Classical Geopolitics and Antarctica

Literature on Antarctic governance traditionally clusters around three academic disciplines: international legal analysis, institutional analysis, and geopolitics. International law and institutional perspectives engage only indirectly with the pivotal roles that power and geography play in shaping human interactions in Antarctica. For this, we turn to geopolitics. In this chapter, we survey the two predominant schools—classical and critical geopolitics—with their rival assumptions. To this we add insights from critical realism, which adopts aspects of both. We suggest that a (substantially classical) definition of geopolitics as the intersection between power, authority, and space in rivalry between states is well-suited to the unique geography and state-centric governance arrangements of Antarctica. We unpack the core elements of our approach to classical geopolitics for Antarctica—power, authority, space, and rivalry—and closely explore the relationship between power and authority, drawing on Oppenheim, Bull, and Little to argue for an optimistic vision of the Antarctic Treaty System as an ‘associational balance of power’ grounded in international law. We conclude by tracing the classical approach to geopolitics into four scenarios on the future of Antarctica.