Science, sovereignty and nation: Canada and the legacy of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958

This paper considers some of the Canadian scientific and political responses to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) 1957–1958. Histories of the IGY have hitherto often concentrated on scientific activity in Antarctica and advances in satellite technology, made manifest in the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Such histories hint at a contradiction at the heart of the IGY – attempts at international scientific cooperation were always concurrent with cold war national rivalries. These tensions were not limited to the superpowers and the IGY helped focus scientific competition between other national polities, including Canada. By examining the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Government of Canada's Polar Continental Shelf Project in April 1958, the paper investigates attempts to mobilize a pan-Canadian nationalism in response to perceived American and Soviet incursions upon territorial sovereignty during the IGY. The PCSP's ostensible purpose was to collect geophysical data for US satellite launch tests in the Canadian High Arctic. However, by placing the founding of the PCSP within the political context of the First UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958, and the unprecedented electoral success of the Progressive Conservatives across Canada during the same year, the paper develops a more sensitive appreciation of the complicated historical geographies of the IGY.     

Reluctant collaborators: Argentina and Chile in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58

This paper suggests that Argentine and Chilean participation with the Antarctic section of the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58 can be characterized as ‘reluctant collaboration.’ It then reflects on the implications of the nature of South American involvement for the history of the Antarctic section of the IGY, especially as it led to the negotiation of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. During the initial planning stages of the IGY, both Argentina and Chile worried that proposals for widespread scientific research in the Antarctic continent would interfere with their contested claims to political sovereignty in the region. Yet despite their initial skepticism, Argentina and Chile found themselves swept along by the current of international scientific co-operation of the IGY, which persisted into the Antarctic Treaty negotiations of 1959. Within the limited options available, Chile and Argentina were able to negotiate an outcome that was not altogether unfavorable to their political interests. At the same time, their collaboration helped to legitimize both the IGY and the subsequent Antarctic Treaty.     

Falling off the Map: South Africa,Antarctica and Empire,c. 1919–59

During the first half of the twentieth century, despatches about the coldest corner of the British Empire were circulated to three, sometimes four, of its southern neighbours under the British crown: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. Of these four, South Africa seemed the least interested in Antarctica, despite the keen interest of some influential individuals and a strategy of bringing Antarctica into the imperial fold through British dominions that were proximate to Antarctica. In this context, we ask how South Africa viewed itself in relation to the Antarctic to the south and the British metropole to the north. We discuss the key activities that connected South Africa to Antarctica—whaling and weather forecasting. Moreover, we consider some of the enterprising plans for a South African National Antarctic expedition, and what these plans reveal of South Africa's perception of itself as a southern country. This article interlinks with a growing scholarship that is critical of treating Antarctic history as politically and culturally isolated, including showing how the relatively simple natural and political ecology of the Antarctic can throw into relief multiple national and international concerns.     

Who goes there? Science, fiction, and belonging in Antarctica

The implications of the ATS regime on Antarctica have been profound, both structuring the possibilities for states to engage Antarctica, while limiting those very engagements to those directly related to science. State-run science has in many ways solved the problem of Antarctica's resistance to capital development and provided a safe course for national rivalry. Yet science has not always been seen as the sole convener of Antarctic activity. Tracing three versions of a story of resistance to an alien invasion of the pole – John Campbell's ‘Who Goes There?’ (1935), and its two filmic remakes, Christian Nyby's The Thing From Another World (1951) and John Carpenter's The Thing (1981), in relation to Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic exploration career, this essay considers US strategies for incorporating Antarctic territory into national and global imaginaries.     

Immigration Geopolitics Beyond the Mexico–US Border

Despite the centrality of Mexico–US border policing to pre‐ and post‐9/11 US immigration geopolitics, perhaps the most significant yet largely ignored immigration‐related fallout of the so‐called war on terrorism has been the extension of interior immigration policing practices away from the southwest border. As I outline in this paper, these interior spaces of immigration geopolitics—nominally said to be about fighting terrorism, but in practice concerned with undocumented labor migration across the Mexico–US border—have not emerged accidentally. Rather, the recent criminalization of immigration law, the sequestering of immigration enforcement from court oversight and the enrollment of proxy immigration officers at sub‐state scales have been actively pursued so as to make interior enforcement newly central to US immigration geopolitics. I argue here that these embryonic spaces of localized immigration geopolitics shed new light on the spatiality of US immigration governance, which has typically been thought of by geographers as active predominantly at the territorial margins of the state. I conclude the paper with some thoughts as to how geographers might rethink the what and where of contemporary US immigration geopolitics.     

