New from the University of Chicago Press: Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania (2026), by M.X. Mitchell (New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark). A description from the Press:
In the years following World War II, the United States conducted sixty-seven devastating nuclear blasts in the Marshall Islands—yet the archipelago was never a US territory. Working through the United Nations, US diplomats engineered a new, one-of-a-kind extraterritorial status, called strategic trusteeship, to control the Native lands, waters, and peoples of the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands. Strategic trusteeship permitted the US to militarize a vast expanse of Western Oceania. This novel and racialized legal form of international dependency was integral to US nuclear weapons detonations and damage in the region.
In Unsettling Sovereignty, M. X. Mitchell recounts this untold legal history, exploring how nuclear weapons changed claims and practices of sovereignty from the 1940s to the present. US nuclear blasting in the Marshall Islands troubled conventional renderings of state sovereignty under international law. The explosions, disastrous for Marshallese communities and their ancestral atolls, also caused hazardous nuclear fallout, which spread around the globe. Islanders and their allies turned to law, using legal wrangling over blasting and fallout to raise new questions about the location, time, and subjects of state violence in a period of decolonization; the intersections between race, Indigeneity, and wide-scale technogenic harm; and the pitfalls and unfulfilled promises of international law. Mitchell shows that the Marshallese people and their lands and waters were, and remain, central to redefining sovereignty in an era of boundless pollution and climate change.
Praise from reviewers:
“Unsettling Sovereignty is a magisterial account of the struggles over US military colonialism in Micronesia after World War II, as the Marshall Islands became a so-called proving ground for nuclear test detonations. Mitchell traces the political and material consequences of US jurisdiction and ongoing nuclear blasting, as well as the legal conflicts these events set off. Ultimately, Marshall Islanders used US environmental law to win recognition of their rights, negotiate sovereignty, and forge the Marshallese state. This is essential reading for scholars and students in history of American science, legal history, and environmental studies.” -- Angela N. H. Creager
“US nuclear explosions in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War were not only catastrophically destructive, but also an occasion for the creation of law as Pacific Islanders fought to retain sovereignty over their homelands, Mitchell shows in this brilliant and original book. Unsettling Sovereignty puts the Islanders at the center of US nuclear history. A powerful and important contribution.” -- Mary L. Dudziak
More information is available here. And we're told that if you purchase from the Press, a 30 percent discount is available (use code UCPNEW).
-- Karen Tani
