Between 1966 and 1996, France conducted 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia, including 41 detonations at or above ground level. This chapter explores the history of legal and diplomatic contestations of the French right to conduct nuclear tests in the South Pacific through the lens of environmental violence. Polynesians and other Pacific stakeholders saw France’s use of the South Pacific as a nuclear proving ground as an act of colonial violence and sought, unsuccessfully, to prevent the imposition of any additional radiological risk in Polynesia. Data gaps, information asymmetries, and the inherent causal uncertainty surrounding harms from exposure to ionizing radiation frustrated both prospective and retrospective legal recourse, as Pacific Islanders struggled to prove that they would be – or, in ensuing decades, that they had in fact been – harmed by French nuclear tests. The complex dynamics around radiological risk provoked anguish not only during the period of nuclear testing, but also afterwards, as individuals who developed potentially radiogenic conditions continued to navigate challenging victim compensation landscapes. This chapter illustrates the particular difficulties of coming to terms with causally complex, underdetermined harms in modern contexts of environmental violence.

In the context of a wider study of the evolution through time of relationships between Indigenous peoples, settlers and the British empire though the example of three family histories, this initial chapter starts in the borderlands between the lands of the Haudenosaunee and colonial New York just before the revolution. It re-reads the well-known histories of Haudenosaunee siblings Joseph and Molly Brant (Thayendenegea and Konwatsienni) and of British Superintendent of Indians William Johnson, Molly Brant’s partner, in a wider regional context. The chapter takes the Mohawk Valley as an example of a context in which the empire was compelled to accept to some extent the models of incorporation, including the creation of kinship links designed to foster mutual obligations, used by Indigenous people who were still key military allies. At the same time, William Johnson also used household power (including the ownership of enslaved people) to attempt to dominate a complex society. Before the Revolution, people in Mohawk Valley borderlands lived in a state of uneasy equilibrium, held together in part by the empire’s military need of an alliance with the Haudenosaunee, even as regional violence made relationships increasingly untenable.

Tracing the fate of British mutiny monuments over the course of the first twenty-five years that followed formal Indian Independence in 1947, as well as the practices of commemoration employed to mark the conflict’s centenary in 1957, Chapter 6 is concerned with how Britain and India were forced to renegotiate the past within the dramatically transformed present. As this chapter shows, British and Indian official memory largely dovetailed over this period. Animated by questions of legitimacy at the international and domestic levels, the uprising presented an awkward moment for official British and Indian memories of empire, and thus both governments settled on an attempt to forget 1857 within the sociopolitical context of this period. However, as this chapter will further show, despite the ideological inducements to forget the uprising of 1857, it remained an important component for many groups in Britain but especially in India during this period, where memories of the conflict continued to help define what empire meant.

Focusing on commemoration over the course of the first twenty years which followed the uprising, this chapter argues that official commemoration was a direct and often conscious attempt to mollify the British population which anxiously anticipated further insurrection. With elevated levels of intercommunal antipathy characterising the post-conflict colonial relationship, this chapter shows how commemoration was designed to produce a conciliatory memory of the uprising consciously shaped to soothe tension and reassure the colonial community about the stability of British India. Responsible for a greatly sanitised memory of 1857, commemoration attempted to mould the conflict into a heroic narrative in which British and Indian soldiers fought side by side to win a magnificent victory in the name of empire. As this chapter further explores, however, despite the enormous ideological energy expended by the administration over this period, fears of further insurrection tied to memories of 1857 were never far from the surface during these practices of commemoration and could still erupt in ruthless outbursts of colonial violence even decades later.

Focusing on Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s commemorative painting, In Memoriam, this chapter traces British responses to the uprising over the course of the conflict itself. Painted at the height of the insurrection, In Memoriam originally depicted the Cawnpore Massacre and was therefore part of a broader discourse which had dramatic material implications for British counter-insurgency by legitimising the ruthless acts of violence used to suppress the rebellion. A continued focus on this artwork reveals, however, the extent to which this depiction of the conflict quickly became unacceptable in its aftermath. With the spectre of armed rebellion haunting the colonial psyche, popular sentiment convinced Paton to make a number of significant alterations to his commemorative composition which transferred the imagined space of the painting from Cawnpore to Lucknow. Employing a range of methods including the use of X-ray and ultraviolent light, this chapter uncovers what the original painting would have looked like at the same time as analysing what the final composition can tell us about the prevalence of colonial anxiety in the years that followed the uprising.

