitary government in Japan and the federal government in the United States – those administrations that have the most power over policy and that grant the contracts for disaster recovery – have the potential for tremendous impact and can provide a model for other countries around the world. These governments can act by strengthening regulatory protections and rewarding those companies that offer safer conditions and fairer wages. The role of business in climate change makes the headlines every day, with companies indicted as much of the problem’s genesis and hailed as the source of innovative solutions. Business leaders have tremendous potential to impact the collective responses moving forward. We have counsel from frameworks like the UDHR and its guidance for business. We must translate that guidance into action. In 2022, financial regulators in Japan announced a revision in the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s corporate governance code to include a provision requiring that companies “protect human rights.” It was stipulated that boards of directors should recognize human rights as vital both to responsibility and to enhancing corporate value, and recommended actions such as ensuring fair labor conditions for overseas partners. Also in 2022, the US Securities and Exchange Commission proposed requiring environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures in corporate reporting, a proposal that is under review and will most certainly undergo changes but is a step with the potential to shine a light on employee rights. These steps reflect growing attention to the need for both “carrots” and “sticks” – regulatory mechanisms and appeals to the benefits of creating stakeholder value – to incentivize companies to improve their environmental, social, and governance efforts. Now we must implement them. Without doing so, we are failing those who are most impacted by climate disasters – from the most vulnerable communities digging out, rebuilding, and relocating, to those doing the very work necessary to dig us out [37].

Increasing transparency about these operations is a precursor to equitable improvements. Which companies are being awarded the contracts to manage the response to these catastrophes, and what are the conditions of the work that is to be done? What protections are in place for the workers, and what is their recourse if they fall to harm? This transparency requires workers and their advocates to have a place at the table [38] when decisions about climate response are made. This representation extends to environmental policy in general. For just one example, consider that despite the fact that indigenous people make up 5% of the global population but protect 80% [39] of the world’s biodiversity, some reported questions about their access to the most recent COP talks [40]. There have been other criticisms about underrepresentation of the poorer, and particularly vulnerable, countries. In the wind-up to COP27, leaders of several African countries, poorly equipped to adapt to the effects of climate change that are driven by other parts of the world, gathered in a UN-backed meeting to discuss adaptation; their Western counterparts largely declined invitations to attend [41]. Who [42] has a seat at this table [43] when decisions are made, and whose voices are most resonant? Who is ultimately responsible for worker well-being? An additional complexity at Fukushima was the makeup of the response. GE and TEPCO successfully held off lawsuits by US service members who claimed radiation exposure, citing Japan’s provenance – a finding that releases US-based GE, from any liability [44]. These ideas of inclusive stakeholder engagement are not new, but stakeholder representation is the only way to ensure equitable ways forward. Nobel prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom provided important insights into the principle of subsidiarity [45]. While governments must act in supporting communities and protecting citizens from all manner of strife, local-level stakeholders have a critical voice and their potential for meaningful action in the face of disasters must be acknowledged and prioritized. In addition, Freeman’s seminal work on the stakeholder theory of management (2010) is notable here for two reasons: first, it reminds us that businesses must be part of comprehensive solutions and not marginalized nor framed solely in opposition to climate policy discussions; second, it implores us to acknowledge that value creation of our businesses must extend to those who are impacted by their actions, not least of all those who are most vulnerable.

Measuring impact and producing clearer data is key. The challenges of measuring impact and the alphabet soup of organizations charged with reporting ESG impacts of our corporations lack standardization, widespread adoption, and comprehensive accounting for impact. Accurately allowing our market mechanisms to account for environmental and social harms requires that we mitigate the information asymmetry between decision-makers – including workers “electing” to do this work despite lack of full awareness of its harms or of their rights, for just one example. We must also recognize the first generation problem – that environmental and social protections most often come about in a market economy after a “first generation” of people or of resources have been irrevocably harmed, bringing the true costs of an activity to light. Our task then becomes gathering substantive information and communicating it persuasively to stakeholders and to decision-makers. This includes data on competitive and fair pay, numbers and conditions of the work of subcontracted employees, and related information. To do this work justly requires that we adopt an honest and transparent approach to the true impacts of business activity – a precursor to rational decision-making about policy and practice.

All of these considerations demand rethinking disaster preparedness and community resilience. Recognizing that these are compound disasters [46] – complex crises like natural hazards intersecting with poverty or other socioeconomic challenges – and that they will only continue to increase means that we examine our institutions and processes and develop their capacities to respond effectively and equitably. Current risk assessments and tools for disaster preparedness like the Sendai framework fail to adequately account for social and structural injustice. Data and frameworks only lead to human flourishing when they are considered in the context of the social conditions and with diverse stakeholders contributing to and benefiting from preparations and interventions.

These questions prompt me to consider where we are as a society more generally. In this other tremendous disruption, the pandemic, many of us are becoming quite adept at technologies that require us to communicate in new ways. Our screens are pointed at each other like never before. We watch videos of catastrophic environmental destruction; it is much harder to plead ignorance about or downplay injustice when we can see it. The excuse of psychological distance is no longer valid, if it ever was. We tell our students that reflection – the need to make sense of what we are seeing and doing – is a critical skill. And we know that reflection often precedes change. Multisector collaboration, stakeholder engagement, and thoughtful consideration of comprehensive and representative data are key. Shining a light is a critical step. We owe those who are doing our dirty work our attention and our esteem. While we quibble about policy and calculate degrees of average temperature increase before we pass the point of no return, let us look, and not forget, the workers who do not have the luxury to project and calculate and debate, and who are patching what is broken, rebuilding what has been destroyed, staving off disaster.

3 Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific Counter-mapping and Counter-narrating Indigenous Space in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean

Lydia Schoeppner

Environmental Violence Statement

As a result of anthropogenic climate change, Inuit in the Arctic and island inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean both experience interrelated changes in their maritime environments. Global warming causes Arctic ice to melt, which leads to rising sea levels. As a result, local inhabitants in both regions experience the disappearance of their space (land and ice), paired with the arrival of new stakeholders with a diverse range of interests in the areas. As the inhabitants of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, Inuit and Pacific islanders have engaged in counter-mapping and counter-narrating their space that colonial powers have previously conceptualized as isolated, remote, and peripheral – a perspective rooted in the western understanding of the ocean as “mare nullius” (empty ocean) paired with a terrestrial bias toward the land over the ocean. In contrast, the maps of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific illustrate and tell the stories of transnational spaces that have been collectively shared and used since time immemorial. These counter-mapping and counter-narrative approaches shape a new perception of the regions. They directly engage with existing international regimes like the International Maritime Organization and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to construct (potential) protected areas and fixed exclusive economic zones to protect and ensure sovereignty over larger maritime environments. Representing and speaking for a large geographic space consisting of land and water, both groups are amplifying their voices to address conditions caused by environmental violence (EV). This chapter contributes to conceptual development of EV by discussing case studies of counter-mapping and counter-narration in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean – as locals’ responses to experiences of structural and cultural violence to overcome their vulnerability, to challenge power differentials, and to satisfy their human needs.¹

3.1 Introduction: Environmental Violence (EV) and Environmental Peace (EP)

The model proposed and illustrated by Marcantonio and Fuentes in this publication incorporates EV within a larger framework that illustrates conditions leading to EV, repercussions resulting from EV, as well as all their interconnections. Focusing on human-produced toxic and non-toxic pollution as the main cause of EV, the model helps explain how structural and cultural violence can facilitate EV, further exacerbating local vulnerability and leading to, but also caused by, unequal distribution of harm and power among those experiencing EV, which, in turn, further reinforces forms of structural and cultural violence. Referencing Johan Galtung, the model defines EV as “any avoidable insult to basic human needs,” lowering “the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible.” EV causes vulnerability – a determinant of human security – which is the “condition that exists when the vital core of human lives is protected and when people have the freedom and capacity to live with dignity. […] The vital core of human lives includes the universal and culturally specific, material and non-material elements necessary for people to act on behalf of their interests.” In his assessment of violence against nature, Galtung discusses how pollution, industrial depletion, and commercialization cause global warming with consequences that are invisible to the perpetrators. The underdogs – those experiencing the violent effects of global warming (first and worst, like Inuit and Pacific islanders) – are marginalized.

The impacts of anthropogenic climate change in the Arctic and the Pacific regions have been illustrated in depth elsewhere, outlining how structural and cultural violence have not only marginalized Inuit and Pacific islanders, but simultaneously exposed them to the forefront of experiencing EV caused by climate change. The Arctic is currently warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. One of the most obvious and serious effects of a warming Arctic is the melting of ice, resulting in a global sea level rise. In both areas, these changes have serious impacts on the lives of local inhabitants. In a 2005 petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Inuit in the United States and Canada outlined how climate change–induced impacts effectively damage Inuit livelihoods and, thus, constitute a human rights violation:

Because Inuit culture is inseparable from the condition of their physical surroundings, the widespread environmental upheaval resulting from climate change violates Inuit’s rights to practice and enjoy their culture.

The petition also argued that we were being denied the right to use and enjoy our traditional lands, as the land was either changing or becoming inaccessible. The fact that we were unable to hunt as before for food and for hides and skins for clothing and that the loss of ice and snow was damaging our snow machines, our sleds and our other tools was a violation of our right to personal property. The Western store-bought diet we were being forced to adopt, the accidents caused by melting ice and snow, and our increasing exposure to UV radiation, among other things, meant that our rights to health and life were being severely constrained.

The petition also stated that our fundamental right to residence and movement was being violated as our homes were damaged and the land upon which many of our communities were built was being eroded by melting permafrost. And finally, Inuit’s fundamental right to their own means of subsistence was being denied as climate change was hurting almost every aspect of our hunting culture: the quantity and quality of wildlife, the length of the hunting season, methods of traveling and the ability of our Elders to pass on traditional knowledge.

In a regional security declaration, Pacific Island leaders confirmed that climate change is the “single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.” Living in regions that are often perceived as peripheral and remote, both Inuit and Pacific islanders are already marginalized. Given climate change’s severe effects in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean, both groups also experience a higher level of vulnerability as they are unequally harmed by climate change. These realities constitute conditions of EV, according to Marcantonio and Fuentes’ model. Negative climate change impacts in both regions (melting ice and rising sea levels) have become noticeable, while many other regions around the world experience much less severe effects. Inuit and Pacific islanders are highly vulnerable to climate change with a limited ability to resist. Broadly stated, the effects of climate change deprive Inuit and Pacific islanders of the fulfillment of their human rights, security and safety needs as well as their need for shelter and identity. While both groups are at the forefront of experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change, both also find themselves in the back seat of climate change policy-making, reflecting existing power differentials in international politics that are dominated by wealthy nation states, rather than transnational ethnic groups.

Counter-mapping and counter-narrating are two approaches chosen by Inuit and Pacific islanders to lower their vulnerability, and to overcome existing power differentials and conditions of structural and cultural violence. These are the encompassing and interconnected concepts that surround, facilitate, and mediate EV in Marcantonio and Fuentes’ holistic model. Looking at climate change in both regions as case studies, this chapter focuses on peoples’ ways of addressing and overcoming EV in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean.

3.2 Colonial Conceptualization of Space: Terrestrial Bias and Terra/Mare Nullius

Metis scholar Adam Gaudry writes the following about the power of maps: “Cartography has long been an imperial enterprise used to claim territory and to imagine the geographic reach of empires. In its imperial usage, map-making is an instrument of Indigenous erasure.” Maps are powerful tools, as their makers can decide to either express or omit certain aspects, and “it matters whether you are on the map or not.” The arrival of colonizers often results in a region’s mapping through western cartography, guided by a “terrestrial bias” that clearly prioritizes land over water and, in doing so, clearly separates both. At the same time, colonizers were also driven by a belief in the emptiness of the land and water (terra/mare nullius). Here, oceans are perceived as “unpeopled and lawless space in between the terrestrial spaces that really matter.” Structural violence is caused by unequal distribution of power, and cultural violence’s teachings portray such inequality and repression as normal. Colonial maps are “powerful symbols that tell stories of an empty, remote, barren, uninhabited, and harsh Arctic,” ethnocentric effects of a power differential between the colonizer and the colonized.

Maps of the Arctic ignored and neglected Indigenous occupancy rights and simply show small and isolated Inuit settlements (which were established by the Canadian government) in an otherwise vastly unpopulated region. Arctic waters are portrayed as shipping corridors, failing to illustrate the many existing interconnections between the communities. While inhabitants of Arctic communities connect via planes or boat, conventional maps of Canada show only roads and rails – infrastructure indicating Western-style (historical) residence and land use. Looking at the other side of the globe, imagined geographies of the Pacific conceived the region in colonial maps as the South Seas, South Pacific, Indo-Pacific, or the Maritime Silk Road with the Pacific Islands as “small and isolated places, months of perilous sail away from Western capitals,” obscuring, neglecting, or ignoring the fact that Pacific islanders live in an interconnected “sea of islands with their inhabitants” – Oceania – with their own unique perspectives and concerns. Oceania was cut into tiny spaces, and its islanders were isolated from each other when colonial boundaries were drawn in the region. Cultural violence (land over water, center over periphery) served to justify acts of structural violence in the subjugation of local populations, and processes of marginalization kept the colonized on the outside and separated from each other.

European voyages of colonization in the Pacific Islands started in the sixteenth century, intensifying in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In what is today the Canadian Arctic, European traders, whalers, and explorers arrived in the late seventeenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, the first missionaries established themselves among Inuit, followed by European whalers in the nineteenth century. Greenland became a Danish colony in 1721, marking the beginning of colonialism on the world’s largest island. Map-making was part of the colonizing process, and the Arctic region and the Pacific Islands have been stereotyped as empty frontier,² exposing local inhabitants to colonialism’s structural and cultural violence.

3.3 Inuit Nunangat

Most Inuit communities are located on coasts or waterways, reflecting the importance of the sea for the Inuit way of life. Inuit mobility systems essentially undermine the colonial belief in empty Arctic space and challenge the western bias toward terrestrial over maritime space. For Inuit, the Arctic is a place of connectivity and interdependence filled with history, stories, memories, resources, relationships:

Because of seasonal Inuit mobility and residence patterns before permanent settlements were established, the Arctic is filled with historically inhabited residence areas (camp sites) that are outside their present-day settlements and that acted as meeting points for Inuit from different neighboring regions. Home for Inuit communities was not associated with a single area but a geographic range within which people moved according to well-known seasonal events. Such a sense of home is still observed today, even after generations of living in permanent settlements.

“Home” describes a transnational space for Inuit that goes well beyond a single location, including terrestrial and maritime space which continues to be used by Inuit. Names of places are remembered and often mark wind directions, the presence of animals, landing places, lakes, landmarks, or refer to harvesting locations. To understand the concept of Inuit homeland means moving away from static concepts of place and of communities located in certain fixed locations. As a semi-nomadic culture, Inuit lives have been determined by changes in the environment (e.g., the condition of snow and ice) and the animals’ seasonal movements. In order to survive, Inuit have developed intricate knowledge about their maritime environment, which includes knowledge about animals, the weather, hunting practices, and the topography.

