Extraction and jurisdiction: forms of law and the Antarctic Treaty System*

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article joins a conversation that examines the dynamics of extraction in global space and their relationship to practices of authorisation in international law. The article offers an analysis of a specific historical debate that occurred through the negotiation of the since-abandoned Convention on the Regulation of Antarctica Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA). The debate was largely over whether the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) should continue to govern Antarctica. This article argues that while extracting mineral resources from Antarctica has now been foreclosed, the jurisdictional form that remains is part of the enabling legal infrastructure that patterns contemporary global extraction. Specifically, this jurisdictional form entails the reassertion of international legal authority grounded in colonial territorial claims, and a reappropriation of the Common Heritage of Mankind principle (CHM) to appeal to a construction of universality that repeats the familiar colonial move of locating ‘humanity’ largely in the Global North. In the contested times of the Anthropocene, discussion of the ATS rightly celebrates an instance of restraining corporate extraction of hydrocarbons from an unstable climactic ecosystem. However, we could also take account of how the ATS’ jurisdictional form could contribute to contemporary global extraction and its highly unequal consequences.