British Cold War government bunkers were built to preserve state authority after a nuclear attack, but the catastrophe they anticipated never occurred. This article argues that they are infrastructures of suspended crisis: material systems organised around an event that did not arrive and therefore shaped by a temporality of the not yet. Drawing on Derrida’s hauntology, it reads the bunker as a site where an expected disaster remains active as a ghost, continuing to organise present perception and interpretation. These sites do not store memory of an actual catastrophe. Rather, they preserve the afterlife of institutional rehearsal, including plans, routines, and spatial arrangements designed for an imagined aftermath. Bringing futures studies into dialogue with memory studies, the article shows how bunkers can hold latent cultural memory and trauma-like orientations without an originating disaster. The argument is based on fieldwork at Kelvedon Hatch and Barnton Quarry, supported by 3D LiDAR scanning, point cloud processing, and visualisation. The resulting uncertainty images are treated not as neutral records or scientific revelation, but as practice-led critical media. Their continuity, occlusion, instability, partial viewpoints, and micro-temporality of capture register gaps in knowledge and the atmosphere of anticipatory governance. At a moment of renewed nuclear anxiety and resilience planning, Cold War bunkers return again as templates for imagining future crisis in public culture today. The article shows how collective future thinking can be organised around what never happened, and offers a practice-based method for demonstrating how unrealised threats still act in the present.

This article examines how the anime Night Raid 1931 reimagines 1931 Shanghai as mato (magic city), using spatial and temporal displacement to negotiate Japan’s imperial past. Drawing on heterotopia and hauntology, it analyzes how the anime reconstructs Shanghai as a phantasmic space, where historical time fragments through supernatural narration and stylized aesthetics. By setting the story in 1931, the series uses nostalgia and speculative imagination to articulate lost possibilities of Japan. This enables trans/national recentering, allowing Japan to reassert symbolic centrality in Asia through popular culture rather than political dominance, reconfiguring unresolved memory and regional identity.

This article investigates the 2022 Yahidne war crime, during which Russian forces confined approximately 368 civilians, including 69 children, to the basement of the local school. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the authors explore satellite images of unfolding events and the enduring material traces of the occupation—drawings, abandoned toys, military rations, propaganda newspapers, spent military equipment and damaged infrastructure. They consider how these traces contribute to processes of collective memory and to the transformation of the site’s significance through public memorialisation, reflecting on the role of contemporary archaeology in documenting and interpreting material legacies of recent conflict.

This article examines the replication of the Statue of Peace as a form of civic resistance and re-commemoration in response to the Japanese government’s efforts at de-commemoration. It advances three central arguments. First, replication functions as re-commemoration that resists state-led erasure of the “comfort women” memory. Second, this process constitutes a hauntological cycle, in which attempts to suppress unresolved memories only intensify their return. Third, both state and civic actors must embrace these haunting memories as enduring presences. The study draws on Derridean hauntology and case studies to support this framework.

Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.