Inuk storyteller Michael Kusugak explains that the Inuktitut term for map is nunannguag – “representation of land.” Contrary to western definitions of land, the sea ice and open waters in the Arctic are also essential parts of the circumpolar topography for Inuit. As a maritime people, Inuit lives and cultures are closely connected with the sea and its animals, and Inuit “have used the ocean in all seasons and in all states, from open water to solid sea ice.” In fact, the very act of differentiating between land and maritime areas in the Arctic can be tricky, given that sea ice can function as an extension of the terrestrial space. This means that shores and the floe edge (the area between landfast ice and open water) are actually not dividers between land and sea, but rather serve as connectors between both. The floe edge is a particularly special and dynamic space with substantial ice movement and an abundance of marine animals.

The circumpolar north has been the home of Inuit for thousands of years. As a result of colonialism, the space inhabited by Inuit was divided among four nation states: Canada, Denmark (Greenland), the US (Alaska), and Russia (Chukotka). Today, Inuit in the circumpolar north are citizens of these nation states, but they continue to perceive themselves as a transnational people – an imagined community – across terrestrial and maritime national borders. In 2009, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the Canadian national Inuit organization, adopted the term “Inuit Nunangat” for the Inuit homeland. ITK’s map of Inuit Nunangat in Canada shows a common territorial and cultural space, and it is meant to replace the more generalized concept of the “Arctic” or the “North.” This term, Inuit Nunangat, shaped by Canadian Inuit, is inclusive of land, water, and ice, and it will be used in this chapter to describe the entire transnational Inuit space spanning four nation states.

Inuit maritime navigation relied on the trained eye and good memory which helped with locating and remembering landmarks. Remembering old placenames used by ancestors, combined with traditional knowledge of the stars, wind, sun, and ridges in snow, and understanding the messages communicated by Inukshuit, Inuit were able to deduct their traveling direction and confidently journey across great distances. Inuit are transnational travelers in the Arctic Ocean. Aporta and Watt explain how winter sled trails are first trodden by experienced hunters, using their memory, followed by others either in the same tracks or in slightly different tracks, “due to seasonal conditions and personal preferences.” Very well-trodden trails are like highways that allow for faster travel. These trails visualize the seasonality of Inuit life in the Arctic. Aporta calls these trails “arteries through which news, goods, and people have traveled, seasonally, for centuries.”

3.4 Counter-Mapping and Counter-Narrating Space

Maps are tools of storytelling, and they can be used as a means of emancipation and to advance processes of self-determination. Counter-maps bring to the forefront stories of those that other cartography has marginalized and made invisible, creating “alternative representations of territory and the practices in it.” Counter-mapping is a critical cartography approach that looks closely at the role of power in the creation of maps and calls for alternative representations. As storytelling tools, maps can be employed in counter-story work – to tell about the experiences of the marginalized that are often silenced, and to strengthen “traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance.” As such, this approach is a decolonial strategy, an element of critical race methodology and theory that focuses on racially oppressed peoples’ rights and epistemologies.

“Counter-mapping challenges western-type appropriation of local peoples’ homes through the colonial enterprise, not just to reclaim resources and land, but imageries as well.” As a theory and method, counter-mapping pushes back against colonial powers, as it recognizes that “what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent.” This is a good example of the employment of cultural violence to justify other forms of violence. This process – termed the sociology of absences by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos – is countered by the sociology of emergences. Counter-mapping of colonialized space can also be an activity of empowerment and reconciliation, as it helps visualize previously invisible Inuit mobility and residence patterns to recognize the “historical presence of Inuit in the Arctic lands and waters”. Moreover, such approaches can help generate a more accurate representation of space use, to create a framework for understanding Inuit ontologies “but also the entire sociological system and the seasonality of resources.” A similar argument can be made for the Pacific islanders. In the words of Gaudry:

Indigenous peoples also use maps to re-inscribe older ways of understanding geographic spaces, to replace the lines of nation-states, provinces and other boundaries with borderlines and edges of our own. Mapping our spaces, in both contemporary and historical practice, protects Indigenous peoples from imperial erasure. Map-making is therefore a deeply political process, as it is a process of world-creation. Whether it is creating a world that hides Indigenous conceptions of space, place and territory, or one that establishes a world of ongoing Indigenous nationhood, how we draw maps goes hand-in-hand with how we understand the world we live in. […] Today, re-mapping (and perhaps also de-mapping) the places now claimed by Canada allows us to assert ongoing Indigenous presence in our homelands. But beyond this, by re-inscribing ourselves onto our landscapes, we can also envision a different world – a world built on Indigenous persistence and political rebirth. By displacing the taken-for-granted representations most of us learned from the maps that hung on our elementary school blackboard, we can also dislodge the permanency of the political world in which we live.

Such “taken-for-granted representations” are signposts of cultural violence that normalizes repression. Re-mapping or de-mapping both challenge the notion of Western-based printed map-making. Before the term “counter-mapping” even existed, Inuit map-making and map-keeping (and related stories) took place orally and relied on remembering. More recently, Inuit have started creating printed maps to illustrate their traditional use of the sea ice. These efforts of “counter-mapping” include information from community-led or community-sponsored participatory projects to “create representations of the Arctic that have not been reflected in public or official maps.” Aporta and Watt argue that Inuit mobility systems (and maps of these trails) can help visualize Inuit connections between communities, shaping our understanding of Inuit use of their marine and terrestrial environment. In doing so, the mapping of trails can help illustrate the social life of an Arctic inhabited by Inuit, the deep contemporary and historic connections Inuit have with each other across communities, regions and national borders, and they help visualize that “Inuit knowledge and occupancy is tied to both marine and land areas.” Inuit routes in the Arctic are real, have been used over generations, and are remembered by Inuit. These routes consisting of walking trails, sled trails, and boat routes – used since time immemorial – seamlessly connect terrestrial and maritime spaces. Such “cartographic representations of trails are unique in illustrating the spatial and […] temporal dimensions of this relationship,” and they highlight how marine areas in the Arctic constitute an essential part of Inuit Nunangat.

Starting in the 1970s, Inuit modern treaty negotiations with the Canadian government were based on Inuit land use and occupancy studies. These counter-mapping efforts relied on the methodology of map biographies, composed of individual “recollections of activities on and memories on the land,” collected through interviews with Inuit in multiple communities. Individual contributions were then merged and compiled into a map. This process that mixed Inuit oral tradition with Western mapping helped generate important evidence of Inuit land use and tenure.

The transnational nature of Inuit mobility systems can also be understood as political statements recognizing the Inuit homeland as spanning across or beyond national jurisdictions. Since its creation in the 1970s, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), a transnational Indigenous non-governmental organization that represents the voice of all circumpolar Inuit on the national and international levels, has worked to foster Inuit transnationalism through circumpolar cooperation among Inuit and with Arctic governments. Of specific importance are three recent landmark studies and participatory mapping efforts to promote counter-mapping and counter-narrating processes – forms of protest against a mainstream narrative using documentary resistance: a 2008 study of the sea ice, and two 2017 studies on the Northwest Passage and the Northwater Polynya – all transnational spaces used by Inuit.

3.4.1 The Sea Ice Is Our Highway

The 2008 report The Sea Ice is Our Highway was issued by the ICC to provide an “Inuit perspective on the human dimension of shipping” by investigating Inuit sea ice use. The report emphasizes that Inuit life, culture, and identity rest, not only on terrestrial movement, but also on free movement on the ice for food consumption as well as obtaining resources and supplies for making art and clothing to keep their cultural heritage alive. Inuit continue to hunt and harvest traditional foods, requiring them to travel great distances to find animals, which are constantly on the move. More specifically, Inuit venture out to hunt different migratory animals at specific times during a season when the animals move through their areas. The floe edge – the area where the sea ice ends and the open water starts – is a particularly good place to hunt sea mammals. Depending on a community’s location, the floe edge could be close or several hours away.

Hunting and being on the land are important elements of Inuit culture as they connect the present with the past.³ Importantly, the sea ice and open sea are seasonal variations of the same “highway,” which has important repercussions for the Inuit understanding of “land”:

When defining our “land,” Inuit do not distinguish between the ground upon which our communities are built and the sea ice upon which we travel, hunt, and build igloos as temporary camps. Land is anywhere our feet, dog teams, or snowmobiles can take us.

The sea – liquid or frozen – constitutes an important constant in the everyday lives of Inuit in the circumpolar north. The sea has traditionally been used for general travel and transportation, but also for hunting and harvesting. The effects of climate change have impacted the migration routes of land and sea animals. Due to their dependency on sea ice, many animals have to move further out to find ice, forcing Inuit hunters to travel further than before to find and hunt polar bears, seals, or walruses.⁴ For Inuit, their own long-distance travel requirements for cultural and subsistence purposes necessitate free movement over the sea and land, and climate change is adding increased urgency to advocate for it. Additionally, climate change has also increased the attractiveness of the Arctic waterways for newcomers driven by economic and touristic interests. The arrival of these new agents in Inuit Nunangat is often accompanied and directed by externally driven agendas and ways of doing with little interest in consulting with Inuit or acknowledging Inuit preferences. Tourists visiting Inuit communities often avoid spending money locally (for example to purchase handmade art or eat local food) and often visit locations like the local church and museum that are reminiscent of the history of colonialism in the region. Inuit are vulnerable to EV caused by climate change. This vulnerability is noticeable when hunters need to travel longer distances to find animals, but also when undertones of cultural violence seem to normalize – and help explain – the lack of visitors’ engagement with local Inuit.

3.4.2 The Nilliajut 2 Report

Nilliajut 2 is a document issued in 2017 by the Inuit Qaujisarvingat (Inuit Knowledge Center) at the ITK in Canada. In English, the publication translates into “to speak up, speak out,” and it consists of written contributions of 10 Inuit from Canada and Greenland who shared their unique perspectives on the Northwest Passage, shipping, and marine issues in the Arctic. Highlighting that the Inuit homeland consists of land, water, and ice, the report leaves no question about the Northwest Passage being a part of the Inuit homeland. Thus, the Northwest Passage is understood as an extension of the land and considered one of many travel “highways” in the Arctic.

In the first essay, Greenlandic Inuk leader Aqqaluk Lynge illustrates the many cultural commonalities shared by Inuit across national borders: stories, legends, language, way of life, and history. These connections were interrupted by the creation of national borders: Inuit “are a small nation who occupies the vast territory of human kind. It is only the national states formed some 300 years ago that divide us.” Lynge also uses the term “highway” to describe the ice bridges connecting the Inuit world. In another essay, Nancy Karetak-Lindell writes about the role of the Northwest Passage as a route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans “along the coasts and islands used and occupied by Inuit since time immemorial,” regions that are still connected by Inuit. Not only is there a growing interest in an ice-free Northwest Passage for resource exploration and tourism, but she also cautions of the danger stemming from unannounced and unanticipated vessels showing up in the waterway and in communities while Inuit who have been traveling across the waterway since time immemorial are now required to carry passports when journeying between Canada and Greenland. While some in more powerful positions find ways to enter the Arctic unannounced, Inuit who have been living in the region for thousands of years are now faced with additional challenges to meet each other. The colonization of the Arctic and the resulting creation of national borders dividing Inuit Nunangat between four different states and modern-day passport requirements for transnational travel reflect the existing power differentials between colonizer and the colonized. These decisions made in far-away capital cities have real-life impacts in Inuit everyday realities.

Despite the Northwest Passage’s benefits for Inuit as an opportunity for cultural exchange and mutual learning when tourists are visiting, and as a transportation route that provides communities with food and other necessities at comparably more affordable prices than flown-in items, the opening of the waterway is also perceived with caution, due to the many resulting challenges. Okalik Eegeesiak is concerned about encroaching cruise tourism, northward movement of animals upon which Inuit depend, seismic testing for resource exploration, and commercial fishing interests. Additional concerns voiced in workshops focused on dangers stemming from oil spills and resulting long-term repercussions, waste dumping, tourists’ lack of interest in local products and local culture, unregulated traveling through the passage, arrival of new invasive species, lack of control over Inuit cultural sites, illegal activities, disturbance of animal migration, lacking emergency response mechanisms, and acceleration of climate change effects as a result of icebreaker activity. Given the interconnections between different elements like ice conditions, animal life, and Inuit culture, Eegeesiak and others call for a holistic approach to conflicts in the area.

Most Inuit, unlike many Arctic tourists, have never traveled the whole Northwest Passage. However, the passage was described as an extension of the land that is important for Inuit culture and survival, and Inuit who lived in one area of the passage could relate to the realities of their fellow Inuit living in other areas along the waterway; all Inuit are impacted by it. These connections can have very serious repercussions if, for example, an oil spill occurs. Northwest Passage corridors are becoming more easily navigable due to the melting sea ice, which has raised concerns among Inuit, pointing out that greater involvement in the protection of the waterway was needed. In addition to protection, Inuit also ask for “the continued connection and unification of Inuit communities” through increased inter-community communication, establishment of regional working groups, and regular collective meetings for knowledge-sharing across Inuit Nunangat.

3.4.3 The Pikialasorsuaq Report

Pikialasorsuaq is the Greenlandic term for the Northwater polynya (meaning “great upwelling”), located between the northern parts of Greenland and Canada. A polynya is an area of open water that remains free of ice, even in winter, due to currents in the ocean and air. The health of the polynya has a direct impact on the health of Inuit communities in the region as it is central for Inuit hunting and harvesting activities. The Pikialasorsuaq covers about 20 000 square kilometers, but it can grow to up to 80 000 square kilometers in summer. About 7000 Inuit in adjacent communities live in close interaction with the Pikialasorsuaq, which is not only the largest polynya in the northern hemisphere, but also the “most biologically productive region north of the Arctic Circle.” The polynya is an area of interconnectedness of weather, ice, food, animals, and culture, and it impacts an area that goes much beyond its physical boundaries (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 ‘The Great Upwelling’: Inuit Rely on its Biological Productivity, Pikialasorsuaq, North Water Polynya between Canada and Greenland.

© 2021 The Pew Charitable Trusts.

As it became apparent that the Northwater polynya’s ecosystem was seriously threatened by the effects of climate change and globalization, causing the erosion of the ice bridge that protects the polynya and leading to increased shipping, tourism, and resource development in the region, the ICC established and mandated the Pikialasorsuaq Commission in 2016 to carry out consultations with communities in Greenland and Nunavut/Canada that are closely connected to the polynya. Participants spoke about their stewardship and customary trans-boundary use of the polynya and the Northwest Passage and how the polynya’s health directly connects with the well-being of Inuit. The commission’s report was published in November 2017.

The Pikialasorsuaq is an important habitat for animals like fish, birds, and marine mammals upon which Inuit depend for food security. The polynya is also important to Inuit for cultural and spiritual reasons, linking Inuit transnationally. It is also an important driver of weather systems that impact travel conditions on the ice. In the twentieth century, Inuit from Canada and Greenland traveled across the polynya for exchanges and community visits, either by dogsled or with airplanes that landed on the sea ice. With the increasing cost of plane tickets and after the 9/11 events, such travel became more complicated and expensive for Inuit, and traveling between the two sides of the polynya today requires customs clearance.