Australia's Antarctic agenda

Australia has had a long connection with, and significant national interests in, the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. The Australian Antarctic Territory comprises 42 per cent of Antarctica's landmass. Australia is not only a claimant state and original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty but has played a significant role in the development of what is termed the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). This article aims to provide an overview of Australia's key policy interests and government policy goals towards Antarctica, including its commitment to the ATS. In examining key policy objectives we note that despite continuity and development of these objectives, significant changes and challenges have arisen in the period 1984–2006. It is these challenges that will help frame Australia's Antarctic agenda over the next 20 years and beyond.     

Britain and the British Antarctic Territory in the wider geopolitics of the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean

Britain's contemporary and future relationship with the British Antarctic Territory and the wider region is the subject matter of this article. In the aftermath of the ill‐fated plans for a merger of British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the National Oceanography Centre, it is timely to ask how the UK projects influence and secures its scientific, resource and strategic interests. The contemporary Antarctic is increasingly characterized by tension over resource management and conservation politics as Antarctic Treaty parties disagree, both in private and public, over the purpose of legal instruments and the regulation of activities such as fishing and marine conservation. While we do not predict the collapse of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), our analysis suggests that the effectiveness and legitimacy of the ATS is increasingly under challenge. The United Kingdom's position as a claimant state and original signatory to the Antarctic Treaty is complicated by the presence of counter‐claimants (Argentina and Chile) and a wider preoccupation with other overseas territories, such as South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands and the Falkland Islands. Polar science, carried out by BAS and other British agents, remains critical not only for maintaining the UK's ‘soft power’ but also increasingly for cementing a ‘strategic presence’ in the Antarctic. The article ends with a cautionary note: scientific excellence is no longer sufficient to guarantee geopolitical/strategic interests and there is growing evidence that claimant and non‐claimant states alike are no longer regarding Antarctica as an area that will remain free of intensifying and diversifying resource exploitation.     

Britain,South African gold,and the sterling area, 1945–50

This article examines New Zealand's role in the British/Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (TAE, 1955–58), the first mechanised crossing of Antarctica. Despite much interest in New Zealand's evolving relationship with Britain, the Commonwealth and the United States after 1945, the Antarctic dimension has received little attention. New Zealand's participation in the TAE, alongside activities attached to the International Geophysical Year, strengthened its claims to sovereignty in the Ross Dependency. Instead, popular and media interpretations of the TAE concentrated on perceived rivalries between the two leaders, Vivian Fuchs and Edmund Hillary, thus severely straining Anglo-New Zealand polar relations despite the successful crossing of Antarctica. The fortieth anniversary celebration of the TAE at Scott Base failed to consider critically how New Zealand's relationship with the Antarctic was (and is) imagined and represented.     

Geopolitics as palimpsest: Contextual inscriptions of the global war on terror

This article aims to develop the agenda of a grounded, contextual critical geopolitics, with particular emphasis on the interaction between local and hegemonic geopolitics. This is achieved by examining the local reception of the geopolitics of the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) in the context of the establishment of US bases on Romanian territory following the 2004 US Global Posture Review. A close reading of this context reveals a complex and ambiguous relationship, simultaneously assertive and subversive, between the GWOT's sui generis, territorially non-specific geopolitics of transit, and Romania's exceptionalist geopolitics of place, significance, and convergence. Not only did the GWOT geopolitics fail to erase local geopolitics, but it also became muddied, contaminated, and inadvertently destroyed by the ‘old’ local geopolitical knowledge. This suggests an understanding of geopolitics as a palimpsest, the product of serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings-over that produce geopolitical knowledge of, and in different contexts. In broader conceptual terms, this study highlights the heteroglossia of geopolitical knowledge, the resilience of local geopolitics, and the importance of contextual sensitivity in the pursuit of the normative mission of critical geopolitics.     

