ARTICLES
Jessica O’Reilly
College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University
Tectonic History and Gondwanan Geopolitics in the Larsemann
Hills, Antarctica
At the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, an Indian delegate proposed a new
research base located within an environmental protection area, because it is where
India and Antarctica were connected on the 125-million-year-old continent of Gondwana. How did this claim come to be successful for the Indian Antarctic Program?
In the production of documents within international governing bodies, policy makers
enroll allies, emphasizing particular aspects of their plans to members of diverse
epistemic communities. Instead of trying to make nationally oriented ideas work
through uniform procedural rules, international policy makers reshape the contours
of acceptable policy-making procedure and the political possibilities of international
governance. [Science, environment, policy, geography, Antarctica, India]
India Announces a New Antarctic Base
After several years of negotiations, I was finally permitted to attend the 2006 Antarctic
Treaty Consultative Meetings (ATCM) in Edinburgh, Scotland, as a delegate to the
NGO Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.1 Governments involved in Antarctic
science annually convene these meetings to make consensus-based decisions about
the continent. As the participants worked through a packed agenda, a delegate from
the Republic of India announced that they were planning to build a new research
base, their third, in the middle of the proposed Larsemann Hills Antarctic Specially
Managed Area.2 An Antarctic Specially Managed Area, or ASMA, is a management
category that enacts environmental protection in heavily visited Antarctic places.
Managers from Australia, Russia, Romania, and China had been working on the
ASMA draft management plan since 1999, and many of the delegates felt that the
plan was ready to be approved.3 The ASMA management team already had bases
located in the Larsemann Hills, and they expected the ASMA to prevent future
development and to put stricter environmental regulations into place. While the
existing bases are concentrated in one area, the proposed Indian base would be
situated in the center of an undeveloped area, miles away. A new base in this location
would significantly increase human impacts in an area that already had limiteddevelopment plans underway. Since the Indian Antarctic Program plans expanded
human impacts in a proposed conservation zone, the Indian delegate’s announcement
ground the ASMA management plans to a halt.
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 34, Number 2, pps. 214–232. ISSN
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2011.01163.x.
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The Indian delegate spoke for several minutes, outlining the prospective scientific
activities that would take place at the new Indian Antarctic research station. He
explained the compelling necessity for India’s Antarctic program to locate this base
right in the center of a proposed ASMA, in a mapped spot designed to prevent this
type of development. This area, he said, is important to the nation of India because it is
at this point where the Indian subcontinent and Antarctica were connected during the
time of Gondwana, 125 million years ago.4 Furthermore, Indian geologists suggest
that their selected promontory in the Larsemann Hills was where the Indian holy
river Godavari flowed when the landmasses were connected. Because of this Indian
relationship to this part of Antarctica, he explained, India has a “scientific need” to
build a research station at this site to study Indian–Antarctic geologic relationships. In
India, people in the Antarctic program worked to create national will in the press that
stressed the Gondwanan link between the Antarctic and India. Indian delegates, in
the international Antarctic Treaty context, reshaped their claim to one that expressed
a scientifically legitimate need through a series of discursive moves that delicately
enrolled disparate audiences.
The Production of Policy
The Antarctic Treaty System, as a system of governance, contains multiple, cultivated
layers, and both explicit and implicit processes for policy making within these layers.
Systems of governance in action, however, are not simply organizations in which
authority moves in a singular, simple way. Riles (2000) depicts bureaucratic systems
as “networks.” For her, networks are a spatial form: they are “systems that create
themselves” (173). I work with and build upon this concept by exploring the ways
in which people in these systems not only create workable networks but become
entangled in them. In this case, actors must convince multiple, conflicting audiences
of their plans, using a series of sometimes-contradictory discursive and technical
strategies. The actors must slip into and out of the networks that they have created
and rely upon for support. In contrast to technopolitical approaches (Mitchell 2002;
Scott 1999), I consider bureaucratic work to be creative and flexible, though limited
and provoked by the institutional boundaries established by people in a bureaucratic
system.