The local workshops in Inuit communities in Nunavut and Greenland revealed – among other recommendations – a strong desire among Inuit “for free movement, once again, across the Pikialasorsuaq and increased cooperation” for a “collective Inuit caretaking regime for the polynya.” This includes the establishment of an Inuit Management Authority (IMA), the creation of a protected area around the polynya that encompasses a larger management zone to reflect existing community connections, and a free travel zone for Inuit across the polynya. The commission also recommended the creation of an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) to support these ideas.

Referencing several articles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the commission illustrates that “Inuit have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned and otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters, and coastal seas, and other resources and to uphold these responsibilities to future generations in this regard (Article 25).” To protect these and related rights, the commission recommends considering international law instruments like the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).⁵ The report discusses the IMO’s concept of a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA). While the adoption of an area as a PSSA does not have legal consequences, “associated protective measures,” however, can come with legal consequences that could include “ship routing measures, reporting requirements, discharge restrictions, operational criteria, and prohibited activities.”

A recent study has predicted the decline of the Northwater ecosystem in the near future, due to a warming climate and changing conditions of sea ice: Ice-arches that stabilize the polynya could become instable in a warming climate, potentially leading to its eventual disappearance as a “globally unique ice-bounded open water ecosystem.” An unstable or disappearing polynya could increase food insecurity, further enhancing Inuit vulnerability to EV.

3.5 Large Ocean States in the Blue Pacific

In the Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, lies a large, culturally highly diverse, maritime region, that is home to 14 independent nation states and hundreds of societies. Islanders in the Pacific Ocean have also employed counter-mapping and counter-narration approaches to challenge colonial and Western notions of “small island (developing) states” as isolated, vulnerable, insignificant, and remote in a basically empty ocean (mare nullius), a perception that served to marginalize Pacific islanders’ realities in international politics. They have shaped a counter-narrative that rejects and challenges this notion of vulnerability and marginalization. Pointing out that “smallness is a state of mind,” the famous Pacific Islands scholar Hau‘ofa reminds his readers of Oceania’s vastness, and the oral traditions, myths, and legends that describe a region consisting of land and ocean. In pre-colonial times, islanders had existing social, transport, and trade networks that connected them between the islands, forming a “large exchange community in which wealth and people […] circulated endlessly.”

Different political leaders have recently started using the term “large ocean state” as a reminder that “considerable parts of the world’s oceans and living resources are under the jurisdiction of erstwhile small island states with tiny populations and landmasses.” The new term has been used by Palau’s president Remengesau Jr., the Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands Tony de Brum, and it was also used in UN debates by Anote Tong, Kiribati’s former president. As noted by Chan, island states often reassert sovereign authority and national control by means of environmental protection, and they play an important role in the global trend of creating large marine protected areas (LMPAs). Contrary to a previous trend of creating marine protected areas along coasts and in shallow water areas, a more recent approach to marine conservation involves the creation of LMPAs in uninhabited ocean areas. The creation of LMPAs is often driven by environmental protection and stewardship interests, rather than by resource extraction interests. Climate change, marine pollution, fish management, and research are reasons for an increased urgency in advocacy for ocean protection.

The term “large ocean state,” as Chan continues to argue, addresses a realist concept of power in international politics according to which (territorial) size equals power. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has regulated that small island states have full sovereignty within a 12-nautical mile zone off their coasts, but their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) reach up to 200 nautical miles off the coast. Within this zone, island states have “sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving, and managing natural resources.” As a result, small islands dispersed over a large marine area have rights over a large marine territory and control over substantial marine resources. The collective EEZ of all Pacific island states covers about 20% of the world’s ocean (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Pacific Island countries and territories

© Pacific Community (SPC)

Palau, an island nation of 500 square kilometers and home to 25 000 inhabitants, established the Palau National Marine Sanctuary (PNMS) in 2015. As a result, 80% of Palau’s EEZ are closed to fishing activities. The PNMS – similar in size to the state of California – is one of the world’s largest marine protected areas (MPA). Kiribati – an island covering 800 square kilometers – established its Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) in 2008. PIPA covers 400 000 square kilometers, 11% of the country’s EEZ. Since 2015, this zone has been completely closed to commercial fishing.

Emerging counter-narrative and counter-mapping processes around large ocean states in the Pacific Ocean are examples of islanders’ collective diplomacy, based on shared cultural, political, and economic connections with and across the ocean. Pacific island leaders have started working together to shape the concept of the Blue Pacific, as “the latest iteration of a history of active and successful indigenous Pacific regionalism” through the pursuit of common interests. Island states have committed to a shared foreign policy and they developed a future strategy for the Blue Pacific. Pacific island states have started to collectively influence global ocean management, for example, when they successfully advocated for an ocean goal as one of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Importantly, Blue Pacific states are advocating for permanent edges and fixed coordinates of their respective EEZ, a request that is a response to climate change–induced rising sea levels that threaten to decrease and ultimately eliminate their terrestrial space. Challenging UNCLOS’s EEZ framework is an interesting example of counter-mapping and counter-narrating, as the critique essentially targets the framework’s terrestrial bias. In its current form, UNCLOS’s formal regulations expose Pacific island states and their inhabitants to structural violence when rising sea levels constitute a risk of the islands and their respective EEZ completely disappearing, while other people around the globe continue to benefit from existing practices that enhance climate change. Taken together, structural and cultural violence generate EV by creating a legal framework for normalizing power differentials between those who create the (UNCLOS) rules and those who are excluded, effectively also increasing Pacific islanders’ vulnerability to EV.

Since 1991, Pacific island states have also been issuing a common regional position to the UN climate negotiations – another example of collective diplomacy. Counter-narratives of the Blue Pacific (or the Ocean Continent) also include poetry, song, performance, and other works created to “‘destabilize myths of island isolation’ and to assert a ‘transoceanic imaginary’ rooted in ocean voyaging and maritime kinship connections.”

3.6 Discussion

The maps and narratives shared by Inuit and Pacific Islanders are reflective of their agency, sovereignty, and resilience, and they illustrate creative approaches to conflict resolution. Both groups have also developed working relationships with each other to amplify their voice on the international political stage, for example in the Many Strong Voices project. In fall 2021, the ICC received provisional consultative status at the International Maritime Organization (IMO). This is a historic milestone as the ICC is the first Indigenous organization to receive such status.

Both the terrestrial bias (prioritizing land over water) and the mare nullius belief (of the ocean as empty) are examples of how cultural and structural violence has worked to disadvantage Inuit and Pacific islanders politically, but it also applies to maps. To challenge these perceptions of the Arctic and the Pacific Islands as peripheral, remote, and disconnected from the center, Inuit and Pacific islanders have engaged in processes of counter-mapping and counter-narrating their own space and identity. Both groups created new maps that more adequately portray their homeland. Importantly, these maps – based on narratives of cooperation, traditional use, and occupancy – equally consider land and water in its frozen or liquid form for the constitution of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific.

Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific and their inhabitants are among the regions most vulnerable to the effects of anthropogenic climate change and EV. The impacts of global warming – caused mainly in the industrial centers far away from these two regions – are experienced first and worst in the Arctic where ice is melting, and in the Pacific Ocean where rising sea levels have started to eliminate island space. Climate change endangers the Inuit’s and Pacific Islanders’ cultural practices and knowledge sets, and it creates conditions of vulnerability, where the satisfaction of human needs for safety, security, identity, and shelter is threatened because space is disappearing. Thus, Inuit’s and Pacific islanders’ experiences of climate change can be termed environmental violence (EV) according to Marcantonio and Fuentes’ model. Keeping in mind the Inuit and Pacific islander’s definition of home and land as inclusive of terrestrial and sea space, it becomes clear that the effects of climate change actually wash away peoples’ homelands in both regions when ice is melting and coastal areas are disappearing. Illustrating the importance of the sea and the people who live in these maritime spaces, this perspective challenges the Western terrestrial bias. Additionally, the remapping of both regions has helped visualize the centrality of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific for Inuit and Pacific Islanders, but also for the climate change debate.

Both groups have used counter-mapping and counter-narration techniques to reduce their vulnerability and challenge existing power differentials to amplify their voices in climate change discussions to help create conditions for Inuit and Pacific islanders that provide human security and satisfy their human needs. The counter-maps both groups have created are based on stories and traditional land use and occupancy, which are employed in two important ways to address climate change.

First, these counter-maps visualize existing imagined communities: groups of people that have been deeply rooted in the customary use of the maritime space since time immemorial. Keeping alive and telling the stories of these intricate connections between the people and their land consisting of terrestrial space, as well as ocean space, is an empowering act of resilience. Inuit maps of land use and occupancy and Pacific Islanders’ visualization of a collective EEZ demand a new understanding of these areas as transnational spaces, visualizing and putting into perspective the vastness of space consisting of land and water that constitutes their homeland. To illustrate counter-mapping and counter-narrating processes in both regions, three reports, focusing on Inuit collective and transnational use of sea ice, the Northwest Passage, and the Northwater Polynya, were discussed. In Oceania, EEZs shape the notion of large island states of the Blue Pacific as a collective zone, and Pacific island nation states are supporting fixed EEZs to avoid losing land due to rising sea levels and, as a result, (maritime) sovereignty.

Second, acknowledging that size and representation on maps matter, Inuit and Pacific Islanders directly engage with the existing international political system through counter-mapping and counter-narration. Their maps tell the story of large spaces and the people calling these their home. Guided by a cultural mandate for environmental stewardship, local inhabitants are the best custodians of the ocean. Using existing international regulatory bodies like IMO, UNCLOS, and UNDRIP, Inuit and Pacific Islanders have successfully employed or are currently considering different mechanisms to make visible and protect Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific. Examples discussed in this chapter described the concepts of an Indigenous Protected Area, Particularly Sensitive Sea Area, and a large marine protected area.

Importantly, for Inuit and Pacific islanders, realizing environmental protection means having sovereignty and decision-making authority to deal with climate change impacts. Pacific Islanders’ demands for fixed EEZs are a particularly interesting and powerful act of counter-mapping, given the still-existing terrestrial bias that continues to guide UNCLOS decision-making processes. Shared cultural connections across both maritime spaces predate European colonial presence in the regions. International regulatory bodies like UNCLOS and IMO and their frameworks offer ways to reinforce and institutionalize these existing connections. Inuit in Canada and Greenland call for visa-free travel between their countries, challenging existing political structures regulating international travel, while aiming at a creative bilateral solution. The need to protect their homeland from harmful forms of tourism and developing conditions for meaningful cultural exchange are additional challenges that are exacerbated by climate change in both regions. The creation of protected areas can increase space and enhance sovereignty for Inuit and Pacific Islanders – tools that can potentially also be used for tourism management.

3.7 Conclusion

Space is disappearing in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean. Colonial map-making and narratives have marginalized inhabitants and their realities in both regions, dismissing their space as remote, isolated, and peripheral. More recently, space has also started to disappear as a result of global warming, resulting in the melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, and the (future) disappearance of Pacific islands, including their exclusive economic zones. While Inuit and Pacific islanders are not among the main contributors to climate change, they experience its most severe impacts. The framework developed by Marcantonio and Fuentes has helped illustrate the complex interplay of structural and cultural violence, vulnerability, and power differentials that end up (re-)creating EV experienced by Inuit in the Arctic and Pacific islanders in the face of climate change. Using the EV framework as a foundation, this chapter has illustrated how both Inuit and Pacific islanders have started opposing such developments through counter-mapping and counter-narrating processes.

Contributing their own maps and associated stories enhances Inuit and Pacific Islanders’ agency and allows both groups to speak with a stronger, collective voice to create conditions of human security, to satisfy their human needs, and to eliminate conditions of structural and cultural violence rooted in power differentials based on ethnocentric beliefs and practices of marginalization that have created and exacerbated their vulnerability. This also involves creative thinking to enhance regional protection, either through expanding the reach of existing frameworks like UNCLOS, or through the development of new entities like the Palau National Marine Sanctuary or the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Portraying Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific as large spaces where local inhabitants exert power challenges existing perspectives of these regions, and it helps visualize transnational collaboration based on traditional connections. Everyone is invited – youth, tourists, researchers, policy makers, and others – to have a look at these maps telling the stories of a different kind of highway that takes them right into the cultural centers in the Arctic and Pacific Ocean.

4 Prior Consultation in Latin American Extractives Structural Forces behind Environmental Violence

Maiah Jaskoski

Environmental Violence Engaged

This chapter adopts the larger volume’s definition of environmental violence (EV), as “direct and indirect harm experienced by humans due to toxic and non-toxic pollutants put into a local – and concurrently, the global – ecosystem through human activities and processes” [1]. The analysis illustrates one component of the book’s framework: the production of environmental violence by “structural violence,” which comprises “formal policies or practices that lead to the unequal distribution of risk and benefits to different groups of people, often divided along lines of race, socio-economic status, or other differentiators” [1]. In particular, the chapter reveals how new hydrocarbon and mining development in Indigenous areas is encouraged by: (1) state disregard of Indigenous rights to lands impacted by extraction; and (2) narrow definitions, again employed by state actors, of impacts of projects that are in the vicinity of Indigenous communities. The chapter further explores institutional factors that contribute to these two forms of structural violence.

4.1 Introduction

In recent decades, Latin America has seen a shift in government policies toward Indigenous communities that are impacted by development. Especially salient in this trajectory is “prior consultation,” a participatory institution according to which the state must “consult” communities before approving major new development projects, including in the region’s important mining and hydrocarbon sectors.

If prior consultation formally invites Indigenous communities into conversations about new extraction and its impacts on their territories, in actuality, as this chapter demonstrates, the institution can lead state actors to bypass and threaten communities’ land rights while downplaying the environmental harms of planned projects. This outcome is due to the pro-extraction bent of national governments to which state agencies report, and to the measures the agencies take before prior consultations are initiated. State actors have disregarded project impacts and Indigenous land rights as a means to deny overlap between Indigenous territory and impacted areas, withhold prior consultation, and, ultimately, streamline extraction.

This chapter uncovers these dynamics through analysis of three important Indigenous mining and hydrocarbon conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru.¹

4.2 Prior Consultation and Associated Challenges for Indigenous Communities in Latin America

Globally, two structures stand out as foundations for national prior consultation norms: the binding 1989 Convention No. 169 of the International Labour Organization (the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, “ILO 169”) and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). ILO 169 marked a shift away from the integrationist approach to Indigeneity articulated in the 1959 ILO Convention No. 107 [3]. Consistent with the new convention’s focus on respecting the traditions and rights of Indigenous communities, signatories of ILO 169 must “consult the peoples concerned, through appropriate procedures and in particular through their representative institutions, whenever consideration is being given to legislative or administrative measures which may affect them directly” ([4], Article 6.1). The prior consultation prerequisite holds for the exploration and extraction of state-owned subsoil resources ([4], Article 15.2).

Related to prior consultation is the concept of “free, prior, and informed consent” (FPIC) of impacted communities [5, 6]. For most large-scale development, ILO 169 does not mandate community consent, though governments are to conduct prior consultation with the “objective of achieving agreement or consent to the proposed measures” ([4], Article 6.2, emphasis added). The convention generally requires consent for a Native community’s relocation, but the government can still avoid this higher standard:

Where the relocation of these peoples is considered necessary as an exceptional measure, such relocation shall take place only with their free and informed consent. When their consent cannot be obtained, such relocation shall take place only following appropriate procedures established by national laws and regulations.

