Marshall Islanders explain that US nuclear blasting is woven into their polity “kone jubar”—like an ironwood tree roots in the soil; like a child belongs to the lands of their mother’s lineage. This talk is about bodies (biological, territorial, political) and persons (natural and legal), and about radionuclides that expose, permeate, entangle, and transform them.

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 of its most powerful nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, which it governed as part of a United Nations “strategic trusteeship.” During decolonization negotiations, the residues of US nuclear colonialism shaped the birth of the Marshallese state. In international law, “residual sovereignty” describes sovereign rights that will only vest fully following the removal of an encumbrance. In the late 1970s, US Defense Department planned to retain extensive military rights in the Marshall Islands that would limit Marshallese state sovereignty indefinitely.

Marshallese sovereignty also became residual in a second, material sense, for it was shaped by the enduring damage and residues of US blasting. As a condition of the formation of a Marshallese state “in free association” with the United States, US negotiators required Islanders not only to cede military and security rights, but also to settle all legal claims relating to the nuclear legacy.

This talk will explore the significance of this history for broader post-World War II entanglements between the racialized international legal politics of decolonization, on the one hand, and the material and epistemic politics of technology and technogenic pollution, on the other.

About the Speaker

Mary X. Mitchell is a lawyer and historian of science and technology. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania (University of Chicago Press), uses legal wrangling over US nuclear blasting and contamination in the Marshall Islands to explore the shifting shape of sovereignty following World War II. Mitchell is an assistant professor in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers-Newark.

Host

The talk is hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies.

Modern surveillance technology has transformed the epistemic conditions of armed conflict. Drones, satellites, and persistent ISR systems now enable military commanders to identify individual civilians and predict, with statistical precision, the casualties their strikes will cause. Yet international humanitarian law continues to operate on frameworks designed for an era when such knowledge was unavailable - permitting foreseeable civilian deaths as lawful "collateral damage" provided they are not "excessive" relative to military advantage gained.

The Principle of Foreseeable Harm to Innocents (FHI) addresses this gap through one core proposition: if you can see them, and you can spare them, you must spare them. FHI does not create new law but clarifies what existing obligations under Additional Protocol I already require when properly interpreted for contemporary capabilities. It introduces an "avoidability gate" into targeting analysis: before asking whether civilian deaths are proportionate, commanders must first ask whether they are avoidable through feasible alternatives—different timing, different weapons, different approaches.

This lecture presents FHI as a further-protective interpretation of existing international humanitarian law, particularly Articles 51 and 57 of Additional Protocol I. Drawing on cases including the 2016 drone strike that killed Mohammad Azam - a Pakistani taxi driver identifiable as a civilian, whose death was foreseeable with certainty, and avoidable through alternative means—it demonstrates how current law permits outcomes that contradict its own protective purposes. FHI reorders the legal analysis to match the moral intuition that knowledge of preventable harm generates obligation to prevent it.

Speaker

Neil Cameron read law with computing at Sussex University, where he studied international humanitarian law under Professor Colonel Gerald Draper. Called to the Bar in 1978, he practised briefly before moving into legal technology consultancy - a field in which he has worked for over thirty-five years, latterly as an adviser to major law firms on technology strategy. He conducted a review of IT systems for the European Court of Human Rights and currently serves as Lead Analyst at Legal IT Insider.

His interest in humanitarian law never waned. Reading Daniel Ellsberg's Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner during the COVID lockdown prompted him to write The Inherent Flexibility of the Human Moral Compass, a two-part analysis tracing the erosion of civilian protection norms from the League of Nations' 1938 resolution through to contemporary drone strikes. The Principle of Foreseeable Harm to Innocents grew from that work. He has since engaged with scholars at Cornell Law School and Oxford's Ethics and Laws of Armed Conflict research group, and has an academic article under preparation. Originally from the UK, Neil currently lives in Ithaca, New York.

Host

Hosted by the Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies

Achieve fluency in a language of South Asia with the help of a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) summer fellowship. You’ll gain valuable knowledge about cultures and countries in which your language is commonly used, while developing skills in a language critical to the needs of the United States. Graduate and undergraduate students are eligible.

Eligible South Asian languages available for in-person or virtual intensive language study include Bengali, Dari, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Oriya, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan & Urdu.

The deadline to apply is February 18, 2026.

Can't attend? Contact sap@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

"Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland" (Princeton University Press, December 2025)

The making and remaking of Bukovina, a disputed Eastern European borderland, from the eighteenth century to the present day

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.

Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.

A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.

About the speaker

Atina Grossmann is Distinguished Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City where she teaches courses on modern Europe, Fascism and National Socialism, the Holocaust, refugees and migration in global context as well as gender and sexuality studies. Relevant publications include: The Surviving Remnant: Documents on Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany 1945-1950 (with A.Kramen, A Patt, T. Lewinsky, 2024); chapter on “Aftermath” (with K. Bohus) in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (2015); Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus 2020), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick 2017), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007/09, German edition Wallstein 2012). as well as “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” (in Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt, 2023). In 2022-23 she was the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM. Her current research focuses on” Jewish Refugees from National Socialism in Iran and India: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship.

Join us to learn about opportunities for graduate students with the Einaudi Center for International Studies. This session will discuss how to discover or strengthen global interests, including research and travel grants, guest lectures, fellowships, and more!

Can't attend? Email programs@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.