Introduction: ‘Studying from the margins’ - Global South perspectives on the future of Antarctic governance

Abstract

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the novel Coronavirus Covid19 a global pandemic. Within nine months, every part of the globe had been touched by the pandemic, including the most remote continent, Antarctica. More than two years into the pandemic, collective scientific efforts have resulted in the achievement of vaccines that provide greater chances of protection against a virus that has, so far, claimed more than six million lives. However, what has also been brutally highlighted during this period is the inequality, vulnerability, precarity and marginalisation of Global South states and their peoples. While the pandemic has affected the entire human population, vaccine nationalism and the superior economic resources of the Global North has enabled richer countries to secure exclusive, plentiful stocks of vaccines and reach high rates of vaccination, while poor countries struggle with vaccine inequity and disparities in distribution that have significantly increased the public health burden, and disproportionately impacted their ability to recover economically from the effects of Covid-19. The gap between rich and poor countries and themes of inequality and marginalisation of Global South states are now familiar tropes in many domains. From the 1970s they began to be heard in more and more arenas of global organisation and management as recently decolonised countries challenged imperial paradigms and systems of control and dominance. This extended in the 1980s to management of the southernmost continent and resulted in reports to the United Nations General Assembly for more than a decade on the ‘The Question of Antarctica’. For over 60 decades, the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) has been the prime governance forum for the management of Antarctic affairs. It is often seen as one of the most successful multilateral agreements: the Antarctic Treaty sidelined conflicts about territorial sovereignty claims, nurtured peaceful scientific cooperation within the world’s first nuclear-free zone, and its additional protocols and related agreements regulate Southern Ocean fisheries, protect Antarctic environments and prohibit mining. Despite a growing number of signatories to the Treaty, Western nation states continue to dominate Antarctic affairs through the only legitimate activity on the ice: science understood as a Western mode of knowing.