Nuclear oncopolitics: Surveilling and decommissioning radioactive sources in Ethiopia

Soc Sci Med. 2026 Jun 24;406:119533. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119533. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Office of Radiological Security (ORS), a U.S. non-proliferation initiative designed to secure high-risk radiological sources in medical, industrial, and research settings, and its implementation in Ethiopia. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted between August 2022 and November 2025, I detail the suspicions and resistance the program provoked among Ethiopian actors. While the case adds new perspectives to literature interrogating nuclear politics and speaks to a growing body of literature on power and inequality in global cancer care, my overall aim is to show how deeply embedded global oncology is in nuclear politics and global security regimes. I argue that the dynamics emerging from this case are best understood through the notion of nuclear oncopolitics: a concept that rests on three propositions and makes this entanglement analytically visible. First, global oncology is political; it consistently functions as an anti-politics machine and requires historicization and contextualization. Second, politics in global oncology is not confined to health systems or professional power struggles; it extends to questions of existential importance to the state-national security, sovereignty, and power competition-and must therefore be understood as ‘high politics’. Finally, reading ‘nuclear’ in its original sense-as the inner, central part of a system-is analytically and methodologically productive. It directs attention to how high politics operates not only at the level of the state or the international, but at the most intimate scales of the medical system: in the cancer ward, at the bedside, and in research centers.

PMID:42497804 | DOI:10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119533