The Centre for International Environmental Studies and the Global Governance Centre co-hosted a hybrid conference on 5 April 2022 on the geopolitics of Antarctica. 

Antarctica, the world’s seventh continent, is seldom in the news. In popular imagination, it is a remote and inaccessible continent that has remained untouched. This conference challenged this conventional wisdom, arguing that it ignores not just current developments in Antarctica, but also its history.  After all, commercial exploitation was at the origin of Antarctica’s discovery, with sealers and whalers being the first to chart the continent. Featuring some of the world’s top scholars on the polar regions, the conference explored the geopolitics of Antarctica and the race to claim its land and resources against a rapidly warming climate. It featured interventions from all of the following renowned Antarctic and Arctic experts:

• Alan Hemmings, Professor, University of Canterbury 
• Sanjay Chaturvedi, Professor of International Relations, South Asian University, New Delhi 
• Rasmus Bertelsen, Professor of Northern Studies, The Arctic University of Norway
• Nong Hong, Executive Director & Senior Fellow, Institute for China-America Studies