ABSTRACT
During the course of the late nineteenth century, Antarctica was subjected to a predominantly state-centric and power-political geopolitics, based on the premise that territory and territorial control necessarily implied more power, prestige and security. Once implicated in the colonial-imperial geographies of exploration and discovery, Antarctica was partitioned into seven pie-shaped claims of territorial sovereignty. The dominant spatial representations of the Antarctic during the 1950s were largely dictated and driven by the Cold War discourses. With the East-West rivalry for power and influence now extending to the south polar region as well, the US proposal to internationalize Antarctica, which eventually culminated in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 (cited hereafter as the Treaty) was motivated by the broader goals of the containment strategy: keeping the Soviet Union out of Antarctica and its affairs (Dodds 1997).