The Geopolitics of Malcolm X

Geographers and other social scientists have largely neglected Malcolm X as a critical theorist. Unlike the attention accorded to Franz Fanon, the writings and speeches of Malcolm X have remained unexplored for their potential contribution to political geographic thought. As a corrective, in this paper we situate Malcolm X within the rubric of critical geopolitics and postcolonial theory. We contend that Malcolm X, during the last year of his life, was formulating a geopolitics of oppression. We further assert that the geopolitics of Malcolm X were decidedly critical and anti-colonial, and that his discourse foreshadows elements of contemporary social theory. Specifically, Malcolm X instructed his audiences to educate themselves about the relationships between imperial power and he addressed the politics of representation by representing the issues of American racial oppression as one of global oppression.     

The geopolitics of Antarctic governance: sovereignty and strategic denial in Australia's Antarctic policy

The governance of Antarctica has re-emerged as a geopolitical issue in the past decade due to the increased presence of China, India and Russia; the continent's importance in understanding global climate change; and its economic potential as a source of marine, genetic and mineral resources. This article examines the challenges for the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in this context and the consequences for Australia's foreign policy in its dual role as both a territorial claimant and supporter of ATS norms of cooperative science and environmental protection. The central argument is that Antarctic ‘bifocalism’ is under pressure as increased commercial activity and problematic jurisdictional interfaces with other regimes create difficult regulatory challenges for the ATS and encourage assertions of sovereignty that cannot be resolved within the existing regime. Consequently, the author argues that it is vitally important for Australia to preserve the legitimacy of the ATS through a policy framework of ‘strategic denial’ that aims to prevent all states from acquiring sovereignty over Antarctic territory. Australia should therefore reject recent proposals to securitise Antarctic policy or pursue World Heritage listing because they involve assertions of sovereignty that risk fracturing the ATS and thus compromise Australia's enduring interest in keeping Antarctica as ‘a continent of international cooperation and peace’.     

The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the technopolitics of river basin development, 1950–1970

This paper examines the links between Cold War geopolitics and economic development to explain the relatively rapid proliferation of the concept of river basin development throughout so-called “developing areas” of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century. The research focuses on the United States Bureau of Reclamation, the most significant water resource development agency of the US government, and its engagement in what it termed “foreign activities” beginning in the aftermath of World War II. Grounded in recent work on technopolitics, the constructed scales of water resource development, and histories of the “global” Cold War, this research examines the advancement of water resource development in the Litani River basin in Lebanon—as guided by staff of the US Bureau of Reclamation—during the period from 1950 to 1970. The Bureau operated as a geopolitical agent attempting to implement a universalized model of river basin development, but encountered continuous difficulties in the form of political and biophysical contingencies. The Bureau’s efforts, centred on the basin as the most appropriate unit of development, were consistently undercut by scale-making projects related to global and regional geopolitical concerns. The research concludes that understandings of the technopolitics of development interventions would benefit from a closer engagement with recent discussions regarding the construction of spatial scale within political geography and related fields. River basin development and its material transformation of multiple locales remains one of the largely neglected, but vitally important, legacies of Cold War geopolitics.     

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.     

南极旅游开发与设想

本文提出,随着我国南极长城站和中山站的建立、以及"极地号"和"雪龙号"破冰船的购置,更由于人民生活水平的逐步提高,我国开发南极旅游的时机已经到来。本文认为与低层次的物质享受相比,南极旅游更有助于促进国民素质提高和全国主义、国际主义精神的培养。本文对南极旅游资源作了评价.划分出南极半岛等4个旅游区。本文构思了我国未来南极旅游组织实施的规划和设想,提出可先开辟南极半岛旅游区和环南极旅行两条旅游线路,沿途可开展海外观光、远洋考察和远洋捕捞业,以促进我国旅游业、南大洋考察和远洋捕捞运输业的全面发展。     