([4], Article 16.2, emphasis added)

In contrast to ILO 169, the nonbinding UNDRIP devotes extensive attention to consent [7]. Latin America is an important setting in which to study prior consultation, given that 14 of the 24 governments worldwide that have ratified ILO 169 are from the region. Furthermore, the government of every Latin American country voted for UNDRIP, with the exception of the Colombian government, which abstained [8].

Research reveals that, in practice, extractivist states in Latin America have treated prior consultation as merely a bureaucratic step in the approval of hydrocarbon and mining activities [9,10]. More broadly, comparative research on the implementation of prior consultation at the national level has found prior consultation disappointing as an institution of Indigenous representation. Scholars emphasize that communities are not provided sufficient information about development plans, national norms generally rule out entirely a consent standard, and the lack of Indigenous influence in the design and conduct of prior consultation processes, which the state tends to control [9, 11, 12]. Scholars also note the divisive nature of consultation processes – especially the state’s practice of consulting individual communities and leaving out higher-level Indigenous authorities [9, 13].

Some scholars recommend adjusting the design of prior consultation institutions to strengthen the position and influence of communities in prior consultation processes [9, 12, 14]. Others doubt that state-led participatory processes could provide for genuine Indigenous participation and representation and, instead, devote attention to the phenomenon of Indigenous–developed and led “self-consultations” (autoconsultas; [11, 15], 134). These community-centered processes are not connected to formal state structures for prior consultation but are frequently grounded in ILO 169 and/or UNDRIP, as well as Indigenous peoples’ laws [11].

That prior consultation seems not to offer Indigenous communities influence in extractives has not gone unnoticed by communities. The development and implementation of national prior consultation structures have been conflict ridden, with communities seeking institutions that would grant them more voice.² Disillusionment of Indigenous communities with the limits of prior consultation has caused some to reject it altogether, refusing state efforts to consult them ([2], ch. 6, [6, 15], ch. 4, [24]).

Added to criticisms of the quality of prior consultations for participating communities are studies of how prior consultation has failed Indigenous communities by not reaching them at all. States have disallowed community participation, especially where they expect Indigenous peoples to oppose extraction ([15], ch. 3, [20, 25], ch. 3). In some cases, this state tactic of avoiding prior consultation has backfired, generating intensive, visible activism by communities that insist on being consulted ([2], ch. 5, [20], pp. 1097–98, [24, 26]).

The analysis that follows presents further evidence of state agents bypassing prior consultation. Yet, unlike previous scholarship, it also reveals the structural violence that serves as a mechanism connecting state interests in expediting extraction to the actual omission of prior consultation. This structural violence consists of state maneuvers to downplay both Indigenous land rights and the impacts of projects that are situated near Indigenous communities.

4.3 Country-Case Selection

Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru offer promising settings for a study about state actions to avoid prior consultation and, in that way, advance extractive projects. First, prior consultation is well established in the three countries. In each case, the government ratified ILO 169 in the 1990s, and prior consultation is institutionalized in extractives through widely accepted procedures; prior consultations usually take place in accordance with regulations ([2], ch. 3).

Second, the Bolivian, Colombian, and Peruvian governments’ strong commitment to extraction could motivate state agencies to sidestep prior consultation. Historically, the national economy in each country has depended on mining and hydrocarbons. And the sectors in which the three conflicts in this chapter took place – mining, oil, and natural gas in Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia, respectively – boomed in the 1990s–2010s, encouraged by extractivist national policies ([2], ch. 2).

If these similarities among the countries make them attractive for a study on government efforts to avoid consulting Indigenous communities, important cross-country variation facilitates a different systems research design ([27], pp. 34–39). More precisely, the differences make it possible to test alternative explanations for why state actors might avoid consulting communities. They also permit an exploration of whether mechanisms identified in this research can operate in different contexts – that is, the reach of the study’s findings.

In terms of broad contextual differences, the countries vary in their regime dynamics. Bolivian democracy was stable from the transition away from military rule in the early 1980s through the period of study. Peru is a case of redemocratization following the 2000 resignation of civilian President Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000). Colombia’s democracy dates to the late 1950s, but it deepened considerably in the early 1990s, through extensive decentralizing reforms and the creation of a progressive Constitutional Court. Yet civil war, which was intense in Colombian hydrocarbon and mining zones, interfered with two basic components of democracy: civil and human rights protections. The reduction of the armed violence in the late 2000s created space for socioenvironmental activism, with mobilizing over hydrocarbon and mining development prominent ([2], ch. 3).

The countries also present variations in government ideology. We might expect agencies operating under governments on the right to promote investment over Indigenous rights more than agencies of leftist governments. The conflicts in Colombia and Peru unfolded while right-wing executives known for implementing liberal economic models were in office.³ In contrast, during the Bolivian conflict, President Evo Morales (2006–2019) of the Movement for Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS) party governed. Morales, a vocal advocate of Indigenous rights, came to power with the support of the country’s most powerful Indigenous movements, though the latter would develop strong critiques of his administration’s actual development policies.

Another factor that could shape how state agencies approach prior consultation is their autonomy relative to extractive firms: Free of the influence of companies and their development timelines, autonomous agencies might be unlikely to try to skip prior consultation. Across the three countries, relevant state agencies hold different degrees of formal autonomy. Prior consultations in Peruvian mining and hydrocarbons are led by the same ministry that is responsible for attracting investment in the sectors, the energy and mining ministry (Ministerio de Energía y Minas, MINEM). Until 2015, MINEM also oversaw the review and approval of environmental impact studies (estudio de impacto ambiental, EIA).⁴ Relative to Peru, Colombian oversight agencies enjoy substantial formal independence. The national agency for environmental licensing (Agencia Nacional de Licencias Ambientales, ANLA) attached to the environment ministry, reviews and approves EIAs for large-scale projects, while the interior ministry conducts all prior consultations.⁵ Bolivia serves as an intermediate case in which the hydrocarbon ministry leads prior consultations for oil and gas projects, and the environment ministry issues environmental licenses.

The countries also differ in the degree to which Indigenous communities contributed to prior consultation structures. This variation is important, given that Indigenous participation in designing prior consultation institutions can result in more legitimate consultation processes ([29]; see also [12] on the negative case of Peru). Could it be that where Indigenous communities helped create these formal norms, governments exhibit greater respect for the prior consultation stage? Alternatively, governments that confront prior consultation institutions that were developed by Indigenous peoples might try to sidestep the potentially more intensive, drawn-out processes, in pursuit of speedy project approvals. Of the three countries, only Bolivia saw active Indigenous engagement in the design of prior consultation norms in hydrocarbons. Peruvian communities initially took part in the drafting of prior consultation regulations, but then, on becoming disillusioned with the endeavor, abandoned it. The Colombian government regulated prior consultation swiftly, through a top-down process.

Finally, the countries vary in the extent to which Indigenous land rights are linked to land titles. A narrow, title-based definition of land rights could make state actors more likely to bypass prior consultation, as the state could consider as “non-Indigenous” vast expanses of nontitled lands on which Indigenous people depend. In Bolivia, Indigenous communities have a right to prior consultation only if they hold title to impacted lands. In contrast, Peruvian and Colombian communities can base this right on other relationships to territory to include reliance on land for subsistence or spiritual practices, though, as shown in the below conflicts, sometimes only through legal battles.

This analysis demonstrates the same mechanisms at work in the three countries, despite their differences, when it comes to the connection between prior consultation and two facets of structural violence – the state downplaying Indigenous land rights and the environmental impacts on Indigenous communities.

4.4 State Disregard of Environmental Impacts and Indigenous Territorial Rights as a Means of Avoiding Prior Consultation

This analysis shows how state actors have sidestepped prior consultation by denying any impacts of extractive projects on Indigenous lands. They do so by employing narrow definitions of: (1) lands to which Indigenous communities have rights; and (2) the geographic reach of extractive projects’ environmental impacts.

The three cases examined here were drawn from a larger sample: the most important social conflicts over new extractive projects in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru that took place after hydrocarbons and mining were opened to private investment and after prior consultation had been regulated in the sectors.⁶ Starting with a sample of conflicts held promise for producing cases in which state agencies bypassed prior consultation, because this state behavior might tend to generate community pushback (i.e., conflict). Importantly, focusing on conflicts also presents the possibility of selecting cases in which Indigenous activism reversed initial state determinations about land rights and environmental impacts. Indeed, in two of the three cases in this analysis, communities successfully defended, through court proceedings, broader definitions of impacts and of Indigenous lands and, in turn, their right to prior consultation.

The role of the courts in the two cases – and also, in Peru, that of the national ombudsman’s office, the Defensoría del Pueblo – demonstrates important variation across state actors: While the state agencies charged with defining project impacts and with leading prior consultation processes proved eager to minimize impacts and Indigenous land rights, those decisions could be reversed, by judicial action (and with support from Peru’s Defensoría). Nevertheless, as the cases will show, the court decisions were issued only after project development had caused substantial environmental and social harms in Indigenous communities, and in one case the court did not suspend the extraction.

From the sample of extractive conflicts, the author chose three illustrative cases of states adopting restrictive definitions of project impacts and of Indigenous territory to avoid prior consultation. As shown in Table 4.1, the conflicts vary in terms of project sector and community goals. The case studies draw on data that the author collected through interviews and through her review of secondary and primary sources, which included laws, judicial decisions, executive measures, and news outlets.

Table 4.1 The cases

Conflict	Sector	Most visible community goal	State methods of identifying impacted Indigenous communities
			Indigenous lands	Project impacts
Putumayo (Colombia)	Oil	Modify project	Recognition of formal communal lands	Recognition of area of direct influence
Afrodita (Peru)	Mining	Block project	Recognition of formal communal lands; reduction of Indigenous lands through reclassification of project area as not protected and “abandoned”	Recognition of area of direct influence; reclassification of project as small-scale; reclassification of project area as not protected
Gran Chaco (Bolivia)	Natural gas	Compensation	Reclassification of project area as privately owned	Formal downgrading of project impacts

As a final introductory note to the analysis, the case studies stress dynamics surrounding prior consultation for proposed extractive projects, consistent with the focus of this chapter. With this emphasis on the prior consultation stage, for each of the cases the chapter is not claiming that prior consultation or the project in question was the main cause of conflict, or social mobilizing more generally, in the regions under study.

4.4.1 The Expansion of Oil Production in Colombia’s Putumayo Department

In a first case, state actors avoided prior consultation as part of an oil conflict in the hydrocarbons-rich Colombian department (or region) of Putumayo. In this conflict, the interior ministry applied restrictive definitions of project impacts and of Indigenous territorial rights. On that basis, the state classified Indigenous communities as not impacted by oil development and, thus, ruled out prior consultation. Specifically, the ministry documented the lack of overlap between a project’s “area of direct influence,” on one hand, and formally recognized Indigenous lands, on the other. This narrow conception of impact on Indigenous communities followed Colombia’s 1998 prior consultation regulations (Decree 1320), which provided for rapid, single-meeting consultations.⁷

4.4.1.1 Initial State Determination: No Overlap between Community Boundaries and Project Area of Direct Influence

The Putumayo conflict of focus erupted in 2014 when the state approved, without prior consultation, the expansion of production in the Cohembi, Quillacinga, and Quinde oilfields. The fields were in the Puerto Asís municipality, a major contributor to Putumayo’s overall oil output ([32], p. 42, [33], pp. 49, 125, 128). In addition to oil, Putumayo – and Puerto Asís – produced coca for the cocaine trade, which helped fuel Colombia’s civil war. As of 2014, the municipality had seen considerable violence tied to the war ([33], pp. 106–11, 116–19).

There were important precursors to the 2014 conflict. Before oil production in the fields began, the interior ministry determined in 2008 – based on a 2006 field visit – that no Indigenous communities were present in the project area: It concluded that neither the La Cabaña community of the Awá nation nor the state-recognized communal lands (resguardo) of Alto Lorenzo, of the Nasa, overlapped with the project’s area of direct influence ([34], Section I.5.13, [35], Section I.1.9). Without consulting communities, in 2009 the environment ministry granted an environmental license to the consortium Colombian Energy for oil extraction. The state also did not lead a prior consultation for a 2010 expansion project ([34], Section I.5, [36]). Indigenous communities had experienced serious adverse environmental impacts from that expansion by 2014, when ANLA approved a modification to the 2010 project [36, 37].

4.4.1.2 2014 Project Expansion, and Protest

The 2014 revision allowed for extraction from 100 additional wells by Colombia Energy. It, therefore, disregarded a 39-well limit that had been established in negotiations between the state and nearby communities in 2006 [36, 37]. Communities were not consulted about the 2014 expansion because the interior ministry again determined a lack of Indigenous presence ([35], I.1.17).

As of late August 2014, protests against the new project had been ongoing for several weeks, and approximately 400 campesinos and Indigenous people were preventing Colombia Energy’s operator from accessing the project area. With the blockade, residents hoped to achieve a dialogue with the government [36]. This organizing merged with a nearby strike that focused importantly on aerial coca fumigations that harmed (non-coca) crops. The most violence during the mobilizations resulted from clashes between police personnel and Afro-Colombians and the Nasa, in Puerto Asís. By late September 2014, 48 people had been wounded in the oil protests [38].

Senior government officials met with the Nasa in Putumayo during three months in late 2014 to resolve the conflict. The meetings produced several agreements, one of which called for government and civil-society actors to study the effects of the 2010 expansion. The civil-society group found that the project fell short of meeting international standards for contamination and health, and that Colombian standards were lax. It also concluded that the state should have consulted the local Indigenous communities [37].⁸

4.4.1.3 Constitutional Court Interpretations of Indigenous Territorial Rights and Project Impacts

In 2015 the Nasa and the Awá turned to the courts to defend their right to prior consultation. They employed the acción de tutela (commonly, “tutela”). Known elsewhere in Latin America as the amparo, the tutela is a judicial process available to people claiming harm to their fundamental rights. The Nasa and Awá argued in their tutelas that they had been heavily impacted by development in the oilfields and, therefore, that they should have been consulted. The Constitutional Court’s decisions on the two cases shed light on just how restrictive the interior ministry’s definition of Indigenous impact had been, relative to alternative interpretations.

The Nasa wanted to be consulted in the hope of adjusting the project to protect their lands, including sacred spaces [37]. Their tutela identified a range of adverse environmental impacts from oil development, including bird deaths due to air pollution, harm to plants and soil caused by leakage from abandoned wells, and various threats brought by water use and contamination – for instance, interference with cultural rituals and with the work of traditional doctors ([34], Section I.2). In its 2016 decision on the Nasa tutela, the Constitutional Court required prior consultation and also compensation for environmental impacts. The court refrained from halting oil activities, as it characterized Putumayo’s oil production as crucial for national development ([34], Sections III.8, IV).

The 2016 ruling challenged the interior ministry’s definitions of project impacts and Indigenous territory. The court asserted that serious impacts reached well beyond the project’s defined area of direct influence, emphasizing that, by harming water sources, oil development affected a much larger area ([34], Section III.8). As for Indigenous land rights, the court found that the borders of a resguardo were not necessarily relevant. Rather, the Nasa qualified as directly impacted, because they relied on areas affected by oil development to satisfy their material and spiritual needs and as part of their customs and rituals ([34], Sections II, III.1.11, III.7).

