From Sovereignty to Guardianship Governing Antarctica, Governing the World

An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest, and highest continent in the world, so it is no wonder that it has been painted as exceptional in geographic and climatic terms. But not only that: Antarctica is also seen as exceptional politically. Since the Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961, it has been under the Joint Guardianship of a group of states that have kept peace and privileged science as the main activity on the continent, with a focus on the protection rather than the exploitation of nature.

For natural scientists, Antarctica is seen as the largest open-air laboratory in the world. In From Sovereignty to Guardianship, Alejandra Mancilla proposes that Antarctica should also be seen as a laboratory for territorial governance, providing inspiration in places where both the regime of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources of individual states and the international regime of Common Heritage of Mankind have proven insufficient and inadequate. At the same time, she shows that Antarctic governance has important limits that can be surmounted to be made less state-centric and less anthropocentric, embracing the fact that protecting Antarctica requires acting beyond Antarctica, and vice versa. Given the global environmental challenges that we face, and the growing challenges to international law and cooperation, this book argues that environmental governance around the world can--and should--benefit from the creative and often unexpectedly fruitful political imagination of Antarctica.

Alejandra Mancilla, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oslo

Alejandra Mancilla is professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo. She earned her degrees in Philosophy from Universidad Católica de Chile and the Australian National University. She is the author of The Right of Necessity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), and co-editor of Theories of Justice (Ashgate, 2016) and Colonialism and Antarctica (Manchester University Press, 2024). Her work on human rights, global justice, and territorial rights has been published in leading journals like Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy and Policy, and WIRE Climate Change. She participates in the Standing Committee of the Humanities & Social Sciences, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.