Critical legal geographies of possession: Antarctica and the International Geophysical Year 1957–1958

Abstract

This is an article about the politics of territory in Antarctica. It revolves around what at first seems like a very simple geopolitical question: who owns Antarctica? As this article demonstrates, this seemingly simple question is far from easy to answer: it cannot be answered with a straightforward list of states, nor by conventional geopolitical understandings of territorial possession (Agnew and Corbridge, Mastering space: Hegemony, territory, and international political economy, 1995). Struggles between states for territorial possession has characterised much recent geopolitical history; struggles for Antarctica do not entirely follow this pattern, and revolve instead on the nature and the concept of territorial possession itself. The article focuses in particular on the debates about, and changes to, Antarctic legal and geopolitical territories triggered by the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year: before the IGY Antarctica was an unstable composite of state claims, unclaimed terra nullius, and terra communis or land unavailable to state claim. By the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, this unstable composite legal and geopolitical geography emerged as a new form of territory, one in which the conventional global mode of territory—state possession—was no longer dominant. Understanding Antarctic legal geographies adds depth to critical geopolitical studies which focus on the ways in which space is actively constructed by specific discourses, understandings, and groups.