Serie

Anton Öhman
Knowing Nuclear Weapons Tests. Witness Activism and Oppositional Knowledge in the Cold War Colonial Pacific
Studia historica Lundensia 40
2026 | 374 s. | engelska,

ISSN: 1650-755X
ISBN: 978-91-90055-89-2, 978-91-90055-88-5

This dissertation examines how actors in the Pacific produced, mobilized, and circulated oppositional knowledge about nuclear weapons testing from the 1950s to the early 2000s, with French Polynesia as its primary focus. At its core is witness activism: coordinated practices of testimony, document retrieval and annotation, archiving, publication, and transnational circulation through which activists contested state secrecy, scientific uncertainty, and colonial power. Witness activism is developed both as an analytical category and as a lens for understanding how non-state actors claimed epistemic authority under conditions of institutional opacity and contested expertise.