Precarious half-lives: silencing toxic legacies in a former uranium mining town in Kyrgyzstan

This article examines how the residents of Mailuu-Suu, a former uranium mining town in southern Kyrgyzstan, normalise everyday life amidst radioactive uranium tailings. While biomedical researchers link the presence of tailings to heightened rates of disease, remediation experts downplay such claims, generating ambivalence that complicates efforts to trace the aetiology of local health problems and blurs perceptions of whether radiation is present at all. Locals, meanwhile, neither deny nor fully acknowledge contamination. Instead, they engage in practices of silencing, a mode of knowing-and-not-knowing that sustains a fragile sense of normalcy against the backdrop of environmental degradation and post-socialist socio-economic hardship. Tracing historical continuities of secrecy from the Soviet period and attending to the neoliberal pressures that keep residents in place, the article conceptualises silencing as a form of toxic politics born of necessity rather than mobilisation. By shifting attention from measurable radiation to lived experience, it challenges binary narratives of contamination and purity, harm and safety, knowledge and ignorance. Mailuu-Suu is thus revealed as symptomatic of neoliberal late industrialism, where communities are forced to grapple with extractive pasts and uncertain futures in the absence of meaningful state support, while striving to sustain ordinary life in conditions deemed uninhabitable.