View article

As a place seemingly both physically remote, 2 and marginal in conventional domestic policy and international relations terms, the idea that there is a genuine Antarctic politics is sometimes seen as fanciful. After all, for those who know anything at all about its governance arrangements, 3 wasn’t the Antarctic all sorted out back in the 1950s? Isn’t it just a place where we do science and lucky or rich people get to visit as tourists? But, oh yes, there is the mining issue–surely we will, or surely we shouldn’t, go there for oil–and yes ‘our’poor whales are still being killed by ‘those people’. And there is even fishing, but that is not in Antarctica, just in the waters around it. And climate change is melting the place isn’t it?

Hopefully, the readers of this volume labour under no such confusion, but in the public domain understanding of the contemporary political (as also scientific and environmental) dimensions of engagement in …