5 April 2022 | Antarctica, the world’s seventh continent, is seldom in the news. In popular imagination, it is a remote and inaccessible continent that is completely covered in ice. While Antarctica is occasionally reported on for its melting glaciers, no one hears of its natural resources or the hundreds of scientific research stations carefully positioned by some of the world’s most powerful nations along its shores.
The continent is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), which is widely celebrated by legal scholars as being one of the most successful international legal regimes. Born in 1959, the Antarctic Treaty demilitarized the continent, dedicated it to peace and scientific inquiry, and later introduced a ban on mining and a series of environmental regulations through its Environment Protocol.
The notion that there could one day be a battle for Antarctica, therefore, seems outlandish to many—a theory peddled by scaremongers with a limited understanding of Antarctica’s ‘exceptionalism.’ An exceptionalism derived from the uniqueness of the legal regime governing the continent and its geographic isolation.
This conference challenges this conventional wisdom, arguing that it ignores not just current developments in Antarctica, but also its history. Commercial exploitation was, after all, at the origin of Antarctica’s discovery, with sealers and whalers being the first to chart the continent. The conference will explore the geopolitics of Antarctica, and the race to claim its land and resources against a background of a rapidly warming climate. Comparisons with the Arctic will be drawn.

This conference was co-hosted by the Graduate Institute’s Global Governance Centre (GGC), the Centre for International Environmental Studies (CIES) and the Interdisciplinary Programmes at the Graduate Institute.