Abstract
Transoceanic Anti-Nuclear Solidarities: Weaving a Web between UK Feminist Peace Activists and Indigenous Communities
This paper will offer an intersectional feminist analysis of how anti-nuclear solidarities can be constructed across substantial identity differences and across ocean-spanning distances. It will focus on two networks that brought activists from Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp together with Indigenous communities, namely Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP), and a group that sought to prevent nuclear testing on Western Shoshone land.
Drawing on archival research, the paper will illuminate the material structures and organisational practices that both facilitated and constrained transoceanic solidarity in these networks. It will also excavate the narrative frames developed by participants and the impacts of participation on their everyday lives. In so doing, the paper will challenge narrow understandings of Greenham and of feminist anti-nuclear activism, and draw out lessons about transoceanic solidarity for present-day anti-nuclear activism.
About the Speaker
Catherine Eschle is an International Relations and social movements scholar, with an interest in feminist critiques of the global nuclear order. Initially working to extend Western Cold War feminist antinuclear arguments to post-Cold War developments and to reinterrogate the politics of peace camps in the UK, she is now developing a feminist antinuclear research agenda that takes coloniality more seriously. To that end, she co-coordinates the international, interdisciplinary FemNukes research network, which recently produced a special section on International Affairs. She has also just published the collection Feminism and Protest Camps: Critiques, Entanglements and Re-Imaginings (Bristol University Press, 2023).