La Cabaña’s tutela also protested the lack of prior consultation on the grounds that oil development impacted the community directly ([35], Section I.1.20), while demanding that the operations of 27 local wells be suspended [40]. In its November 2018 decision on the Awá case, the Constitutional Court admonished Decree 1320 as inadequate for reserving prior consultations for only communities in a project’s area of direct influence ([35], Section III.12.6) and, again, employed conceptions of Indigenous territory and project impacts that were substantially broader than those applied by the interior ministry. The court interpreted as Indigenous territory not only lands to which communities held titles, but also areas with spiritual meaning and areas used intermittently ([35], Sections III.7.7, III.8.1, III.8.7–8.8). With regard to project impacts, the court found that oil development had caused direct negative health impacts on La Cabaña, in part because of the nature of oil contamination, and especially how it spread beyond the project’s area of direct influence, for instance, by polluting water sources on which the community relied ([35], Section III.21.6). The court also found that air contamination caused by oil development threatened crops, plants, and animals ([35], Sections III.21.9–21.10). The decision devoted special attention to the impacts of hydrocarbon extraction on the San Lorenzo River, which the court characterized as of “vital importance” to La Cabaña, for spiritual, economic, and social activities ([35], Section III.21.20).

Based on its finding of direct impacts on La Cabaña, the court ruled that the state should have consulted the Awá for the 2009, 2010, and 2014 oil projects. It required prior consultation to identify the environmental, spiritual, cultural, and social impacts of extraction on the Awá, and it mandated preventative, mitigation, and restoration measures as needed. The court again chose not to pause oil work, taking into consideration, among other factors, the importance of production in the oilfields for the national and regional economies [35, I.2, II.25.2, III.25.5, V, 41].

4.4.2 The Afrodita Mining Project in Northern Peru

In a conflict over the Afrodita mining project, Peruvian state bodies and structures contributed to a determination that the project did not directly impact Indigenous peoples. The state (1) recognized only formally defined communal lands, and limited characterizations of Afrodita’s environmental impacts, similar to the Putumayo case; and (2) changed the classifications of the project and of the project site. State rules altered the project by allowing for its partition into multiple small projects so that the owner could transition from large-scale mining to the less-stringent, small-scale mining sector. With regard to the project site, subnational and national state entities used legal and regulatory structures that weakened Indigenous land rights to define the impacted lands as “abandoned.” In addition, the executive ignored the extent to which Afrodita would harm the region by revoking the site’s planned parkland status. The redrawing of the national park boundaries in question also threatened the recognition of nearby Indigenous lands.

4.4.2.1 Overlap between National Park and Indigenous Communal Boundaries

The Afrodita concessions were located in the Condor Mountain Range (Cordillera del Cóndor) in Peru’s northern Amazon, near the border with Ecuador. In 1993, the Peruvian state granted the concessions to the exploration company Metalfin, of the British Hochschild group. Metalfin subsequently established Compañía Minera Afrodita S.A. and, in 1999, transferred all 203 000 hectares of its Condor gold exploration properties to the new firm ([42, 43], p. 28, [41]).

The mine site became part of a protected national park in the early 2000s, due to collaboration between the state and the local Awajún and Wampis Indigenous nations. The park initiative came from a peace agreement that resolved the longstanding Peru–Ecuador border dispute. That conflict had culminated in the 1995 Cenepa War in Condor. As part of the peace, the Peruvian and Ecuadorian governments committed to working with local Indigenous communities to institute protected ecological areas in the combat zone ([44], p. 4).

The national park endeavor appealed to the Awajún and Wampis, who valued the area as a water source, and for its cultural significance and environmental uniqueness ([43], pp. 12, 17–19). Moreover, the two nations hoped the park project would help them formalize their landholdings ([44], pp. 5, 6–7). Awajún and Wampis leaders sought to protect what they viewed as their traditional territory through a combination of a park and Indigenous land titles. They supported the creation of a national park on the condition that it share borders with (1) titled Indigenous communal lands, and (2) other lands to which communities sought title ([45], Section II.1).

Negotiations between the state and the Awajún and Wampis created the Santiago Comaina Reserve (Zona Reservada Santiago Comaina, ZRSC) as a step toward establishing a park. A prior consultation process with the Awajún and Wampis defined the boundaries of the Ichigkat-Muja Condor Mountain Range National Park (Parque Nacional Ichigkat Muja de la Cordillera del Cóndor, PNIMCC), within the ZRSC. The consultation process concluded in November 2004 ([44], pp. 5–6, 11).

4.4.2.2 The Contraction of the Parklands and of Indigenous Territory

The executive reduced in size the PNIMCC specifically to allow for mining in Condor, and in response to pressures from Afrodita. Initially, the company sought exploration privileges in the ZRSC from the state agency that founded and oversaw protected areas, the Instituto Nacional de Recursos Naturales (INRENA). INRENA denied Afrodita’s request in 2001, declaring mining incompatible with Condor’s ecological and geological characteristics and referencing the ongoing national park project. Afrodita then turned to MINEM’s General Directorate of Environmental Affairs in Mining (Dirección General de Asuntos Ambientales Mineros, DGAAM). DGAAM routed Afrodita’s application to INRENA, which again refused to allow the exploration on the basis of the reserve’s protected status ([43], p. 30).

Afrodita succeeded with its third approach: to reduce in size the PNIMCC to eliminate the park’s overlap with the mine site. In 2005, Afrodita’s owner, Jorge Bedoya Torrico, met several times with state officials to convince the defense and foreign affairs ministries that, relative to a national park, Afrodita’s operations on the border would defend more effectively Peruvian sovereignty from ongoing informal Ecuadorian mining activities ([43], pp. 30–32, [46]). A 2007 decree diminished the size of the ZRSC and instituted the PNIMCC, which was 58% smaller than the park dimensions defined in 2004 ([44], p. 11). The decree excluded from the PNIMCC an extensive stretch of Awajún and Wampis’s proclaimed territory that communities had previously claimed through the first park project ([45], Section II.1).

Mining exploration in Condor, which was now open to development, expanded dramatically ([43], p. 31, [44], p. 12).

4.4.2.3 Transition to Small-Scale Mining Sector

Alongside the PNIMCC fight was a conflict over the surface rights needed to develop the Afrodita concessions. This struggle drove Bedoya to the small-scale mining sector.

The surface-rights battle began in December 2009, when MINEM approved Afrodita’s Environmental Impact Statement (Declaración de Impacto Ambiental, DIA) to begin exploration [47]. After the DIA approval, and still in December 2009, the Organization for the Development of the Border Communities of El Cenepa (Organización de Desarrollo de las Comunidades Fronterizas del Cenepa, ODECOFROC) denounced mining in Condor, in writing to MINEM ([48], p. 2). When 52 Amazonian communities threatened to protest Afrodita’s exploration work and its impacts, all without prior consultation, MINEM suspended Afrodita’s exploration privileges in February 2010 on the grounds that the firm lacked permission from communities to access their land [49]. The project was stalled until 2013 ([50], p. 24).

To move forward with his mining plans, Bedoya distributed the Afrodita titles across several companies of which he was the legal representative. Bedoya now operated in the small-scale mining sector, governed by regional environmental rules ([44], p. 31, [50], p. 24, [51]). These subnational requirements were less cumbersome than those of the national environmental regime, including with regard to community participation ([50], p. 24, [52]). Bedoya and his firms – referred to here as Afrodita for the sake of simplicity – built strong relationships with Amazonas regional government officials and sympathetic communities.⁹

4.4.2.4 Definition of Awajún and Wampis Lands as “Abandoned”

When seeking the Amazonas government’s permission to mine, Bedoya took advantage of recently implemented norms that facilitated the transfer of Indigenous lands to companies for extraction. Specifically, Article 6 of a 2013 decree, DS 054-2013-PCM (which would be supported by the 2014 Law 30230) did not differentiate between nontitled Indigenous lands – to which communities historically had recognized rights – on one hand, and “abandoned lands” (terrenos eriazos) on the other, and it streamlined the issuance of easements on the latter [53, 54].

Afrodita asked the Amazonas government in 2013 for access to 56 hectares, to extract from one of the Condor concessions. The regional government brought the matter to the National Superintendency of State Assets (Superintendencia Nacional de Bienes Nacionales, SBN), which granted easements on public lands. SBN classified the property as abandoned and granted the easement. In June 2014, the Amazonas government approved the Afrodita operations. Several months later, MINEM allowed the extraction on the basis of the abandoned land status. Amazonas’s regional energy and mining office (Dirección Regional de Energía y Minas) issued the construction permissions for the project in early 2015 and authorized extraction in April 2016 ([50], p. 24, [55, 56]).

4.4.2.5 Broader Interpretations of Indigenous Land Rights and Environmental Impacts: The Courts

The Awajún and Wampis pushed back against the above challenges to their territorial rights, with considerable success. In one victory, the nations achieved the reversal of the April 2016 permission to mine. In a context in which the 2013 easement had lapsed, and in line with an ODECOFROC request and a recommendation by the Defensoría del Pueblo, the Amazonas regional council supported the withdrawal of the 2016 authorization. By the time the Amazonas governor withdrew the permission in December 2016, the company had built encampments, and exploration had impacted the area significantly [52]. While the Awajún and Wampis were contesting the 2013 easement and related permissions, Article 6 of DS 054-2013-PCM was thrown out in March 2015 (by the Cuarto Sala Civil de la Corte Superior de Justicia de Lima).¹⁰ The court highlighted the treatment of Indigenous territorial rights by ILO 169, which recognizes Indigenous rights to lands that they traditionally occupied [54].

To contest the lack of prior consultation for the Afrodita development, Indigenous communities also used the judicial system. An ODECOFROC representative filed an amparo in 2013 that decried the state for issuing mining titles and approving exploration in Condor without consulting impacted Indigenous communities. Following a negative outcome from a lower court, a 2019 court ruling (by the Décimo Juzgado Constitucional de la Corte Superior de Lima) nullified 111 mining concessions in Awajún and Wampis territory. The decision also invalidated the approvals of Afrodita’s DIA for exploration and of an exploration project of a different mining firm ([45, 48], p. 8, [58]). The 2019 ruling emphasized that it could be necessary to consult an Indigenous community that did not reside within the concession area; it was sufficient that a community be located nearby or be susceptible to negative impacts on the environment or ecosystem. Using this logic, the court required prior consultation with the Awajún and Wampis, noting the importance of Condor for the nations’ daily life, culture, and traditional practices ([45], Section XV.1).

In another filing, in 2017, ODECOFROC sought to defend the consultation for the PNIMCC that had concluded in 2004, and the original park dimensions [59]. That case was pending in 2020 [60].

4.4.3 The Bolivian Guaraní and the Gran Chaco Natural Gas Plant

In a third and final case, the Bolivian hydrocarbon ministry refused to consult communities of the Guaraní nation – organized under the Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní (APG) – for the Gran Chaco natural gas plant. In the Gran Chaco conflict, state actors justified not consulting the Guaraní by relying on narrow definitions of Indigenous territory and project impacts.

According to Bolivian regulations, the hydrocarbon ministry must consult peasant, Indigenous, and Native communities (los pueblos campesinos, indígenas, y originarios) impacted by Category 1 oil and gas projects – that is, projects with the highest level of environmental impact – before approving EIAs (in Bolivia, Estudios de Evaluación de Impacto Ambiental, EEIAs ([61], Article 15, [62], Article 115, [63], Article 15). In contrast to the Colombian and Peruvian cases, Indigenous communities in Bolivia have been considered impacted by hydrocarbon development for purposes of prior consultation only if they held communal title to impacted land, in the form of Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (TCOs; [64], p. 664).

Achieving prior consultation was complicated further by various state actions that impeded Indigenous communal land titling in hydrocarbon areas. In fact, some such measures have been taken specifically with the aim of avoiding prior consultation. Two tactics stand out. First, the national land-reform agency (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria, INRA) classified stretches of Guaraní lands as public, similar to the above-described “abandoned lands” logic in Peru.¹¹ Second, the state oil company (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos, YPFB) has secured land rights at its project locations. Aside from denying communities title to impacted lands, the state – and specifically the environment ministry – also regularly ruled out prior consultation by classifying development as Category 2 projects [66].

4.4.3.1 Restrictive State Determinations of Indigenous Territory and Environmental Impacts

The Gran Chaco Liquid Separation Plant was expected to be the third largest of its kind in Latin America, based on its size and operations ([67], p. 80). The state awarded the plant construction, estimated to cost $500 million, to the Spanish firm Técnicas Reunidas, though YPFB was the face of the project in discussions with the nearby Yaku Igua capitanía, a term that refers to an organized group of Guaraní communities ([67], pp. 109, 112, [68]).

Yaku Igua communities that depended on agriculture and livestock farming considered themselves impacted by Gran Chaco and believed they should be consulted about the project. The capitanía initially expected to be consulted, for several reasons: INRA made an early assessment that the project was on Yaku Igua lands; the capitanía had received documentation that the Gran Chaco plant was a Category 1 project; and the hydrocarbon ministry had consulted the Guaraní about other projects in the area ([69], p. 84).

Despite these early expectations among the Guaraní, the environment ministry issued a license for Gran Chaco in April 2012 without consulting them [70]. By that time, the state had ruled out prior consultation on two grounds. First, the environment ministry had classified the project as Category 2. Second, there was the question of land rights. YPFB had reported that the plant was on titled, private land, and the city of Yacuiba had deemed the land within its “urban radius,” and not in TCO Yaku Igua [70, 71].

Yaku Igua leadership responded to the project’s licensing by asking to meet with state representatives. In April–June 2012 discussions, officials of INRA, YPFB, and the environment and hydrocarbon ministries explained to the capitanía the process of licensing and Gran Chaco’s Category 2 status. On June 25, 2012, a government commission traveled to the Yaku Igua community of Yerobiarenda, which was adjacent to the plant site, to negotiate compensation payments with the APG Yaku Igua. Determined to be consulted, Yaku Igua’s representatives refused to discuss the proposed social investments ([69], p. 82, [70, 71]).

The day of the government’s failed Yerobiarenda visit, Yaku Igua blocked the Gran Chaco project, while the Council of Guaraní Captains of Tarija (Consejo de Capitanes Guaraníes de Tarija), the APG, and the leaders of Yaku Igua’s 18 communities held an “emergency meeting” in Yerobiarenda. Meeting participants agreed to continue the blockade and to threaten to close the valves of the major Juana Azurduy gas pipeline to force a prior consultation for Gran Chaco [70, 71].

4.4.3.2 Conflict Resolution

The conflict over prior consultation for Gran Chaco concluded days later, at the end of June 2012, without a consultation process. A signed agreement between the APG Yaku Igua and the hydrocarbon minister, who had traveled to the region, committed the minister to address APG Yaku Igua’s demands for: (1) social investment programs for the Guaraní; and (2) a review of the Gran Chaco environmental license and of several properties that neighbored the plant to determine Indigenous land allocations ([69], p. 84, [72]).

The last cycle of the Gran Chaco conflict concerned compensation. A May 2013 agreement assigned state agencies to design and pay for social and economic development projects that Yaku Igua would propose [68].

