Search results

AbstractThe 2018 Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean (Agreement) is a notable intervention in living resources management. The Agreement seeks to anticipate future fisheries management and serves as a reminder as how international legal frameworks such as UNCLOS 'regionalise' seas and oceans. But thus far analyses of the Agreement have tended to focus on its legal and managerial qualities and implications. This paper offers a different reading of the Agreement, informed by critical geopolitics, which focuses on how the Agreement actively produces 'the Central Arctic Ocean' (CAO) which it then seeks to manage. The Agreement will shape not only the future geopolitics of the Arctic Ocean but also the diverse array of interests held by Arctic Ocean coastal states, indigenous peoples, environmental groups and extra‐territorial parties such as China.

On the Falklands question, David Cameron has been the most robust British Prime Minister since the late Margaret Thatcher. He has accused the Argentine government led by President Christina Kirchner of being 'colonial like' in its campaign to 'recover' the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). This article teases out two aspects of the current UK policy towards the Falklands and wider region: first, the Falklands are increasingly imagined as a strategic 'gateway' to the wider region including Antarctica. Resource interests do play a major role in this geographical imagination and in a post- Afghanistan era, there might be additional UK military capacity to support the UK presence. Second, the Coalition government is, more than ever, determined to promote and protect the 'wishes' of the Falkland Islands community to self-determine their own future. This has, in turn, given added confidence to the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) to organize a referendum in March 2013. There is going to be no return to a more co-operative period in the late 1990s; consolidate is the new watch word.

AbstractThe planting of a Russian flag at the bottom of the central Arctic Ocean in the summer of 2007 drew attention, in dramatic fashion, to a subterranean space beyond national jurisdiction. While the region was a permanent feature in Cold War strategic planning, the flag planting incident was rapidly framed as indicative of a different kind of struggle –'a scramble for territory and resources'. Notwithstanding the media led hyperbole, one question to emerge was an apparently straightforward one – did any one state or group of states possess sovereign rights in the central Arctic Ocean? More generally, how do issues of access, control, property rights and resource use continue to affect the governance of the global commons? This special section explores those questions.