The work of writing policy, and the negotiations, meetings, and rewritings that constitute “writing policy” (in my understanding of the term), revolves around implementation and interpretation as much as writing. Policy makers and scientists interpret the
others’ work throughout this writing process. Shore and Wright (1997) describe policy as an “intrinsically rational, technical, action-oriented instrument” and claim that
policy contains models of society (5–7). These models of society are often bound up
in moralistic discourses such as environmentalism or cultural conservatism, but such
moralistic policy makes such decision making “more generalized, more impersonal,
bureaucratic, and anonymous” (10–11).
As a continent of “peace and science,” the production of Antarctic policy is shot
through with the production of scientific knowledge about the place. Antarctic scientific knowledge carries the mantle of internationalism as well. I consider knowledge
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production to emerge from institutionalized power relationships (Foucault 1969,
1970) as well as from relationships between the human researcher and the nonhuman
objects of their concern (Callon 1999; Latour 1987). This scientific knowledge production is flexible, contingent, social, and unprivileged. The intersection of science
and policy is a gray zone, which contains “science in policy”—the incorporation of
scientific expertise in policy decisions—and “policy for science”—the making of
regulations that affect how science is done (Jasanoff 1990:5).
People cannot always insert decisions into and out of policy documents with ease:
the creative work of the bureaucracy relies on an accord among the people participating within it. This accord is not always easily achieved. Sometimes policy
makers must work through political intransigence via alternative, less formal practices (e.g., see Chayes 1996). Other times, policy makers must take into account
the postcolonial dynamics in their specific policy situations and severe imbalances
of power in global governance overall (Anghie 2005; Kennedy 2008). The people
in this article must also take scientific discourse into account, lending legitimacy
to Antarctic proposals while deflecting, though not erasing, national plans for the
continent.
By taking document production as a cultural practice as well as a cultural material,
the implicit, informal, and tense negotiations that inform seemingly flattened text
emerges. During the mundane procedures of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, people produce knowledge, alongside the documents and relationships
forged or tattered in meetings. Negotiating policies involves wrangling over text and
numbers and interpreting these into action, rewriting as needed. Focusing on policy
writing lends attention to the modes of power that are entangled in writing policy
documents, particularly on the ways difference and accord are managed in the text
(see Riles 2006). Foucault (1977) famously suggested that modern institutions situate
people into “networks of writing,” where inscriptions emerge from sets of disciplinary
practices. Donald Brenneis (1999) and Marilyn Strathern (2000) have built upon this
idea, showing that bureaucracies are rich sites for producing new knowledge and
enveloping this knowledge into the everyday and repetitive practices of bureaucratic
work. Going through the process—moving policy through the Antarctic Treaty System in ways socially acceptable to dominant parties within the system, rather than
meaningfully addressing concerns and problems—becomes the measure of success
and complaints.5 Careful and meticulous policy writing (not content) is the epitome
of a good policy-making process (Riles 1998).
People working in and around international governance regimes generate ways of
knowing about their particular concerns and topics. Highly stylized negotiations
among international representatives, with eyes cast both toward global ideals and national goals, occur in international forums besides the Antarctic Treaty System, such
as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. People working in international governing
bodies use policy processes to portray tenuous institutional perspectives, agreed-upon
information, and specific maps for future actions (Harper 1997; Muehlebach 2001).
Akhil Gupta (1992) has written about the specific kinds of transnationalism that
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emerge among developing nations as counter to the dominant internationalisms forwarded by wealthier nations. These international fora usually come with procedures
that inform how the meetings are carried out, the tone and language of the meetings,
and the ideas that are allowed to become part of the institutional discourse. Participants in these institutions form epistemic communities—interpretive frameworks
that shorthand science and policy understandings in order to get to the work of policy
negotiation (Haas 1990).
The category of epistemic communities, however, is problematic because of its
idealized and glossy sets of knowledge and principles of inclusion and exclusion.
While epistemic communities exist and make significant contributions to scientific and political problems, this model does not resonate across groups of experts because of differences in expertise, because epistemic communities are far
from egalitarian, and because these communities are imbricated in political institutions. In international governing bodies such as the Antarctic Treaty System, people negotiate with and among multiple epistemic communities—those of
the national delegations, the organization writ large, and the vague but idealistic frameworks such as science. To account for the clear power disparities among
these epistemic communities, policy makers enroll their various audiences and allies, emphasizing particular aspects of their plans to members of diverse epistemic
communities.
