This essay serves as an introduction to the special issue recognising the 60th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. It provides the geopolitical and scientific context informing the creation of the negotiations for a new treaty between October and December 1959. Thereafter, it identifies some of the challenges facing the contemporary Antarctic Treaty System. While none are thought to be threatening to the collaborative spirit that informs the legal and political status quo, there is no room for complacency either. Finally, the contributors and their essays are introduced for the reader. Taken together, it showcases the diversity of work being undertaken by scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

There are at least four ways in which Antarctic colonialism was white: it was paradigmatically performed by white men; it consisted in the taking of vast, white expanses of land; it was carried out with a carte blanche (literally, “blank card”) attitude; and it was presented to the world as a white, innocent adventure. While the first, racial whiteness has been amply problematised, I suggest that the last three illuminate yet other moral wrongs of the Antarctic colonial project. Moreover, they might be constitutive of a larger class of “white” colonialisms beyond the White Continent.

In 1940, a PhD was published in Germany about the claiming behaviour of several countries and the whaling industry in Antarctica. It shows already at this time that a need for regulation on that issue was required. The intertwined relationships between the claiming nations demanded an overarching framework where these complex issues could be managed. This paper elaborates on the state of the claiming parties before the 1940s and will demonstrate that the development for a comprehensive regulation was the only way to avoid a global conflict. The doctoral thesis from 1940 will be the focal point of the discussion.

Diplomats, officials, scientists and other actors working with the Antarctic Treaty System have not simply negotiated a range of measures for regulating human access to the region in a physical sense. They are also continually negotiating a cultural order, one in which time is central. Antarctic actors are aware that the Treaty did not once exist and may cease to exist sometime in the future. They are conscious of environmental change. Each actor tries to elevate their standing and power in the system by deploying temporal ideas and discourses in their interactions with each other: bringing their histories into negotiations, trying to control the idea of the future. This article will map three temporalities within Treaty history: first, the deployment and potency of histories and futures, their relative rhythms and lengths; second, permanence and expiration, the questions and politics of how long the Treaty should or might last; and third, the periodisation of the Treaty period, both among actors themselves and among scholars studying Antarctica.

Are similarities of temperature, snow and ice cover, and (certain) marine mammals sufficient to warrant both polar regions being considered a single object of study or governance? We argue that their treatment as a unit is an invitation to examine the motivations behind the choice to be polar rather than Arctic or Antarctic. For individuals such as James Clerk Ross or Roald Amundsen, logistical requirements and analogous goals facilitated careers spanning both the Arctic and the Antarctic. This trend continued through the 20th century as individual scientists studying phenomena such as glaciers, sea ice, or aurora defined their research as “polar” in nature. Organisations such as the Scott Polar Research Institute and Norwegian Polar Institute could draw on traditions of national exploration in both polar regions, while the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg gained its southern mandate with the importance of the International Geophysical Year. By comparison, neither the Arctic Institute in Copenhagen nor the Argentine Antarctic Institute felt any need to become polar. The creation of polar identity is ultimately a matter of geopolitics, of the value states see in instruments and symbols that speak to polar rather than Arctic or Antarctic interests. In cases such as Finland’s icebreaker industry, a technological capability justified Antarctic interest even without any national research tradition. We conclude by asking whether there is anything more natural about the polar regions than there is about the concept of a “tripolar” world in which the high alpine regions form a natural unit along with the Arctic and Antarctic.

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty made Antarctica the world’s first and only demilitarised continent, the world’s first denuclearised zone, and pioneered a comprehensive inspections system. This article explores Antarctic arms control as past precedent. It finds that the United States, which spearheaded the Antarctic Treaty negotiations, initially rationalised arms control in Antarctica as an isolated endeavour. Yet its potential elsewhere quickly appealed to various officials involved in the treaty negotiations and aligned with public perception. Subsequent initiatives for arms control took broad inspiration from the Antarctic Treaty, but regional differences limited specific adaptations.

