Agencies, temporalities, and spatialities in Hiroshima’s post-war reconstruction: a case of reflexive peacebuilding in the Anthropocene?

AbstractThis article revisits the case of Hiroshima’s post-war reconstruction using the lens of reflexive peacebuilding. Reflexive peacebuilding is a set of practices that align peacebuilding efforts with the notions of agency, time, and space, as problematised within the critical discourse on the Anthropocene. For this study, a review of relevant policies and initiatives following the bombing reveals how agencies, temporalities, and spatialities in Hiroshima’s post-war reconstruction generate interweaving and sometimes contesting peace narratives. Hiroshima’s experience in responding to the needs of the survivors, accommodating future generations, and using spaces for peace promotion offer insights into the blurred agency, uncertain times, and porous spaces of Anthropocene imaginaries.Keywords: Post-war reconstructionpeacebuildingreflexive peacebuildingAnthropoceneHiroshima AcknowledgementsI am grateful to the editorial team of War & Society and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier version of this paper. I also wish to acknowledge the research assistance of Kazuma Sugano for the selection and translation of relevant documents used in the analysis of this paper.Disclosure statementThe authors declare there is no conflict of interest in this study.Notes1 Colin N. Waters et al., ‘Can Nuclear Weapons Fallout Mark the Beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch?’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 71, no. 3 (2015), 46–57.2 John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, The Politics of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).3 Dahlia Simangan, ‘Reflexive Peacebuilding: Lessons from the Anthropocene Discourse’, Global Society 35, no. 4 (2021), 479–500.4 UN, ‘An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-Keeping’, 31 January 1992, para. 57, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/145749?ln=en [accessed 19 May 1923].5 Several indigenous studies scholars have emphasised the experiences of societies and communities subjected to colonialism, slavery, and imperialism in dealing with the loss of life, land, and relationships. These experiences are exacerbated by global environmental change and left unaddressed by the power asymmetries underpinning the global politics of climate action: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16, no. 4 (2017), 761–80; Audra Mitchell, ‘Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction’, Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 5 (2016), 23–42; Kyle P. Whyte, ‘Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (2018), 224–42.6 Simon Dalby, ‘Framing the Anthropocene: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’, The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 1 (2016), 33–51.7 The policy review conducted for this paper is limited to publicly available documents that summarise the policies and initiatives undertaken by Hiroshima’s prefectural government and Hiroshima City’s municipal government. Hiroshima for Global Peace (HGP) has published several volumes in English containing the historical background and comprehensive reviews of Hiroshima’s reconstruction. These policies and initiatives were categorised according to decades, from 1945 until 2020, with each decade containing the said policies and initiatives relevant to the research questions. Due to the Japanese language limitation of the author, this paper extensively draws on HGP’s relevant publications available at [accessed 19 May 2023]. A research assistant who is fluent in the Japanese language searched and translated other relevant scholarly articles and government documents that are written in Japanese.8 These questions do not aim to provide a comprehensive historical account of Hiroshima’s post-war reconstruction. It must be recognised that there is no single narrative or perspective to this part of Japan’s history. Differing and often competing ideologies and interests among national parties, labour unions, peace movements, politicians, and other interest groups have influenced the process of post-war reconstruction and peace promotion in Hiroshima and elsewhere in varying degrees.9 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter, no. 41 (2000), 17–8.10 Dahlia Simangan, ‘Situating the Asia Pacific in the Age of the Anthropocene’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 73, no. 6 (2019), 564–84.11 Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, 1st ed. