Atomic Worlds: Nuclear Modernity and Ontological Conflict in Kazakhstan

This thesis frames debates over nuclear infrastructure in Kazakhstan as sites of ontological conflict. Tracing developments from Soviet-era nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk Test Site to contemporary debates over the Balkhash Nuclear Power Plant, I analyze how state actors, modernist environmentalists, and Indigenous activists construct competing understandings of land, life, and harm. Drawing on historical and ethnographic sources, I argue that the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement constituted an earlier form of ontological conflict, in which Indigenous Kazakh activists articulated relational understandings of land against Soviet technoscientific frameworks. Discourse analysis of contemporary media, policy, and activist materials is then used to build on this genealogy and show that nuclear infrastructures continue to produce distinct subjects and objects within partially connected worlds. This thesis concludes that nuclear debates in Kazakhstan are not reducible to policy disagreements but reflect ontological struggles over how the world is defined, with implications for environmental governance in Kazakhstan today.