Antarctic Geopolitics and Science
Antarctica has a relatively short history with humans that often seems to start with the
International Geophysical Year (IGY) (1957–58). The period before that is deemed
the “exploration era,” in which Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, and Mawson led men
to and around Antarctica. While the exploration era and the peace-and-science era
brought forth from the IGY are typically narrated as abruptly discordant ways of
claiming and living in Antarctica, the contemporary era is always informed by the
earlier explorers, from traditional gender structures and dynamics on the ice, to the
legacies of observations gleaned in the earliest traverses of the continent, to the
primacy and stature implied in being first to a place, planting a flag and maintaining
a territorial claim (Bloom 1993).
Leaders from nations that claimed Antarctic territory—France, the United Kingdom,
New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Chile, and Norway—became increasingly concerned over the posturing of Russia and the United States during the Cold War. The
1957–58 IGY helped focus attention of modern scientific endeavors in Antarctica and
elsewhere, including space.6 In this climate of public support for Antarctic scientific
research, government representatives of nations involved or interested in Antarctica
met to discuss potential Antarctic futures. The matter of national territorial claims
and the build-up of Soviet and American infrastructure throughout the continent was
the primary policy concern. The solution to this problem was the Antarctic Treaty,
signed in 1959 in Washington, D.C., and entered into force in 1961. Much of Antarctica’s geopolitical and environmental dramas are based on the interpretations of this
treaty.
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The Antarctic governing body is tenuous, suspending national territorial claims in
favor of maintaining an international, scientific continent. In 1959, Antarctica was
declared the Antarctic Treaty Territory. Nine nations formed the initial signatory
members, and new nations have been added as they have demonstrated a “scientific presence” in Antarctica. Nations exercise scientific claims but attach further
meanings and aspirations to Antarctica. Chile has stated that Antarctica is a natural,
geological extension of its territory. Norway maintains its claim to try to standardize
whaling in polar seas. New member nations, such as the Ukraine and India, claim
membership to the modernizing, technological, and scientific elite. The treaty system
is fragile, though; besides the multiple and greatly contested national claims, there are
increasing pressures from corporations, NGOs, and tourists. Delegates meet annually
in different nations to update the treaty through decisions that must be unanimous.
Because unanimity is required to adopt resolutions, much Antarctic governance is
conducted through informal channels—otherwise one nation could effectively and
easily end the treaty system without such practices.
Antarctic scientists and policy makers travel extensively, so I spent a fair amount
of my research time flying to other locations where Antarctic scientists and policy
makers negotiate environmental decisions. For example, case visits were made to
Scotland, where the 2006 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings took place, and to
Hobart, Australia, where another set of Antarctic meetings occurred just one month
later, as well as visits to Antarctica.
In 1998, at the ATCM in Madrid, Spain, the international Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties took up the continent’s first comprehensive environmental management
guidelines, informally called the Madrid Protocol. Before the Madrid Protocol, there
were multiple land use categories in Antarctica, with a confusing mixture of protection regulations for each. The protocol standardized these special-status areas into two
categories: Antarctic Specially Protected Areas (ASPA; intended to protect one small
research site, historical monument, or biological population) and Antarctic Specially
Managed Areas (ASMA; intended to protect larger places and multiple ecosystems
and environmental “values”).
Some national Antarctic programs are worried about the increasing amounts of environmental regulation in Antarctica, seeing “the tougher environmental protections
required for Antarctic activities and the setting up of Antarctic Specially Managed
Areas as a ruse to maintain the assets of more-established powers there” (Brady
2010:774). In a Chinese bureaucratic periodical, Jiangson writes that increasingly
strict environmental regulations make “the struggle over resources in Antarctica
all the more complicated, more covert, and more extreme” (Jiangson 2007) and that
“mineral exploration is continuing disguised as scientific activity” (Brady 2010: 774).
This skepticism over the Antarctic environmental regime under the Madrid Protocol
translates into fraught negotiations over base-building and environmental protection.