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).12 Giovanna Di Chiro, ‘Welcome to the White (M)Anthropocene? A Feminist-Environmentalist Critique’, in Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, ed. by Sherilyn MacGregor (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2017), 487–505; Nancy Tuana, ‘Climate Apartheid: The Forgetting of Race in the Anthropocene’, Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019), 1–31.13 Jeremy Baskin, ‘Paradigm Dressed as Epoch: The Ideology of the Anthropocene’, Environmental Values 24, no. 1 (2015), 11.14 Several studies point to different transitions in geological history, marking the onset of the Anthropocene. For a review of these transitions: Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015), 171–80.15 Halvard Buhaug, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and Ole Magnus Theisen, ‘Implications of Climate Change for Armed Conflict’, Social Dimensions of Climate Change Workshop (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2008); Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko, eds, Environmental Peacemaking (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002); Vally Koubi, ‘Climate Change and Conflict’, Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1 (2019), 343–60.16 Eva Lövbrand and Malin Mobjörk, eds, Anthropocene (In)Securities: Reflections on Collective Survival 50 Years After the Stockholm Conference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Ignasi Torrent, ‘An Introduction to “Peace, Conflicts and Security in the Anthropocene: Ruptures and Limits”’, Revista de Estudios En Seguridad Internacional 7, no. 1 (2021), i–vi; Paul Heikkurinen, Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene (Oxfordshire and New York: Routledge, 2017); Rhys Kelly, ‘Avoiding the “Anthropocene”?: An Assessment of the Extent and Nature of Engagement with Environmental Issues in Peace Research’, Peace and Conflict Studies 27, no. 3 (2021), article 3.17 Hans Günter Brauch, ‘Sustainable Peace in the Anthropocene: Towards Political Geoecology and Peace Ecology’, in Handbook on Sustainability Transition and Sustainable Peace, ed. by Hans Günter Brauch et al., Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), 187–236; Simon Dalby, ‘Peace in the Anthropocene’, Peace Review 25, no. 4 (2013), 561–67; Simangan, ‘Reflexive Peacebuilding’.18 Simangan, ‘Reflexive Peacebuilding’.19 Jack L. Amoureux and Brent J. Steele, Reflexivity and International Relations: Positionality, Critique, and Practice (Oxon: Routledge, 2016).20 Matthew Eagleton-Pierce, ‘Examining the Case for Reflexivity in International Relations: Insights from Bourdieu’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 1, no. 1 (2009), 111–23.21 Inanna Hamati-Ataya, ‘Reflexivity and International Relations’, International Relations, 2020; Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True, ‘Reflexivity in Practice: Power and Ethics in Feminist Research on International Relations’, International Studies Review 10, no. 4 (2008), 693–707; Cecelia Lynch, ‘Reflexivity in Research on Civil Society: Constructivist Perspectives’, International Studies Review 10, no. 4 (2008), 708–21.22 Dryzek and Pickering, 17.23 Ibid.24 Ibid.25 Simangan, ‘Reflexive Peacebuilding’.26 Ibid.27 David Chandler, Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2017); David Chandler and Julian Reid, Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).28 Matt McDonald, Ecological Security: Climate Change and the Construction of Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).29 Simangan, ‘Reflexive Peacebuilding’.30 Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, ed., Rethinking the Liberal Peace: External Models and Local Alternatives (Oxon: Routledge, 2011); Edward Newman, Roland Paris and Oliver P. Richmond, New Perspectives on Liberal Peacebuilding (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2009).31 Roger Mac Ginty and Oliver P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013), 763–83.32 Oliver P. Richmond, ‘A Post-Liberal Peace: Eirenism and the Everyday’, Review of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2009), 557–80; Roger Mac Ginty, Everyday Peace: How So-Called Ordinary People Can Disrupt Violent Conflict, Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Cedric de Coning, ‘Adaptive Peacebuilding’, International Affairs 94, no. 2 (2018), 301–17.33 Roger Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Oliver P. Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace (London and New York: Routledge, 2011); Tadjbakhsh.34 Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Beyond Local Ownership in the Architecture of International Peacebuilding’, Ethnopolitics 11, no. 4 (2012), 354–75.35 Richmond, ‘A Post-Liberal Peace’, 566.36 Mac Ginty and Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building’.37 Dahlia Simangan, International Peacebuilding and Local Involvement: A Liberal Renaissance? (Routledge, 2019).38 de Coning.39 Dryzek and Pickering, 105.40 Eileen Crist, ‘The Reaches of Freedom: A Response to An Ecomodernist Manifesto’, Environmental Humanities 7, no. 1 (2016), 245–54; Madeleine Fagan, ‘Security in the Anthropocene: Environment, Ecology, Escape’, European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 2 (2017), 292–314; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern’, Millennium 46, no. 3 (2018), 259–82.41 Edward Newman, ‘A Human Security Peace-Building Agenda’, Third World Quarterly 32, no. 10 (2011), 1737–56; Pamina Firchow, Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation After War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).42 Simangan, ‘Reflexive Peacebuilding’, 490.43 Land Rezoning Division, Urban Development Department, Urban Development Bureau, the City of Hiroshima, and Editorial Society for the Records of Postwar Reconstruction Project, ed., Sensai Fukkoh Jigyoushi [The Records of Postwar Reconstruction Project] (Hiroshima: and Rezoning Division, Urban Development Department, Urban Development Bureau, the City of Hiroshima, 1995).44 ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee (Hiroshima Prefecture and The City of Hiroshima), Hiroshima’s Path to Reconstruction, 2nd edition (Hiroshima: ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee (Hiroshima Prefecture and The City of Hiroshima), 2020).45 S. Ubuki, ‘II Peace Movements’, in Learning from Hiroshima’s Reconstruction Experience: Reborn from the Ashes, ed. by ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee (Hiroshima Prefecture and The City of Hiroshima, 2014), 157.46 Ubuki, ‘II Peace Movements’.47 ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee.48 Ibid.49 K. Mizumoto, ‘Part II Questions for Hiroshima: FAQ on Reconstruction of Hiroshima’, in Hiroshima’s Path to Reconstruction, 25–38.50 Ibid., 31.51 Ibid.52 Noriyuki Kawano and Luli van der Does, ‘Heritage of the Atomic-Bomb Experience: What Needs to Be Conveyed?’ Hiroshima Peace Science 39 (2017), 69–93.53 Mizumoto, 34.54 Ibid.55 Ibid.56 Satoru Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengoshi [Hiroshima’s Postwar History] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014), 283.57 Tilman Ruff, ‘Negotiating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and the Role of ICAN’, Global Change, Peace & Security 30, no. 2 (2018), 233–41.58 Shinzo Hamai, ‘Peace Declaration’, 1952, [accessed 19 May 2023].59 Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengoshi, 242–3.60 ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee, 21.61 Ibid.62 Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengoshi, 247.63 Mizumoto, ‘Part II Questions for Hiroshima’, 35.64 Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengosh, 247.65 Mizumoto, ‘Part II Questions for Hiroshima’, 35.66 Ibid.67 Yuta Shibayama, ‘A-Bomb Hibakusha Groups in 7 Japan Prefs May Disband or Suspend Activities: Survey’, Mainichi, 7 August 2020, [accessed 19 May 2023].68 Shogi Oseto and Hitoshi Nagai, ‘Part III Exploring Hiroshima, Column 5 Listening to the Voices of A-Bomb Survivors’, in Hiroshima’s Path to Reconstruction, 52.69 Ibid.70 Mizumoto, ‘Part II Questions for Hiroshima’, 35.71 Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengoshi, 278.72 Ibid., 312.73 Akira Kawasaki, Kakuheiki Wa Nakuseru [Nuclear Weapons Can Be Abolished] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2018), 108.74 ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee, 12.75 Land Rezoning Division, 176.76 ‘Hiroshima for Global Peace’ Plan Joint Project Executive Committee, 12.77 Carola Hein, ‘Tange Kenzō’s Proposal for Rebuilding Hiroshima’, in Cartographic Japan, ed. by Kären Wigen, Fumiko Sugimoto, and Cary Karacas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 205.78 Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengoshi, 305; David Petersen and Mandy Conti, Survivors: The A-Bombed Trees of Hiroshima (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2008).79 Ubuki, Hiroshima Sengoshi, 306–7.80 Mizumoto, ‘Part II Questions for Hiroshima’, 59.81 Ibid., 36.82 Ibid.83 Ibid.84 Ibid.85 Allam Alkazei and Kosuke Matsubara, ‘The Role of Post-War Reconstruction Planning in Hiroshima’s Image-Shift to a Peace Memorial City’, Proceedings of the 18th International Planning History Society Conference, 2018, 378–99.86 Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999).87 Ibid., 20.88 Robin Gerster, ‘Hiroshima No More: Forgetting “the Bomb”’, War & Society 22, no. 1 (2004), 64.89 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993; Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History 45, no. 1 (2014), 1–18.90 Timothy Morton, ‘From Things Flow What We Call Time’, in Spatial Experiments: Models for Space Defined by Movement, ed. by Olafur Eliasson et al. (Thames and Hudson, 2015) [accessed 16 January 2023].91 Karen Barad, ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable’, New Formations 92, no. 92 (2017), 56–86.92 Erik Ropers, ‘Contested Spaces of Ethnicity: Zainichi Korean Accounts of the Atomic Bombings’, Critical Military Studies 1, no. 2 (2015), 145–59.93 Nicola Piper, ‘War and Memory: Victim Identity and the Struggle for Compensation in Japan’, War & Society 19, no. 1 (2001), 131–48.94 Akiko Naono, ‘The Origins of “Hibakusha” as a Scientific and Political Classification of the Survivor’, Japanese Studies 39, no. 3 (2019), 333–52.95 For a timeline of the medical care for survivors: Hiroshima for Global Peace, ‘Medical Care and support for A-bomb Survivors’, available at [ accessed 16 January 2023].96 Madeleine Fagan, ‘On the Dangers of an Anthropocene Epoch: Geological Time, Political Time and Post-Human Politics’, Political Geography 70 (2019), 55–63.97 Jack Amoureux and Varun Reddy, ‘Multiple Anthropocenes: Pluralizing Space–Time as a Response to “the Anthropocene”’, Globalizations 18, no. 6 (2021), 929–46.Additional informationNotes on contributorsDahlia SimanganDahlia Simangan is Associate Professor at the IDEC Institute of Hiroshima University and one of the core members of the university’s Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS). She holds a PhD in International, Political, and Strategic Studies from the Australian National University (2017). She is the author of International Peacebuilding and Local Involvement: A Liberal Renaissance (Routledge, 2019) and several research articles on post-conflict peacebuilding, the relationship between peace and sustainability, and international relations in the Anthropocene. She is an Assistant Editor of Peacebuilding and a member of the Planet Politics Institute. X: @dahlia_cs; Website: https://dahliasimangan.com/