Alejandra Mancilla, From Sovereignty to Guardianship: Governing Antarctica, Governing the World – Oxford University Press, June 2026 (print and open access)

ABC News discussion with David Rutledge

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest, driest, and highest continent in the world, so it is no wonder that it has been painted as exceptional in geographic and climatic terms. But not only that: Antarctica is also seen as exceptional politically. Since the Antarctic Treaty came into force in 1961, it has been under the Joint Guardianship of a group of states that have kept peace and privileged science as the main activity on the continent, with a focus on the protection rather than the exploitation of nature.

For natural scientists, Antarctica is seen as the largest open-air laboratory in the world. In From Sovereignty to Guardianship, Alejandra Mancilla proposes that Antarctica should also be seen as a laboratory for territorial governance, providing inspiration in places where both the regime of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources of individual states and the international regime of Common Heritage of Mankind have proven insufficient and inadequate. At the same time, she shows that Antarctic governance has important limits that can be surmounted to be made less state-centric and less anthropocentric, embracing the fact that protecting Antarctica requires acting beyond Antarctica, and vice versa. Given the global environmental challenges that we face, and the growing challenges to international law and cooperation, this book argues that environmental governance around the world can—and should—benefit from the creative and often unexpectedly fruitful political imagination of Antarctica.