Securing the Atom: Radiation Terrorism and U.S.–Ethiopia Relations
Marit Østebø, University of Florida
In this talk, Marit Tolo Østebø examines a U.S.-initiated radiological security program designed to prevent radiological terrorism and its implementation within Ethiopia’s emerging cancer-care infrastructure. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted between 2022 and 2025, Østebø explores the suspicions, negotiations, and forms of resistance the program provoked among Ethiopian actors.
The presentation shows how radiotherapy, security regimes, and geopolitical power relations become entangled within global oncology. The Ethiopian case reveals how nuclear history, competing notions of exceptionalism, and questions of authority and sovereignty shape what often is assumed to be an apolitical and benevolent domain of cancer care and research. In doing so, it also challenges portrayals of African states as passive recipients of international security and development interventions.
Marit Tolo Østebø is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Her focal point of interest is anthropology of policy, international development and critical global health. She integrates perspectives from multiple specialties including anthropology of policy, anthropology of religion, gender studies, digital anthropology, medical anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Her works have focused on policy models and modeling communities, translations of gender equality, the interplay between religion and development, the relationship between politics and health research, and—more recently— global oncology and public-private partnerships (PPP). Østebø’s research is usually multi-sited and transnational in nature, with a primary geographical focus in Ethiopia, where she has conducted anthropological fieldwork since 2005.