An international hierarchy of science: conquest, cooperation, and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System

Abstract

The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), created in 1959 to govern the southern continent, is often lauded as an illustration of science’s potential to inspire peaceful and rational International Relations. This article critically examines this optimistic view of science’s role in international politics by focusing on how science as a global hierarchical structure operated as a gatekeeper to an exclusive Antarctic club. I argue that in the early 20th century, the conduct of science in Antarctica was entwined with global and imperial hierarchies. As what Mattern and Zarakol call a broad hierarchy, science worked both as a civilized marker of international status as well as a social performance that legitimated actors’ imperial interests in Antarctica. The 1959 ATS relied on science as an existing broad hierarchy to enable competing states to achieve a functional bargain and ‘freeze’ sovereignty claims, whilst at the same time institutionalizing and reinforcing the legitimacy of science in maintaining international inequalities. In making this argument, I stress the role of formal international institutions in bridging our analysis of broad and functional hierarchies while also highlighting the importance of scientific hierarchies in constituting the current international order.

The Territorialization of the Global Commons: Evidence from Ocean Governance

“…Outer space followed a similar trajectory of technologically enabled use leading to the emergence of an internationalized governance regime, mostly because there were (and still are) no technologies for cost-efficient control over segments of outer space (Paliouras, 2014). Antarctica is an interesting case of sovereign claims that could not be put into practice due to the prohibitive costs of control, which were later superseded by an international regime principally driven by superpowers who wished to avoid a territorial scramble-or at least, a territorial scramble in which they started from behind (Yao, 2021). In each case, we can see that technologically created accessibility and usability of a global commons went hand-in-hand with demands for commercial exploitation and great power interest in the military uses of this space.…”

Making Polar and Ocean Governance Future-Proof

“…Furthermore, it has helped absorb geopolitical pressures of the early Cold War period. On the other hand, though, science has been identified as a significant barrier to entry for states with fewer resources (Yao, 2021). The ATS thereby perpetuates practices and a form of global order that can be traced back to European-led globalization and colonialism since the 16th century (Dodds, 2010).…”

Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea

“…However, the main value of the new hierarchy agenda is that it helps us conceptualise and thus investigate how these narrower forms of hierarchy intersect and interact with broader sorts of hierarchies (Yao, 2021; Zarakol, 2017). Broad hierarchies – of symbolic or material stratification – may engender social pressures as well as pleasures, constrain action and even thought, quite beyond the control or perhaps even consciousness of those actors involved.…”

“…By making this argument, we aim to advance the burgeoning body of work in International Relations (IRs) that has sought to account for how hierarchies that structure world politics emerge, intersect and reproduce, and the consequences of these processes (Zarakol, 2017; Mattern and Zarakol, 2016). This scholarship has illuminated how broad hierarchies of race, gender (Sjoberg, 2017), science (Yao, 2021) and civilisation (Towns, 2010; Yao, 2019) structure world politics. However, the ways in which ostensibly ‘natural’ geography can be productive of hierarchies – ‘intersubjectively constituted (or maintained) structure[s] of inequality’ (Mattern and Zarakol, 2016: 730) – have thus far been overlooked.…”