Arcane geopolitics: Heidegger,Schmitt and the political theology of Gnosticism

In this paper, we discuss what is at stake in appropriating the thought of reactionary figures, such as Heidegger and Schmitt, for critical geography. We will argue that Heidegger and Schmitt were beholden to an arcane geopolitics shaped by supposed gnostic insights into the deeper currents of world history. This (geo-) political theology of Heidegger and Schmitt has not yet been given sufficient attention by geographers engaging their work. However, it is only in approaching their work in a theological key that the gnostic political theology that undergirds their arcane geopolitics can be fully understood. At the core of this arcane geopolitics is the conviction that modernity and all those identified as its agents is a force for ill, setting the world towards catastrophe. In this paper, we excavate this gnostic disposition in the thought of Heidegger and Schmitt in order to raise questions about how their work ought to be mobilized in and for critical, emancipatory, progressive thought so that this appropriation does not bring unwanted residues along with it.     

Science in Antarctica Intellectual and Physical Adventure

Abstract

Antarctica is a geographical region and Antarctic science is therefore multidisciplinary, the main areas of research being concerned with the continent's geological base, the superimposed ice-cap, the atmosphere above it and their external relationship. Each of these research areas is interdisciplinary: the study of its outstanding problem – the history of the Antarctic ice sheet – requires contributions from meteorology, oceanography, glaciology, geology, chemistry and physics; and its future behaviour will he determined by external events, including the consumption of fossil fuels on other continents. Research in Antarctica is given added piquancy by the continent's unique environment and rigorous climate which retain their attractive character even though modern technological developments have removed many elements of discomfort and danger. The region is also singular in its political nature and scientist have a particularly close relationship with their governments through the Antarctic Treaty.     

Rape as a Weapon of War(riors): The Militarisation of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1990–2000

This article uses a transnational feminist lens to examine how accusations of sexual violence were mobilised by the United States (US) government to justify military intervention at the same time that the US military failed to address sexual violence perpetrated by and against its own service members. Drawing upon an archive of civilian representations ranging from the New York Times to G.I. Jane, the author explores US interventions in the Persian Gulf, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia alongside sexual assaults committed by servicemen at the Tailhook Convention, on Okinawa and at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. This article draws connections between feminism and neo‐imperialism, between Cold War and War on Terror ideologies, and between rape as a weapon of war and rape during times of ‘peace’ in order to better understand the relationships between sexual politics and geopolitics at the end of the twentieth century.     

The Geopolitics of Eugenics and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans

Both geopolitics and eugenics as political/scientific theories emerged during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although in the literature these remain largely disparate areas of inquiry, many parallels exist. Both reflected a concern over the security of the state and both emphasized the identification of foreign threats and likewise intimated viable solutions to counter these threats. This paper seeks to uncover a geopolitics of eugenics. Specifically, I contend that a eugenically informed geopolitical discourse—and not solely a racist ideology—greatly informed the decision during the Second World War to incarcerate in the United States 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. The liberties and human rights of those incarcerated were violated because, according to this discourse, their sacrifices were necessary for the preservation of a (white) race and nation.     

Towards a feminist geopolitics

The intersections and conversations between feminist geography and political geography have been surprisingly few. The notion of a feminist geopolitics remains undeveloped in geography. This paper aims to create a theoretical and practical space in which to articulate a feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics is not an alternative theory of geopolitics, nor the ushering in of a new spatial order, but is an approach to global issues with feminist politics in mind. 'Feminist' in this context refers to analyses and political interventions that address the unequal and often violent relationships among people based on real or perceived differences. Building upon the literature from critical geopolitics, feminist international relations, and transnational feminist studies, I develop a framework for feminist political engagement. The paper interrogates concepts of human security and juxtaposes them with state security, arguing for a more accountable, embodied, and responsive notion of geopolitics. A feminist geopolitics is sought by examining politics at scales other than that of the nation-state; by challenging the public/private divide at a global scale; and by analyzing the politics of mobility for perpetrators of crimes against humanity. As such, feminist geopolitics is a critical approach and a contingent set of political practices operating at scales finer and coarser than the nation-state.