In 1942, the British government created the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) to enforce sovereignty over the Antarctic Peninsula. The small groups of men who worked for the Survey called themselves Fids. During the late 1950s when Antarctic sovereignty was being hotly debated and worked out by national governments, Fids serving at British bases criticised the British government’s use of science as a bargaining chip. Using in-house magazines written and printed at FIDS bases and oral histories, this article examines how Fids viewed Antarctic politics and how those events influenced daily life at bases on the Peninsula.

The visual arts have played an increasingly important role in examining and critiquing past and present human activities in Antarctica as governed by the Antarctic Treaty and its Protocol on Environmental protection. This paper analyses the work of six artists who have contributed to this scrutiny, awakening us to fabrications and helping to enrich Antarctic cultures beyond the scientific and the environmental. It encourages all signatory nations to the Antarctic Treaty System to embrace and empower a more diverse artistic engagement with Antarctica and suggests that artists find new ways to address threats to the Antarctic, whether they come from within and from without.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which dedicates the continent to peace and international scientific cooperation in the face of rising east–west tensions, is informed in part by a shared scientific imaginary created by the UK and other nations which maintained scientific bases in Antarctica at the time. In this article, the poet offers works extracted from her longer sequence “Met Obs,” based on meteorological reports and journals from the UK station at Port Lockroy written in advance of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year (IGY). The poems engage with the work and circumstances which helped foster such an imaginary, as well as with the nexus of Antarctic “values” endorsed by the Treaty, and the later Madrid Protocol. The commentary further contextualises these literary responses in terms of the attitudes of the men working there as well as the “wilderness and aesthetic values” recognised by the later Protocol on Environmental Protection. The world of the poems may belong to 1950s Antarctica, but their observations reach beyond that experience, making a case for the continued relevance of Treaty values, and for the importance of artistic, as well as scientific, responses to the environment in a world under threat from accelerating climate change and competition for resources.

Africa has been marginalised in the history of Antarctica, a politics of exclusion (with the exception of Apartheid South Africa) reflected unsurprisingly by a dearth of imaginative, cultural and literary engagement. But, in addition to paleontological and geophysical links, Antarctica has increasing interrelationship with Africa’s climactic future. Africa is widely predicted to be the continent worst affected by climate change, and Antarctica and its surrounding Southern Ocean are uniquely implicated as crucial mediators for changing global climate and currents, rainfall patterns, and sea level rise. This paper proposes that there are in fact several ways of imagining the far South from Africa in literary and cultural terms. One is to read against the grain for southern-directed perspectives in existing African literature and the arts, from southern coastlines looking south; another is to reexamine both familiar and new, speculative narratives of African weather – drought, flood and change – for their Antarctic entanglements. In the context of ongoing work on postcolonial Antarctica and calls to decolonise Antarctic studies – such readings can begin to bridge the Antarctica–Africa divide.

The ratification of the Antarctic Treaty established a unique construct for human presence and activity in Antarctica. The designation of the continent for peace and science has inspired and informed the work of artists from across the world. This paper explores relationships between the Treaty and contemporary visual artists’ responses to Antarctica. Using data from interviews with scientists, cultural professionals and exhibition audiences, I explore the value to science and society of artists’ presence in Antarctica. I look at why in the last 2 years the number of artists being supported to work in Antarctica has declined and conclude with some observations on how this downward trend might be addressed.

The international community’s interest in the governance of Antarctica has long been recognised. Consideration of this interest has even been one of the pillars of the Antarctic Treaty System’s legitimacy. The Antarctic Treaty, for example, famously claims to serve “the interest of all mankind.” Yet, exactly how the international community is given a voice in Antarctic deliberations remains unclear. This contribution argues that – with the idea of direct United Nations involvement having been squarely rejected – stewardship could best describe the existing governance model as well as offer a normative framework to assess the system’s legitimacy.