In the years following World War II, the United States conducted 67 devastating nuclear blasts in the Marshall Islands—yet the archipelago was never a U.S. territory. Working through the United Nations, U.S. diplomats engineered a new, one-of-a-kind extraterritorial status, called strategic trusteeship, to control the Native lands, waters, and peoples of the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands. Strategic trusteeship permitted the U.S. to militarize a vast expanse of Western Oceania. This novel and racialized legal form of international dependency was integral to U.S. nuclear weapons detonations and damage in the region.

In Unsettling Sovereignty, M. X. Mitchell recounts this untold legal history, exploring how nuclear weapons changed claims and practices of sovereignty from the 1940s to the present. Mitchell shows that the Marshallese people and their lands and waters were, and remain, central to redefining sovereignty in an era of boundless pollution and climate change.

M. X. Mitchell drafted Unsettling Sovereignty as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell and member of the Einaudi Center's working group on nuclear compensation. She is an assistant professor in the federated department of history at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers Newark.