Gran Chaco began test operations in October 2014 [73]. As of early 2020, the plant was producing liquefied natural gas for export, mainly to Paraguay and Peru. The value of the gas exported in 2019 surpassed $44 million [74].

4.5 Conclusion

The Putumayo, Afrodita, and Gran Chaco cases exemplify how the installation of prior consultation requirements can motivate state actors working under extractivist governments to define narrowly Indigenous territory and the environmental impacts of hydrocarbons and mining. Through this practice, state agencies have avoided consulting communities, as a means to expedite development. In the three conflicts, entities of the state withheld communities’ right to prior consultation, in part, using formal rules within prior consultation regulations, but also through their applications of those rules. The latitude for alternative interpretations of legal and regulatory structures was perhaps revealed most vividly in Colombian and Peruvian court rulings that challenged initial state assessments by taking broader approaches to identifying project impacts and Indigenous communal rights.

The court decisions draw attention to another finding in this chapter. Early determinations by state agencies can be overturned later, at least by highly mobilized communities. In the Colombian and Peruvian cases, communities secured prior consultation by using the judiciary. Importantly, however, the quality of Indigenous representation in the mandated consultations necessarily would be poor, due to the sequencing of consultations, project approvals, and project development. The Colombian Constitutional Court required prior consultation in Putumayo but did not, in the meantime, suspend oil extraction, which had already devastated communities’ environments. In the Afrodita conflict, mining permissions were revoked, but only after local communities had been impacted significantly by exploration work.

A final observation relates to how this analysis engages with the focus of the larger volume. The chapter illustrates a component of the book’s central theoretical framework: the causal relationship between structural and environmental violence. Specifically, it reveals how structural violence – the state’s denial of both Indigenous rights to land and environmental threats close to Indigenous communities – can facilitate extraction and associated environmental violence that harms Indigenous communities. The study’s larger contribution is that it explores a factor that brings about or bolsters this structural violence: the introduction of prior consultation in contexts in which governments promote new extraction.

The harms to communities and to the environment generated by prior consultation may extend beyond environmental violence in Indigenous communities in extractive zones. When the state articulates a narrow definition of Indigenous lands for purposes of deciding whether to consult communities, that definition can extend to the realm of Indigenous land rights more generally, weakening Native communities’ claims to ancestral territory in other contexts. Moreover, a narrow state definition of “project impacts” within mining or hydrocarbons can carry over to development in other sectors. The result would be an increase in the streamlining of approvals of environmentally destructive development, along with environmental violence, in multiple sectors, in Indigenous lands and beyond.

5 Radiological Risk Imposition as Environmental Violence A Case Study of Nuclear Harms and the Limits of Legal Redress in French Polynesia/Mā‘ohi Nui

Sonya Schoenberger

Engaging Environmental Violence

In this chapter, I argue that examining nuclear legacies in French Polynesia can help us to think through the possibilities and limitations of the Environmental Violence concept in an age of causally complex and underdetermined harms that can remain latent for decades, if not generations. This type of environmental harm is not unique to nuclear weapons programs: nuclear power plant accidents, chemical toxins, and even greenhouse gas-induced climatic changes all fit into a similar framework. But nuclear issues are in many ways, as Ulrich Beck has argued, the paradigmatic case of our modern “Risk Society.” In this chapter, I grapple with how we can think about risk in the context of environmental violence – and how careful attention to the case study of nuclear legacies in French Polynesia can help illustrate the descriptive, political, and legal challenges posed by environmental violence in the atomic age.

5.1 Introduction

Between 1966 and 1996, France detonated 193 atomic bombs in Polynesia [1]. Through 1974, these “experiments,” or “tests,” were conducted at or above ground level, with several detonations giving rise to short or long-range fallout that contaminated downwind communities and the broader Pacific. From 1975 onwards, in the wake of mounting international disapproval of French testing, France moved its Pacific testing program underground, becoming the first nuclear power to detonate nuclear weapons in the basaltic substrate of coral atolls.

Despite French assertions that the bombs detonated at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls were “clean” and would have no impact on the populations or environment of the Pacific, weapons detonations came with an irreducible element of risk and unpredictable dispersion of radioactive harm. Technological limitations, worker inexperience, and human error contributed to accidents and meteorological misjudgments, with effects that proved lethal in the short, medium, and long term. While many of the victims of France’s nuclear testing program were military and civilian employees flown in from metropolitan France, the harms associated with nuclear testing fell disproportionately on indigenous Polynesians – from the thousands of locally engaged workers who staffed test sites to those living in communities downwind of France’s nuclear proving grounds.

The violence of France’s nuclear testing program operated at several temporal scales and across a spectrum of causal certainty. In some instances, harms were explosive, direct, and irrefutable, such as when workers perished at the Moruroa test site from industrial accidents [1–4]. Yet many of the effects of the nuclear testing program were underdetermined and deferred. For many victims, the immediate effects of radiation exposures were anodyne, even imperceptible: villagers in downwind atolls held banquets amid radioactive fallout [4]; children played outside and walked barefoot in contaminated soil [4]; and community members ingested radionuclides through the food chain and by drinking water stored in open-air cisterns [4, 5].

In the years and decades that followed France’s atmospheric detonations, many former test site workers and residents of downwind atolls wondered about a potential link between radiation from nuclear experiments and the cancers, birth defects, and fertility issues that seemed to emerge suddenly in their communities [2, 4, 6, 7]. Testimonies from workers and downwind communities speak to a sudden spike in congenital deformities and deaths from cancers in the wake of the installation of the French nuclear testing center, or Centre d’expérimentation du Pacifique (CEP) [2, 4, 6–9]. Some also noticed a rise in ailments that, while not radiogenic, bore a relationship to the construction and population influxes associated with French nuclear testing. Extensive destruction of coral over the course of military buildup, for example, caused an explosion of ciguatera fish poisoning that provoked unprecedented waves of illness, disability, and deaths tied to consumption of contaminated reef fish [9–12].

Efforts to come to terms with nuclear legacies in French Polynesia are hampered both by the inherent causal uncertainty surrounding the effects of exposure to ionizing radiation and by historical efforts by the French government and a certain subset of stakeholders in French Polynesia to downplay or actively obfuscate nuclear risks. In some cases, these information suppression efforts extended to the active intimidation and silencing of workers and community members [2, 8]. Information asymmetries allowed the French military to avoid certain measures that might have limited risks to workers and downwind populations and today complicate the documentation efforts of those seeking compensation from the French government for radiogenic cancers. In many cases, the data simply isn’t there: The French ran just over 30 radiological monitoring stations throughout a territory comprised of five archipelagos and 118 inhabited islands at atolls, distributed across an area of ocean the size of continental Europe [13]. Such a network hardly provides a comprehensive picture of individual exposures.

This chapter explores how the history of nuclear testing and redress efforts in French Polynesia, or as many Polynesians prefer to call it, Māʻohi Nui,¹ can illustrate the descriptive, political, and legal challenges posed by environmental violence in the atomic age. In particular, I focus on risk imposition in and of itself (even in the absence of provable, measurable harm) as a form of environmental violence of particular salience in what Ulrich Beck has termed our modern “Risk Society” [14]. Environmental violence in the context of nuclear testing cannot be understood as separate from colonial contexts and forms of colonial violence. Max Liboiron has asserted that pollution should be understood as a form of colonialism, as polluters presume access to land that is not their own [15]. As indigenous groups in the Pacific have argued for decades, the offshoring of radiological risk to overseas territories, too, should be seen as a form of colonialism [16–20].

This case study focuses on two key strands of violence that characterized the French testing program in Polynesia²: (1) the French decision to emplace a nuclear testing center, and concomitant radiological risk, in Polynesia, far from France’s metropolitan territory; and (2) the obfuscation of information and deliberate dissemination of disinformation regarding the risks of the French nuclear program, along with failures at various points to adequately protect workers and downwind populations. The colonial dynamics that facilitated this violence also undermined paths toward legal recourse – both prior to and during the period of testing, as individuals sought to contest France’s right to test nuclear devices and, afterwards, as those with radiogenic cancers pursued avenues of compensation. Causal uncertainties inherent to radiological exposures and the information gaps and asymmetries either deliberately created or tolerated by French authorities continue to cause harm today by frustrating victim redress.³ In theorizing “environmental violence,” we should be attentive to the ways in which strands of ecological, (neo)colonial, epistemological, and juridical violence bleed into and reinforce one another in the context of causally complex, environmentally mediated harms.

This chapter proceeds in three sections. The first section examines the colonial context that drove the French to emplace nuclear risk upon French Polynesia and that shaped the experiences of Polynesian workers and downwind communities. The second section traces efforts by Polynesian and Pacific peoples to contest, through legal argumentation and diplomatic discourse, the French right to impose nuclear risk and low-level radioactive fallout on Pacific communities. In the final section, I explore twenty-first-century efforts to grapple with nuclear legacies, and I examine how the dynamics of risk, causal uncertainty, and insufficient data frustrate processes of victim compensation today.

5.2 French Bombs in Polynesia

Until World War II, France’s South Pacific archipelagos had been distant imperial outposts of limited economic or strategic relevance [21]. In the wake of World War II, though, the islands came to take on new significance for French national interests. During a 1956 visit, Charles de Gaulle, then a private citizen, extolled the virtues of Tahiti’s geographic remove in the context of the looming threat of nuclear war. He envisioned that the islands, “surrounded by the invulnerable immensities of the Ocean,” could one day provide a crucial “refuge” [22]. Within 10 years, the significance to the geographic location of the islands had been inverted: The Tuamotu Archipelago would become the epicenter of France’s own nuclear war–making capability, a place to offshore the risks associated with developing and fine-tuning France’s nuclear deterrent.⁴

Māʻohi Nui was not the first nuclear proving ground in the Pacific, nor was it France’s first nuclear test site. The US Military conducted dozens of atmospheric nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands and Johnston Atoll [25–28] as well as over indigenous lands in the American West [29–31]. Great Britain tested a more limited number of nuclear weapons over indigenous lands in Australia [32–34] and in what is today Kiribati in the late 1950s and early 1960s [32, 35]. And France, before moving its nuclear program to the Pacific in the wake of Algerian independence, conducted atmospheric and underground nuclear detonations in the Sahara between 1960 and 1966, over and under lands inhabited by Tuareg communities [4, 36–38]. All nuclear powers conducting atmospheric tests, including the Soviets and the Chinese, chose to impose nuclear risks and harms upon indigenous communities.⁵ The infamous 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear test, which caused acute radiation injuries to downwind Marshall islanders living under US trusteeship and provoked fatal consequences for the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel, loomed particularly large in the minds of Pacific Islanders who objected to the creation of a new nuclear test site in the South Pacific.

French leaders engaged in a propaganda campaign, both within Polynesia and on the global stage, to stifle dissent by stating that the planned tests posed no risks to local populations or the wider region. In 1962, French Polynesian parliamentarians reacted to rumors of a final series of American atmospheric tests in the region by passing a resolution urging the French government to take a “firm stance” against any nuclear tests in the region that could pose even the slightest health risk to French Polynesians [39]. The French government, whose plans for a Pacific test center in the Tuamotu archipelago of Polynesia were already underway [12], responded by sending an expert to lecture Polynesians on the risk-free nature of nuclear testing. When France openly announced its intention to conduct tests in the region, leaders of Latin American states along the Pacific seaboard wrote to de Gaulle to express their concern over potential transboundary health and economic impacts. De Gaulle rebuffed these concerns by stating that the “the populations of Polynesia … as well as the land, sea and air fauna and flora, will actually incur no risk” [40].

Once testing began, French officials engaged in a theater of cleanliness, geared toward international observers, to defend their claims of “clean” – or “propre” – bombs. Military officers and high officials often made a show of jumping into the lagoon of Moruroa atoll in the wake of tests to prove they did not fear radioactive contamination. Testimonies from Polynesian workers, however, shed light on a different side of life on France’s Pacific test sites. A worker interviewed by Greenpeace in 1987 stated that, when he worked on the atoll in the 1960s, he observed that the same French officials who bathed in the lagoon after tests would later shower in what he described as “special containers,” using “special soaps and creams” [2]. The same worker also spoke about his experiences having to clean up giant piles of irradiated sea life projected onto the atoll in the wake of lagoon-level tests – working without protective clothing or a dosimeter. Other sources that mention workers coping with massive quantities of dead fish after tests [1] and that describe uneven landscapes of radiological protection among different categories of workers [7] lend plausibility to this account.⁶

The divide between official French assertions of nuclear innocuity and the lived experiences of Polynesians was not limited to the test sites – downwind communities began to notice disturbing environmental and public health impacts beginning in the late 1960s. Residents would later recall the large quantities of dead fish, and even dead sharks, that washed up on their beaches in the late 1960s and early 1970s [7]. Mountaintops once rich with vegetation turned barren [7]. All of the horses on Mangareva, an island downwind of the test sites, died in the wake of the first set of nuclear tests [7]. And outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning, caused by coral damage due to military construction activities, sickened workers and downwind communities and significantly altered the economy and nutritional situation of the Gambier archipelago. For years, residents of Mangareva, the principal island of the Gambiers, were forced to decide whether to abstain entirely from fish – their principal source of protein – or to risk their health via successive exposures to the biotoxin accumulating through the food chain [8].

The situation in the Gambier archipelago also illustrates how the French knowingly exposed downwind populations to potentially dangerous levels of radioactive fallout. In July 1966, when the minister of French Overseas Territories and Departments arrived on the island of Mangareva, along with other French officials, in order to observe France’s first nuclear weapon detonation, the Mangarevans threw them an elaborate welcome banquet [4]. The visitors did not linger long, however – a journalist would later explain that the French officials were swiftly and clandestinely evacuated by plane in the wake of the nuclear detonation, after the military recognized that a “non-negligible” level of radioactivity was descending on the island [4]. A scientific vessel that arrived at Mangareva several days later reported high levels of radioactivity found in plankton and fish, and 18 000 picocuries per gram of radioactivity in unwashed salad – a level equivalent to that registered in lettuce in the areas around Chernobyl the day of the accident. Despite these troubling findings, the French provided no warning to Mangarevan residents in the wake of the incident, and children continued to play barefoot in contaminated soil [4]. A French doctor, who produced a report of the visit, noted the lack of radiological awareness in the community: “The population is perfectly ignorant and doesn’t show any curiosity. Father Daniel [the local priest and community leader] doesn’t even know what fallout is” [4]. While the French erected rudimentary fallout shelters for certain downwind populations in later years, during periods of thermonuclear testing [2, 7, 9], insufficient protection and education of downwind populations about nuclear risks continued throughout the period of atmospheric testing.