Through the discursive strategies of people involved in the Larsemann Hills ASMA
case, as well as the institutional processes that these actors must attend to, science
becomes refracted through law, emerging as an international environmental policy.
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From Formal Politics to Informal Process
In an interview in Hobart, Australia, I asked the Indian delegate Rasik Ravindra to
explain the process by which India decided to build a new station, and, specifically,
why they decided upon this location in the Larsemann Hills. We sat in a nearly empty
corridor at the hotel hosting the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR)
conference, near a large poster exhibit. He explained that their Antarctic program
leaders wanted to expand their research to include more than one site—to make the
research more robust and representative of the entire continent. They wanted to find
a site more appropriate than Maitri for conducting oceanographic studies. To find
the site for the new base, Ravindra explained, they cruised for 2,000 kilometers to
consider three different places: the Antarctic Peninsula, the Bellingshausen Sea area,
and the Amery Ice Shelf. After Ravindra detailed the logistical considerations, he
described the scientific interest in the area, including but not limited to the Gondwanan
connection between India and the Larsemann Hills (taped interview, July 13, 2006).
Furthermore, Ravindra shifted the sacred geography implied in the geohistoric link
between India and Antarctica to become a research-based justification for constructing a base in the Larsemann Hills. With the two landmasses previously connected,
Ravindra explains, much can be determined about the geology of both regions. The
entire geologic story of this piece of Gondwana, Ravindra explained, cannot be told
only from India, or only from the Larsemann Hills. It is the interactions of the
landmasses, told through geologic observations, which explain the past processes
that occurred during the Gondwanan time period and the splitting off of India and
Antarctica (taped interview, July 13, 2006).
When the new Indian base was brought up at the ATCM, some delegates were
diplomatically though visibly irate. During the Indian delegate’s presentation, people
began leaning over, speaking to one another, and tilting placards with their states’
names on them, indicating their desire to speak. A long session ensued as each
delegation was given its turn to speak. A few delegates supported the Indian program’s
plans, but most were politely critical. Delegates mentioned the environmental impact
of having so many bases in one area. Many people discussed the wrench that this
threw in the ASMA management plans and the years of hard work that other Antarctic
Treaty members had put into this plan. In casual conversations after the formal
meeting, they suggested that Indian scientists were merely proposing to conduct
research already completed by other scientists. One delegate opposed to the new
Indian station suggested to me in passing that “India doesn’t understand the process”
of Antarctic policy making. I contend that this informal process is what happens in the
gap between national agendas and global governance, where people in one national
Antarctic program must translate their plans into internationally acceptable policies
(see Herzfeld 1992, 1997; Shore 2000).
This translation often takes form in discourse that privileges scientific expertise,
which is performed strategically in the formal meetings, in sideline negotiations,
in gossip, and to the press. Indian Antarctic delegates finesse this process in ways
contradictory to the norms maintained by many state delegates. The Indian delegate’s
deployment of sacred geographies and tectonic time is a tactic, one that positions
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him and the Indian Antarctic Program as both expert insiders and outsiders to the
mainstream of the Antarctic Treaty meetings, scientifically and geopolitically.
Following India’s announcement, the tenor and direction of the discussion over the
proposed Larsemann Hills ASMA shifted. The creation of ASMAs forces a contingent
of several nationalities to turn a seemingly blank Antarctic space into a decidedly
international, managed one. ASMA management teams comprise nations with bases
in or near the ASMA. As soon as the ASMA management plans begin to be written,
the involved parties negotiate procedures and regulations for how to live in, develop,
study, visit, and categorize a piece of Antarctic land. Whereas the entire Antarctic
is international, it is also large, spread out, and relatively unpopulated. ASMAs
concentrate the roles and ideas of nations onto a relatively small international space.
New and tiny national borders seem to become drawn around national bases, and
where it was physically impossible before, Australia shares borders with Romania,
China, and India; the national representatives have to relate with each other as border
sharers, sharing logistics such as runways and agreeing on environmental and other
policies.
