An international hierarchy of science: conquest, cooperation, and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty System
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Joanne Yao |
| DOI | 10.1177/13540661211033889 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661211033889
European Journal of
International Relations
2021, Vol. 27(4) 995 –1019
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661211033889
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JR
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An international hierarchy of
science: conquest, cooperation,
and the 1959 Antarctic Treaty
System
Joanne Yao
Queen Mary University of London, UK
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.
Keywords
International order, international hierarchy, Antarctica, international institutions,
science, environment
Corresponding author:
Joanne Yao, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, England E1 4NS, UK.
Email: joanne.yao@qmul.ac.uk
1033889EJT0010.1177/13540661211033889European Journal of International RelationsYao
research-article2021
Article
996 European Journal of International Relations 27(4)
The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) has governed International Relations in the southern
continent for six decades and, in political discussions, is often celebrated as a model of
international cooperation through scientific research. As British representative at the
1959 creation of the ATS, Brian Roberts, maintains, ‘in the forty years or more during
which I’ve been associated with Antarctic affairs, I have seen some degree of interna-
tional order evolve out of chaos; harmony has replaced discord. . .’ (quoted in Scott,
2011). At its 50th anniversary, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the Treaty
as ‘a blueprint for the kind of international cooperation’ needed to address 21st century
challenges and ‘an example of smart power at its best’. She describes Antarctica as a
place where ‘science is the universal language’ that brings people from different nations
together for a common purpose (Clinton, 2009). Indeed, the steady record of scientific
collaboration in the harsh beauty of Antarctica has drawn much attention to science’s
role in forging interstate cooperation – and its potential to create global partnerships over
pressing challenges from pandemics to climate change. Some have even praised the ATS
as a triumph of apolitical science in the service of peace with Fogg’s volume on Antarctic
science concluding that the ATS ‘seems to have given hope of a movement towards more
rationality and more peaceful solutions to international problems’ (1992: 406).
Curiously, the ATS has been an understudied moment of international cooperation in
International Relations (IR) scholarship. When it is mentioned, the ATS is often listed in
passing as an example of an effective international regime (Koremenos et al., 2001; Young,
1989, 1996). Scholars such as Young (1989: 64) do note the exclusionary nature of the
Antarctic club, but there is limited exploration into what the use of science as an exclusion-
ary device means for the international order that the Treaty helps to constitute. To examine
the implications of science as a formal hierarchy embedded in the fabric of the ATS, this
article critically interrogates pervasive visions of Antarctic science as an impartial catalyst
for international cooperation, and in particular, situates the ATS in growing IR scholarship
on international hierarchies (Mattern and Zarakol, 2016). Through a detailed analysis of
the ATS, particularly Article IX of the treaty, which stipulates that all parties who join the
Treaty must conduct ‘substantial scientific research activity’ in Antarctica, I demonstrate
how science operated and continues to operate as a gatekeeper to an exclusive Antarctica
club. In doing so, I draw on scholarship in geography that has advanced the critical analysis
of cooperation in Antarctica as an uneven global governance framework that legitimized
pre-Treaty land grabs and institutionalized early 20th-century imperial structures (e.g.
Dodds, 2006; Scott, 2011; Glasberg, 2012; Howkins, 2017). I also use primary archival
research that showcases how these unequal structures were embedded into the diplomatic
bargains that legitimated and enabled the creation of the ATS.
By highlighting science as a hierarchical tool of exclusion in Antarctica, I make two
larger interventions into our understanding of the evolution of the current international
order. First, I contend that science constitutes an understudied source of hierarchy in
international politics – both as a broad hierarchy that manifests itself in deep structural
inequalities and as a narrow hierarchy or functional bargain that brings actors together in
international agreements. In particular, science is an epistemic argument that links a
certain type of knowledge production about a space with legitimate political authority
over that space. In doing so, it produces a hierarchical relationship between actors that do
science and the peoples and spaces that are the objects of scientific study. Here science
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