The limited knowledge of downwind populations was not only a product of errors of omission, French officials also worked to actively silence workers who had borne witness to accidents and illnesses [2, 8]. Testimonies collected by activists and scholars in the decades after France’s first nuclear test in the Pacific, notably those collected by Bruno Barrillot [4, 9], Hans Seur and Peter De Vries [7], Greenpeace [2], and the French Polynesian Commission of Inquiry into the consequences of nuclear testing [8], speak to French efforts to suppress information and intimidate those who shared eyewitness accounts. One former test site worker who witnessed a deadly accident, for example, later spoke to Greenpeace activists about the warnings he received afterwards to never divulge what he had witnessed. The French, he said, “told me I should watch my step … they said there could easily be an accident” [2]. The French also sought to suppress evidence of the epidemiological impacts of nuclear detonations, in at least one case going so far as to confiscate the diaries and notebooks of enterprising teachers and medical workers who sought to track public health trends in their communities [8]. This suppression of information, which extended to patchy and incomplete gathering of data on fallout and worker exposures, would both enable the continued myth of a “clean bomb” and frustrate future efforts to pursue redress.

Some Polynesians also experienced living under the threat of nuclear risk, with attendant anxieties, as a violation in and of itself. Robert Jacobs has written on how radiological risk and attendant uncertainties in the wake of civil nuclear disasters can take a psychological toll even in the absence of realized radiological harm. “The uncertainty of living one’s life, of raising children in such a landscape of invisible risk,” he wrote in the context of the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima reactor meltdown, “takes a toll” [41]. Legal claims brought by Polynesians in the 1990s allude to the psychological toll of living with nuclear risk, with some individuals reporting that they decided not to have children because of anxieties over potential intergenerational health impacts [42, 43]. While there are no validated studies proving a link between radiation exposures and birth defects, the prospect and, in some cases, imputed incidence of intergenerational impacts of nuclear testing also weigh heavily on the minds of many cancer survivors, parents, and advocacy groups. Subjecting victim narratives to doubt, while evaluating causation during the compensation process, can also do harm: M.X. Mitchell has argued that the contested boundary between “risk” and “harm” in the wake of nuclear accidents and radiological exposures, in turn, “abandon[s] the victims completely to the judgments, mistakes and controversies of experts, while subjecting them to terrible psychological stress” [44].

The colonial context that brought nuclear violence to Polynesia also shaped avenues of legal recourse – both ex ante and ex post. The following two sections show how Polynesians and regional actors engaged with legal and political avenues to push back against France’s right to bomb with impunity – first, in an effort to prevent and halt testing in the 1960s through the 1990s, and later, after 1996, in an effort to pursue meaningful redress for victims suffering from conditions caused by unnecessary exposures to ionizing radiation.

5.3 Objecting to Risk Imposition: The Language of Rights

Over three decades of French testing, Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders pursued a wide range of strategies in contesting the French nuclear program, from grassroots organizing to filing claims in international fora. While some opponents emphasized Polynesians’ rights as French citizens to be free from nuclear violence, others cited the UN Charter and regional human rights instruments to assert that France was violating its duties toward Polynesians under international law. Still others invoked the language of sovereignty to argue that the transboundary harms associated with French nuclear testing violated international law. While French military and political leaders, along with their French Polynesian political supporters, repeatedly asserted that nuclear tests were “clean” and posed no risk to local populations, various Pacific stakeholders expressed skepticism, arguing that if the bombs were truly so harmless, the French should test them over the Seine [45].

5.3.1 Rights of Citizenship

Technically speaking, those who stood to suffer the worst harms associated with France’s nuclear testing program were French citizens with equal rights under the French Constitution. In 1946, following the adoption of the Constitution of the French IVth Republic, all indigenous residents of the Établissements français d’Océanie (EFO) were accorded French citizenship, and the islands’ status shifted from colony to that of a “territory” within the “French Union.” Article 72-3 of the Constitution of 1958 declares this equality explicitly, stating that “[t]he Republic recognizes as part of the French people populations of overseas territories within a common ideal of liberty, equality, and fraternity” [46]. And while France had submitted a filing regarding its Overseas Territories to the United Nations in 1946, as prescribed with respect to all states “administering non-self-governing territories” under Article 73 of the UN Charter, it pointedly refused to do so in succeeding years, maintaining that its overseas territories, now fully and directly represented in the French parliament, could no longer be considered non-self-governing [47].⁷

Yet residents of French Polynesia were hardly on equal footing with their compatriots in the metropole, despite their French citizenship. As Robert Aldrich and John Connell have argued, the French territoires d’outre-mer “were the former colonies under a new name” ([24], p. 80). These dynamics were laid bare when General de Gaulle effectively persuaded the Territorial Assembly of French Polynesia to accede to French testing in the Tuamotu archipelago, under the implied threat, according to the testimony of a former territorial politician, of imposing a military occupation upon the entire territory of French Polynesia if the local government failed to cooperate [48].

Polynesians were well aware of the colonial dynamics of selecting nuclear proving grounds. As John Teariki, Polynesian Député to the French National Assembly, wrote in 1966: “No government has hesitated to force other people – and preferably, small and defenseless peoples – to bear the most dangerous risks of its nuclear tests” [49]. The Americans, he continued, “reserve the heavy fallout of their largest bombs” for the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands; the English, “for the Polynesians inhabiting the equatorial islands near Christmas”; the Russians, “for some tribes of the Great North”; and the Chinese, “for Tibetans and Mongols.” France reserved its fallout, Teariki stated, “first for Africans, and now us” [49].

Teariki refuted France’s ongoing claims of the harmlessness of nuclear explosions, citing UN reports that found that the smallest dose of radiation could be toxic to humans and their descendants, and arguing that any augmentation of environmental radiation should be avoided. Teariki invoked the rights in asserting his opposition to nuclear testing, stating that the emplacement of the Centre d’expérimentation du Pacifique (CEP) in French Polynesia, “without the consultation of Polynesians, while it is their health and that of their descendants that is at risk,” constituted “a grave violation of the contract that links us to France and of the rights recognized by the UN Charter” [49]. Teariki was fundamentally concerned with the latent harms of nuclear fallout – and, presciently, anticipated the anger that Polynesians would one day come to feel when suspecting that French testing was the root cause of their or their loved ones’ radiogenic cancers. He closed his speech with “a humble prayer” that de Gaulle might apply in French Polynesia the pacifist principles that he claimed to espouse [50], so that future sufferers of leukemia and other cancers in Polynesia need not accuse France of being the source of their misery [49].

In the 1970s, Pouvanaa a Oopa, an influential and widely respected independence leader who was elected to the French Senate in 1971, again emphasized the French-ness of the overseas territory in arguing against the continuation of nuclear testing on grounds of equality between territory and metropole [51]. “The faithfulness of our population to the Republic and to France has been too often proven and tested for it to be brought into question,” he stated, referring to Polynesian sacrifice of life and limb in the Free French forces during the World War II. “But to the senators of France and to French public opinion, we would like to say that we can no longer allow our territory to serve as the battlefield of nuclear experiments” [51]. Because the French senators would not accept such experiments taking place over metropolitan France, Pouvanaa argued, they should not allow such tests to take place in the “antipodes,” either. French Polynesia’s status within the French Republic, in Pouvanaa’s view, should protect French Polynesians from bearing the burdens of nuclear testing so disproportionately.

5.3.2 Rights under the UN Charter

Other critics of nuclear testing questioned the right of France – and other nuclear powers – to test nuclear weapons over non-self-governing territories. A decade before France moved its nuclear testing program to the Pacific, Marshall Islanders had petitioned the UN Trusteeship Council asking for a cessation of US nuclear detonations, citing harms experienced by civilians on Rongelab and Uterik atolls in the form of burns, nausea, hair loss, and lowered white blood counts [52].⁸ The petition spurred a series of anxious memoranda within the US State Department discussing whether nuclear testing might be viewed at the UN as a breach of the United States’ obligations under its UN-mediated Strategic Trusteeship Agreement [53, 54].

In the early 1970s, some international actors similarly questioned France’s right to conduct tests in a far-flung territory over which it asserted control, assessing whether such acts might violate the UN Charter. Fijian Ambassador to the UN Satya Nandan, for example, criticized the French decision to test in an overseas territory and argued that France had no right under the UN Charter to do so in a non-self-governing territory [55]. Representing a country that had recently gained independence from Great Britain, Nandan was acutely aware of the fact that French Polynesians themselves had no delegate at the UN. Nandan likened France’s “defiant disregard of the pleas of the inhabitants of the region,” and particularly France’s disregard of “those of the small States and Non-Self-Governing Territories that are within nuclear fallout range,” to the “attitude of an international bully showering its nuclear waste over one region after another” [55].

Nandan then made a legal argument that the tests should not be understood as being conducted on French territory at all. While France maintained that French Polynesia was part of France, rather than a colony, he argued in 1971 that, because French Polynesia was for all intents and purposes non-self-governing, France should be bound by certain duties of care in the treatment of its inhabitants [55]. Under Article 73 of the UN Charter, states administering non-self-governing territories must, inter alia, “promote to the utmost … the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories and … ensure … their economic, social and educational advancement, their just treatment and their protection against abuses” [47]. It was self-evident, Nandan argued, that the emplacement of a nuclear testing center, with all attendant risks, in the Tuamotus contravened the “sacred obligations” that bound France under Article 73 [55]. Claims of French Polynesia being part of France, he argued, “are like those of Portugal, which considers its African Territories to be a province of Portugal in order that it may continue to exploit them.” French Polynesia, he stated, was being used as “a dumping ground for French nuclear waste in order to provide for the alleged security of Frenchmen in distant France” [55].⁹

5.3.3 Inherent Rights of Sovereignty

Nandan was not concerned only with the rights of French Polynesians. Suva, Fiji’s capital, had experienced significant fallout in the fall of 1966, when prevailing winds carried the radioactive cloud westward across the Pacific [56, 57]. Fiji was one of numerous states in the Pacific region that could claim that French nuclear tests, and the transboundary harm they caused, infringed on its sovereignty and the rights of its citizens. Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Niue, the Cook Islands, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Australia also registered fallout over their territories [58]. And in 1973, the governments of Australia and New Zealand brought a high-profile case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), seeking to prevent further French testing in the region [59, 60].

In their cases before the ICJ, Australia and New Zealand challenged France’s right to test on the grounds that nuclear detonations and resultant fallout infringed on the rights of other sovereign states in the region [59–61]. While both complaints mentioned briefly the risks posed to inhabitants of French Polynesia, the substance of Australia and New Zealand’s legal arguments centered on the alleged violation of the two countries’ sovereign right to exclude radioactive particles from their own territories. Australia’s memorandum, like New Zealand’s, focused on the illegality of France’s introduction of radioactive fallout into territory not its own – the high seas and the sovereign territory of neighboring states. Imposing even de minimis levels of risk on citizens of a foreign power was, in Australia’s view, a violation of international law. Notably, Australia also argued that the tests imposed objective measurable harms in the form of elevated radionuclide counts and additional “psychological consequences” that should be considered harms in their own right. Even aside from measurable amounts of fission products in foodstuffs and the atmosphere, Australia argued, “populations are subjected to mental stress and anxiety generated by fear and this is a cause of injury to them” [59].

In June 1973, the ICJ issued an interim protection order, stating that “the French government should avoid nuclear tests causing the deposit of radio-active fallout on Australian territory” [62].¹⁰ France ignored this order and, in early August, detection devices throughout Australia began to register “fresh fallout.” International leaders sharply criticized France’s indifference to both the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbad atmospheric testing, and the interim order of the “highest international judicial body” [63–65]. Despite ostensible French disregard for international law, international censure did begin to weigh heavily on French parliamentarians [66]. The French government announced in 1974 the intention to move testing underground, in wells dug deep into the base of Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls. The ICJ ultimately declined to issue a final ruling on the legality of atmospheric French nuclear testing on the grounds that the issue was moot now that France had moved their testing program underground.

The ICJ’s interim order, however unenforceable it proved in practice, is revealing in its endorsement of the principle that one of the inherent rights of sovereignty is the ability to exclude radionuclides from one’s territory. The Court focused on the concrete harm of unwanted particulate matter itself, rather than the more fraught question of whether radioactive contamination could be definitively linked to future corporeal harms. Other states in the Pacific would soon seize on a parallel strategy in the multilateral domain, invoking their sovereign power to exclude nuclear-related vessels from their ports as a means for curtailing the operations of nuclear powers in the Pacific. The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP), a transnational, Indigenous-led anti-nuclear movement that espoused twinned anti-colonial and anti-nuclear objectives, gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s, and helped drive the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the South Pacific via the 1985 Treaty of Rarotonga [67, 68].¹¹

Despite this ongoing transnational campaign and high-profile activism by Greenpeace, resistance to nuclear testing within French Polynesia did not gain widespread traction until the mid-1990s. Civil society groups, such as Ia Ora Te Natura, organized protests during the early decades of testing [69], but Polynesians who objected to nuclear testing or questioned French testing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were generally associated with the independentist political party. During this period, to criticize the CEP was implicitly to criticize French Polynesia’s role within Overseas France. Pro-independence candidates garnered only a growing minority of the vote – 15% in 1978, and 20% in 1981 ([24], pp. 212–213, 233). These parties failed to garner wider support in large part because the CEP had so transformed the economic landscape of the islands that a significant portion of the population was now dependent on associated jobs and government aid [21]. John Teariki himself commented in 1984 that independence “would be difficult now as the people aren’t ready … The Tahitians live an unnatural life now. They live off imported goods, tinned food and other things. There would be struggles, unemployment, all possible things” ([24], p. 246). These dynamics shifted suddenly in the mid-1990s, when French resumption of underground testing after a three-year voluntary moratorium touched off a series of mass protests and riots [70]. With the support of international lawyers, a small cohort of Polynesians also looked to international organizations for potential avenues of redress, embracing the language of human rights in expressing their opposition to continued French testing in the region.

5.3.4 Human Rights

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac’s announcement of French plans to renew underground testing after a three-year moratorium [71] sparked widespread outrage and grassroots anti-nuclear sentiment within French Polynesia on a level that had not yet been seen over 30 years of testing. Since 1975, all French nuclear experiments had been conducted underground, with much lower risk of fallout or contamination beyond immediate test sites. Yet for those protesting in 1995, the resumption of testing provided the impetus for airing grievances about the French testing program writ large – and gave rise to several legal claims that invoked human rights law to argue that the imposition of a nuclear testing program in Polynesia violated local people’s human rights. These legal efforts show the way in which opponents of nuclear tests framed risk imposition itself as one of the rights violations associated with nuclear testing.

In the wake of Chirac’s announcement, a group of Māʻohi claimants and their lawyers objected to the French right to test under the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Vaihere Bordes, a 46-year-old farmer living on Tahiti, and 18 other residents of French Polynesia filed a petition with the European Commission of Human Rights, seeking to enjoin further testing on the grounds that additional detonations would violate the ECHR [42]. Specifically, claimants argued that further underground testing would violate their right to life, their right to be free from inhumane and degrading treatment, their right to private and family life, and their right to be free from discrimination on the basis of race. A similar group of petitioners lodged a parallel complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee, alleging that the proposed tests violated their rights under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) [43].

The petitioners had already experienced harms directly linked to French testing. Some had worked at Moruroa and had been hospitalized for health problems related to their work there [42]. Others experienced repeated miscarriages and lost children to conditions they suspected were related to radiation. One childless petitioner stated that he did not plan to have any children, for fear that he would pass on congenital malformations [42].

