I spent the second half of last week back in Durham at a workshop organised by Phil Steinberg on Ice Law or, to give it its full title – The IBRU Workshop on International Law, State Sovereignty, and the Ice-Land-Water Interface. I used to work closely with IBRU – the International Boundaries Research Unit – at Durham when I was there, serving as Academic Director between 2004-2007 and 2011-13. Among other things, the workshop was good for seeing how well IBRU is thriving with Phil as the Director.

The plan is that all participants to the workshop write a short summary of how their work contributes to the project, and I think these will all be posted online as the next stage in this work. For the moment, I’ll simply post the audio recording of my comments to one of the sessions. Much of this will be familiar to people who know my work on territory – both the historical, political and conceptual work on this topic – but that was really the point: a brief primer for people from a range of disciplines including anthropology and international law.