Cycles of violence in Palestine are set against a backdrop of settler colonialism. In this chapter, we argue that in colonial conditions such as in Palestine, ‘transformative justice’ frameworks and practices are needed over transitional justice. In particular, we suggest that transformative justice should e grounded in Indigenous knowledges and emergent practices ‘from below’, meaning the everyday needs and strengths of those most directly impacted by violence and oppression. In this chapter, specifically, we theorise ‘from below’ from the perspective of our work as two Palestinian psychologists. Through this writing process, which involved reflecting on our personal, professional and inter-generational experiences of contending with violence and oppression, we articulate a series of counter-stories as key decolonial enactments of adaptation and resilience. These decolonial enactments include:  1. Self-determination of Colonized Communities: Asserting our Sovereignty with Decolonial Attitude and Unafraid Re-Planting; 2. Radical Coalitions for Transformative Justice: Strengthening our Connections and Capacities to Struggle; and 3. Resetting our Wings: Everyday Enactments of our Humanity and Radical Love. These counter-stories shed light on pathways towards effectively disrupting cycles of colonial violence in Palestine and bringing forth, into everyday life, the decolonial futures that we so desperately need and deserve.

In Chapter 7, we find that the characters in J. M. Coetzee’s novels are afflicted by second thoughts in a manner that brings to mind the structure of sceptical interlocution and the abolition of philia that we saw in Fanon. With the particular case of the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, this thought-affliction produces an edginess that is directly related to the character’s unerring perception of the force of the Empire’s ideology and to his sense of having been compromised for being their unwitting agent. As the novel progresses, the Magistrate’s edginess moves from being a feature of his internal interlocution to being defined by his material conditions: he is thrown into jail and tortured. It also impacts on the moral contradictions of his position – having to choose between allegiance to the Empire and care for the barbarian girl. The question of moral residue and ethical choice are carefully examined with respect to the Magistrate.

The fall of the great Turkmen fortress of Gök-Tepe in 1881 took place in the full glare of international publicity, but it was preceded by over ten years of skirmishing and raiding between the Russians and the Akhal-Teke and Yomud Turkmen from the shores of the Caspian to the Köpet Dagh mountains. In 1879 the hapless General N. P. Lomakin was defeated beneath the walls of Gök-Tepe and forced to retreat, the most significant defeat inflicted on Russian arms throughout the entire history of the conquest of Central Asia. The celebrated and sadistic General M. D. Skobelev was tasked with wiping out the memory of Lomakin’s humiliation, which he did by storming the fortress and massacring 8,000 Turkmen, women and children included. Over the next four years the Russians would annex Merv and the Panjdeh oasis, arousing Persian and British alarm, before they came to an agreement both with the Qajars and with the British on drawing what would become the new southern frontier of the Empire.

The conquest of the Ferghana valley and the final destruction of the Khoqand khanate are often overlooked in histories of the conquest. Having survived in uneasy limbo as a protectorate from 1866 until 1875, Khoqand was rocked by a series of rebellions against its unpopular Khan, Khudoyar, prompting a Russian military intervention. Attempts to preserve Khoqand as a protectorate by putting Khudoyar’s son on the throne failed, and further rebellions broke out in Andijan and other cities of this rich and fertile region. General M. D. Skobelev led a series of vicious punitive expeditions against the Sart, Qipchaq and Kyrgyz inhabitants of Ferghana, which saw Russian forces deliberately making war on women, children and non-combatants. The last resistance to the Russians in Khoqand’s name came from the Kyrgyz of the mountainous Alai region, who did not made peace until 1876. Ferghana would become the richest province of Russian Turkestan, while Khoqand’s demise would be mourned by a whole generation of intellectuals and commemorated in an extraordinarily rich historiography.

The Khanate of Khiva had a long history of cocking a snook at Russian authority. From the massacre of Bekovich-Cherkassky’s expedition in 1717 to the failure of Perovskii’s winter invasion in 1839–40, Khiva seemed the embodiment of ‘Asiatic insolence’ and intransigence. Turkestan Governor-General von Kaufman was determined to wipe out the memories of these early defeats and secure his own legacy as a great military leader. Easily securing consent from St Petersburg and brushing aside Khivan attempts to find a diplomatic solution, in 1873 he launched the most elaborate of all the Russian campaigns of conquest, with four different columns setting out from Krasnovodsk, Mangishlaq, Orenburg and Turkestan. Of these, the Krasnovodsk column ran out of water in the middle of the Qara-Qum desert and had to turn back. The Turkestan column, led by von Kaufman himself, almost met a similar fate in the Qizil-Qum, and was saved only by the skill of its Qazaq guides. Most of the fighting was done by the Orenburg and Manghishlaq columns, which reached the city of Khiva ahead of von Kaufman, who instructed them to wait until he arrived and could enter in triumph – with farcical consequences. The campaign ended on a grim note with the notorious massacre of the Yomud Turkmen by Russian forces, ostensibly designed to secure the internal authority of the Khivan Khan, Muhammad Rahim II, now a Russian puppet like his counterpart in Bukhara.