In the context of the 1995 underground tests, plaintiffs drew attention to the way in which additional nuclear risk imposition itself caused cognizable harms in the form of stress, anxiety, and stigma. Plaintiffs argued that the announcement of the new series of tests had, in and of itself, already caused them harm in the form of psychological anguish,¹² echoing Australia’s arguments before the ICJ in 1973 that living under radiological risk produced psychological harms. The claimants also argued that the continued use of Polynesia was tantamount to racial discrimination. Choosing a distant site in the Pacific, as opposed to sites in metropolitan France with more solid geological formations and closer to sites of materials production, they argued, served as evidence of discrimination on the basis of race. The only logical explanation for selecting Moruroa as the principal test site, they contended, was “the greater political acceptability of exposing a minority non-European population to risks generated by nuclear tests” [42]. According to petitioners, the imposition of the test site with attendant risks in Polynesia was a mark of stigma and discrimination and, thus, a cognizable injury. In addition to these claims tied specifically to the final set of seven tests, the applicants added that they had “suffered cumulative degrading and humiliating treatment” because the “Polynesian population lives in terror of the consequences of the numerous earlier tests and in fear of the potentially tragic consequences of the further series of tests” [42].

The Commission essentially ignored these claims about the psychological harms inherent in living in the shadow of nuclear testing and dismissed the case on the grounds that mere risk of harm insufficient grounds for legal recourse. Many of the legal claims in the petition hinged principally on prospective, rather than realized, harm: Claimants argued that the final planned series of tests could cause venting of radioactive material into the atmosphere; fracturing of the atolls under which tests were conducted; and contamination of the surrounding ocean food chain.¹³ “Merely invoking risks inherent in the use of nuclear power, whether for civil or military purposes,” the Commission stated, “is insufficient to enable the applicants to claim to be victims of a violation of the Convention, as many human activities generate risks” [42].¹⁴ In a claim before the UN Human Rights Committee, petitioners argued that the proposed tests would “with some degree of probability” increase the incidence of cancer cases among inhabitants of French Polynesia and trigger ciguatera outbreaks [43]. Like the European Commission of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Committee decided that the claimants were not “victims” according to the ICCRP, as hypothetical violations (in the absence of “real” and “imminent” consequences) were insufficient in showing harm [43].

Unimpeded by these and other unsuccessful legal challenges [72], France’s final set of underground nuclear tests moved forward, but not without much international public outcry [73]. France’s leadership justified the limited, final set of tests as a necessary precondition of the country’s planned accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) [72]. But this context did little to tame public protests. For French Polynesians, the protests of 1995 were not just about the seven final tests, but reflected grievances built up over decades of French use of the territory as a nuclear proving ground. While the European Commission’s and UN committee’s legal analyses focused only on the foreseeable harm that might arise from additional underground tests, those most directly impacted by French nuclear testing in the Pacific knew firsthand of relatives, friends, and neighbors coping with health conditions and fertility problems that many considered a direct consequence of exposure to ionizing radiation. Many affected individuals had not spoken out previously because of the delayed onset of these conditions and because of the atmosphere of secrecy, intimidation, and information suppression that prevailed for decades.

That the European Commission and UN Human Rights Committee claimants’ core legal arguments focused on prospective risk, rather than imminent harm, was their legal undoing. But these cases do provide a window into how affected populations could experience risk itself as a form of harm – in terms of the mental anguish associated with living under the shadow of nuclear testing and its embodied legacies and the more insidious stigmatic harm of discrimination. The disposition of these cases at the hands of the European Commission of Human Rights and the UN Committee on Human Rights also helps to illustrate how the law rejected rights-based arguments seeking to prevent exposure to risk in the absence of compelling evidence that concrete and imminent harms would be suffered by claimants. Similar challenges of proving links between risk and harm apply when looking backward to assess whether nuclear testing can be considered the causal agent in harms suffered today.

5.4 Coming to Terms with Violence and Harms: The “Loi Morin” and the Politics of Redress

In the years that followed the final set of tests in the mid-1990s, increasing press coverage of nuclear contamination, individual litigation in French courts, and expanding victim advocacy organizations spurred a public reckoning with France’s nuclear testing legacy. Since 2010, those who resided or sojourned in French Polynesia during the period of nuclear testing and later developed one of an enumerated list of radiogenic cancers – or their surviving relatives – have been eligible to apply for financial compensation under the French nuclear victim compensation law, known as the “Morin Law” after former Minister of Defense Hervé Morin [74].¹⁵

While nuclear compensation programs represent a partial victory for victims and their advocates, they also have a flattening effect on the conceptualization of nuclear harms. The Morin Law allows surviving family members to collect compensation on behalf of potential claimants who passed away from radiogenic illnesses, but it offers no redress for individuals with non-cancerous health concerns, who have dealt with miscarriages or fertility challenges, or who believe they have passed on genetic damage to subsequent generations. It also provides no compensation for those whose health and livelihoods were impacted by severe ciguatera outbreaks in the 1960s and 1970s and does not address the durable environmental and sociological consequences of nuclear testing.

The Morin Law has been mired in controversy since its enactment and has undergone a rapid succession of amendments that have shifted the playing field for those who believe themselves or their family members to be victims of nuclear testing [75]. One central controversy around the law concerns its treatment of the causal link between exposure to radiation linked to the French nuclear program and the eventual development of a radiogenic cancer. While numerous studies have demonstrated a link between exposure to fission products and the development of certain cancers, it is virtually impossible to prove such a causal link at an individual level.

Under the law, if basic eligibility criteria are met, a claimant benefits from a “presumption of causality,” even in the absence of proof that the nuclear tests caused his or her cancer [74]. The contours of this presumption of causality, though, have proved controversial, and numerous amendments to the law since its 2010 enactment have created a moving target for prospective claimants [75]. Between 2010 and 2017, 97% of claims were rejected by the French administering agency through a “negligible risk” loophole that allowed the committee reviewing claims to dismiss those where they found that exposure to ionizing radiation linked to nuclear testing likely contributed only “negligibly” to the claimant’s risk of developing cancer [76]. In 2018, this negligible risk exception was replaced with an exposure threshold: Claimants meeting eligibility criteria could receive compensation if the committee determined that they could have been exposed to at least 1 mSv of ionizing radiation due to nuclear tests in any given year [77–79].¹⁶ Decisions by France’s top administrative and constitutional courts later extended a pure presumption of causation retroactively to cover applicants who submitted claims before 2018 [80–82]. These changes have provoked widespread confusion. While the claim acceptance rate rose from a paltry 3% to nearly 50% after the removal of the negligible risk exception, the claims process remains a source of controversy, in both metropolitan France and Māʻohi Nui [83–85].

The French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and the French government more broadly continue to play a role in shaping public information about the effects of nuclear testing, making certain concessions while holding out against claims of widespread harm or culpability. In the wake of a March 2021 scientific and journalistic investigation showing that more than 90% of the population of French Polynesia was exposed above the 1 mSv threshold during the period of atmospheric testing [86], the CEA published its own book casting pollution as “limited” in an effort to take back control of the narrative [13]. And while French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged during a July 2021 visit to Tahiti that France has “a debt” to French Polynesia for the collectivity’s role in hosting nuclear tests, and acknowledged that we know today that the tests were not “clean,” he also asserted, incorrectly, that members of the military did not lie to Polynesians and accepted the same risks as local populations [87]. The French Morin Law itself is enacted in such a way as to evade apologies or acknowledgments of French responsibility for the harms associated with nuclear tests. The compensation regime is framed as an act of “national solidarity” recognizing that the nuclear testing campaign could have produced some victims, but maintaining that the harms compensated under the law are not ultimately attributable to the French state [88, 89].

Historical and ongoing information asymmetries complicate efforts by victims to mount a case in favor of their compensation – and can be understood as part of the historical violence of the nuclear testing program, given failures to limit harm to affected populations. Surveillance among soldiers and civilians working at nuclear testing sites was uneven at best – and often particularly lacking for indigenous or minority workers. Downwind communities, from the predominantly white citizens of St. George, Utah to the indigenous Pacific Islanders on remote atolls, were generally, and often deliberately, kept in the dark about nuclear risks in the wake of tests – leading to external and internal exposures that could have been avoided. And even those fully aware of dangers who might have actively sought out ways to measure their past or ongoing exposures were forced to contend with a lack of adequate sensing technologies – especially for calculating internal exposures. Machines capable of determining levels of internal exposure lagged years behind the detonation of the first nuclear weapons and were often expensive, bulky, and available only to a select few. The full body counter was not available until 1964 and, even then, was impractical for large studies of internal radiation doses [41]. “Without such instrumentation,” Robert Jacobs writes, “you cannot differentiate who in a group of people has internalized a particle and who hasn’t” [41]. Internal exposures could vary based on happenstance (who inhaled which particle) and exposures through the food chain, creating uneven landscapes of radiological vulnerability.

Even for those who can prove exposure levels, the “slow violence” [90] of radiological harms makes definitively proving a causal link between level or chronic exposure and the development of disease in following years and decades nearly impossible in any given individual case. To this end, the introduction of doubt – about both initial levels of exposure and the causal link between exposures and disease – provides a critical tool in the arsenal of those seeking to deflect and undermine claims by putative nuclear victims. And, as Mary Mitchell, Holly Barker, and Barbara Rose Johnston have shown, being subjected to the judgments of lawyers and civil servants and invasive examinations by medical professionals can be experienced as a form of violation in and of itself [26, 44].

Contemporary challenges identifying the “true” victims of nuclear testing were hardly unforeseeable. In the 1970s, the Congress of Micronesia issued a report on the effects of the 1954 Castle Bravo incident, arguing that the “prudent assumption” in the case of those exposed on Rongelap and Utirik Atolls was that “all ionizing radiation to the patient is harmful” [26]. The committee thus concluded that “whether or not ‘damage’ can be proven is irrelevant, since it is a fact that exposure occurred and that, since exposure to radiation is harmful, then it is highly probable that damage did indeed occur” [26]. In this view, which parallels the legal arguments advanced by the government of Australia before the ICJ, the harms of nuclear testing should be registered at the level of the intrusion of unwanted radioactive isotopes, regardless of realized downstream health consequences. Yet, calculating levels of exposure, at an individual or local level, is complicated by insufficient historical instrumentation and systemic gaps in exposure data. So how does one go about pursuing redress when, at least in part by design, no reliable record of exposures exists?

In July 2021, French Polynesian President Edouard Fritch flew to Paris with a 20-person delegation to participate in a the “Reko Tika,” or “Truth and Justice” round table with French ministers and high officials [91]. This official delegation was principally concerned with issues of declassifying nuclear archives, improving the compensation process for individual claimants, and securing French reimbursement of the costs taken on by the Polynesian social service organization in caring for cancer victims. Yet, while the official Polynesian delegation solicited input from civil society organizations and claimed to represent the grievances of all Polynesians, the Mā‘ohi Protestant Church and civil society organizations eventually pulled out of the process and declined to travel to Paris [92]. Oscar Temaru, President of the independentist Tāvini Huiraʻatira party, objected to the bilateral nature of the round table, refusing to participate in any discussion of the nuclear issues with the French state in the absence of UN arbitration [93].

On the morning of July 1, the independentist party Tāvini Huiraʻatira, the Mā‘ohi Protestant Church, and several civil society organizations organized the “Tahiti Nui Round Table” in Faʻaʻā as a counterpoint to the Reko Tika round table taking place a dozen time zones away in Paris [94]. The Māʻohi Nui round table organizers crystallized their grievances into two main buckets: first, the environmental and health impacts from radioactive contamination in Polynesia; and, second, the lies of the French State and consistent denial and minimization of nuclear contamination [95]. The Māʻohi Nui round table, thus, centered the dishonesty of the French government as a key element of nuclear violence.

Both round tables agreed that the status quo around nuclear legacies and compensation must change: The official delegation to Paris spurred an initiative to open up more archives related to the French nuclear program and helped lead to the allocation of additional resources from the French state to assist eligible claimants in submitting their compensation applications [96, 97]. The Faʻaʻā round table, which denounced the Paris event as illegitimate, called for more ambitious measures: a complete overhaul of the Loi Morin system and a Justice and Reconciliation Commission in Papeete, citing the example of the Republic of South Africa’s management of post-apartheid reconciliation [94]. The group described the French nuclear program as being characterized by an “institutional lie erected to a systemic level,” and emphasized the need for narrative justice. The enabling condition behind French lies, according to minutes from the July 2021 meeting, was that French Polynesia “has been an occupied country. And there is no democracy in an occupied country headed by an ‘administrative power’” [95].

Today, as in the 1960s, French Polynesians continue to assert that France never had any right to detonate nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Yet, because of the liminal status of the archipelagos that comprise French Polynesia, or as the Tāvini party would describe it, Māʻohi Nui, Polynesians were compelled to endure cultural upheavals, radionuclide contamination, and varying degrees of ecological destruction in the service of France’s nuclear deterrence force. The violence of risk imposition, which can be considered a form of “wastelanding” [29], was compounded by a secondary violence of tactics aimed at suppressing public knowledge and documentation regarding radiological risks and harms. The violence endured by Polynesians was at once grounded in deeper patterns of racialized colonialism and peculiar to the atomic age – a slow, environmentally mediated violence at once complicated and co-constituted by the maddening dynamics of radiological risk, uncertainty, and underdetermined causation.

5.5 Conclusion

In theorizing environmental violence, we should also pay attention to how legal status and degrees of political empowerment in colonial and postcolonial contexts shape global geographies of risk, violence, and harm. Ulrich Beck has written of the “systematic ‘attraction’ between extreme poverty and extreme risk” [14]. But financial affluence is not the only – or necessarily the most significant – factor in shaping community vulnerability and access to forms of redress. French Polynesians have borne the brunt of the harms associated with the French testing program in the Pacific because, between 1966 and 1996, they were considered by the metropole to be at once French and not French enough – objects, but not full subjects of French authority.

Examining nuclear legacies in French Polynesia can help us to think through the possibilities and limitations of the “Environmental Violence” concept in an age of causally complex harms that can remain latent for decades. This case study shows how complex causation makes environmental harm difficult to address through law, both ex ante and ex post. The emplacement of radiological risk on a population, in colonial contexts and environmental justice contexts more broadly, is a form of violence, not only because of the potential for embodied harm and the concomitant likelihood of psychological stress, but also because the dynamics of generalized risk often complicate, or even preclude, adequate redress.

These dynamics are not unique to the victims of nuclear weapons programs. Nuclear power plant accidents, chemical toxins, and even greenhouse gas–induced climatic changes can all fit into a similar framework of latent and causally complex harms. Notably, in the Pacific, efforts to preempt harms from accelerating climate change and deep-sea mining follow a similar logic to historical attempts to prevent and halt nuclear testing. As with nuclear testing, the dispersion of benefits and harms in the context of twenty-first-century energy and mineral extraction fall along predictably colonial lines: Financial and security benefits accrue to the global North, while communities in the Global South and, in particular, small island states in Oceania, bear the brunt of harms. Even if one argues that the value of certain polluting industries outpaces their harm, any calculus of “balancing” should consider the fact that, under current international law, we lack effective mechanisms for compensating harms in full. The systemic obstacles to victim redress, whether political, doctrinal, or inherent to the causal complexities of environmentally mediated harms, should be understood as key elements of modern environmental violence.