Description
How do empires "end" materially? This paper argues that post-imperial transitions operated not through clean diplomatic breaks but through infrastructure's violent attempts to impose territorial order onto populations empire had regionally entangled. Reframing Hiroshima not as a singular site of atomic detonation but as an imperial metropole deeply integrated into Japan's colonial circuits—connected to Korea through decades of labor mobilization, kinship networks, and military-industrial production—the paper examines how 1945-1947 repatriation infrastructure attempted to sort Korean atomic bomb survivors into bounded national territories yet revealed this as fundamentally impossible.
I develop "infrastructured regionalism" as an analytical framework attending to how material systems simultaneously enabled and constrained postwar mobility while producing the national categories through which populations were sorted. The paper demonstrates how infrastructure became the contested site where postwar boundaries were materially produced: repatriation bureaus collapsed atomic harm into generic war damage erasing colonial histories, regional disruptions (mines, disease, strikes) exceeded state control, and Korea's partition further fragmented what repatriation presumed as singular "homeland." Survivors navigated through rumor networks, unofficial boats, and circular movements that defied territorial logic, revealing empire's spatial entanglements persisting in bodies and routes no administrative reordering could eliminate.
The paper contributes to decolonial IR by demonstrating how infrastructure operated as regional geography-making: material systems that simultaneously attempted territorial sorting and perpetuated empire's cross-border entanglements, revealing postwar order as emerging through failures, exclusions, and the improvised circuits marginalized populations navigated.
