“Go contaminate back home!” Territorial stigmatization and spatial nuclearity production in Hao (French Polynesia)

Résumé 0

The ongoing renewal of nuclear geography fueled the inflation of concepts characterizing the relations between this sector and space. Yet, we argue that these notions fail to document how places come to be counted and treated as nuclear. Building on Hecht, we consider “nuclearity” as a contested and volatile technopolitical category, disconnected from material realities. In this paper, we suggest bridging “nuclearity” with “territorial stigmatization” to construct an analytical framework identifying the production of spatial nuclearity. We experiment our framework by studying the fluctuating social nuclearity of the atoll of Hao (French Polynesia) which hosted the French nuclear tests forward operating base. Two cases—the sales of gravels and metal scraps originating from the buildings dismantling—, leading to two distinct nuclearization of space, are compared. To reconstruct the narratives framing these cases, we drew on a three-step protocol mobilizing articles from the main French Polynesian media, minutes of the Polynesian Parliamentary debates as well as semi-structured interviews. Results show that spatial nuclearity is relational, processual and multidimensional, emerging from actors’ strategic actions, everyday operations, interests and discourses. Different regimes of spatial nuclearity coexist in time and space, and places’ nuclearness can shift. Frequently portrayed as imposed by dominant agents, spatial nuclearity is also reproduced by locals perceiving political opportunities. As a growing number of nuclear infrastructures are decommissioned, these findings have important implications for policy-makers working on territories postnuclear trajectories.