Counterarchives

International Law, Nuclear Testing and the Pacific

A global history told from the Pacific.

Nuclear testing in the Pacific was never only a technical or military project. It was also legal, political and colonial. International law helped organise the nuclear order: through sovereignty, jurisdiction, security, secrecy and the unequal distribution of risk. It also became a language through which states, Indigenous communities, anti-nuclear movements, lawyers and activists challenged that order.

Counterarchives reconstructs this history by following law across courts, islands, movements and archives. It asks how environmental harm became visible; how testimony and science entered legal argument; how secrecy shaped what could later be proved; and what justice requires when the consequences of nuclear testing outlast the explosion itself.

The project forms part of the McKenzie Fellowship, Human Rights, Decolonisation and Environmental Justice in the Nuclear Pacific, at Melbourne Law School.