The consternation from several Antarctic national delegations indicates that the translation between India’s national interests in building a new base, and the rhetoric and
practice of Antarctic environmental management, was not an easy one. Although the
Indian delegate’s Gondwanan rationale was framed in scientific terms, it was not
accepted as such by other national delegates. Therefore, the involved delegates had
to switch registers from official onstage negotiations to informal backstage policy
making.
Tectonic and Sacred Geographies
As the delegates from the Republic of India mobilized arguments for building their
new base in the Larsemann Hills, they reimagined the kinds of expert evidence that
Antarctic decisions might be based upon. The people working around the Larsemann
Hills ASMA management plan and the new base had to find ways to work with
two clashing timescales: contemporary international geopolitics, and Gondwanan
megacontinent, which is much longer and beyond the scope of everyday political
maneuvering.
One of the most compelling justifications for the location of the new Indian base in the
Larsemann Hills is that it is the site where India and Antarctica were joined when they
comprised part of Gondwana. Contemporary claims and longings for ancient places,
though idiosyncratic, have been presented before. Sumathi Ramaswamy, in The Lost
Land of Lemuria (2004), traces the histories of a supposedly submerged continent
and landbridge in the Indian Ocean, theorized over time by European scientists,
American New Age adherents, and by Tamil people in India and Sri Lanka, who
claim that Lemuria is the (now submerged) Tamil homeland. The lost Lemurian
continent eventually became discredited in geological studies over the course of the
twentieth century. Ramaswamy, though, maintains that the work involving the lost
continent—particularly by Tamil people—is not focused on a longing for the past
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but is a commentary on the scientific work that discovers lost continents. Lemuria
as a paleo place inhabits a particular tectonic geography that interacts with the lived
geographies of contemporary people, a way of using history to speak to scientists and
the state. Lemuria was a means by which Tamil people could position themselves
alongside and against Western science, using tectonic time.
Gondwana was another large and ancient landmass, first named by Austrian Eduard
Suess in The Face of the Earth (1906). Unlike Lemuria, the scientific community came
to agree that Gondwana did exist, though the acceptance of the theory of continental
drift has its own complex history (Oreskes 1999). The naming of this land mass is
significant, as are the exploratory activities that follow its naming (or discovery, if
one can label a no-longer existing place as discovered). In the case of the Larsemann
Hills, Indian exploratory work is explicitly scientific but is also wrapped in the work
of nationalism, territoriality, and religion. This work is similar to the Lemurian labors
of loss the Tamil people use to negotiate their standing in a postcolonial, scientific
world. This is not exclusive to Indian people and is not a mystified response to
modernity; this negotiation of science and nationalism is embedded in all national
Antarctic projects. It is not just Indian managers who deploy alternative strategies
to situate themselves in the Antarctic as all Antarctic national representatives use
science strategically for their national interests. However, the aspects of religion and
deep geologic time make the Indian arguments stand in contrast to the dominant
vernaculars of Antarctic projects. The use of sacred geographies and tectonic time,
while not well received in the Antarctic Treaty Meeting room, were essential to
bolstering a sense of national significance for Indians learning about their Antarctic
program’s plans to build a new base. The argumentation used in the international
arena would not necessarily be as compelling in gaining Indian national support.
Strategic Science in Domestic and International Policy
Indian representatives narrate their activities and decisions using the diplomatic discourse that all national delegates use in Antarctic matters. Nationalist and media
representations of the proposed new Indian base highlighted the spiritual and geonationalistic claims about the Gondwanan connections between India and Antarctica
at the Larsemann Hills. Among various reporters and attendees at the Antarctic Treaty
Consultative Meetings, the specter of the Godavari River in the Larsemann Hills was
treated both as absurdly silly and utterly serious. Today, the Godavari River flows
through the Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh states and is considered a Hindu sacred
site. In the earliest days of planning the new Indian Antarctic base, this geologic and
sacred link between India and Antarctica was often mentioned by the Indian Antarctic program, particularly in the national press. However, the point of the sacredness
of the Godavari River in Antarctica did not go over well in the international press
or in the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (Jayaraman 2007; Kamat 2006a,
2006b; Mallikarjun 2003; Ramachandran 2007; Ramesh 2006; Sharma 2006, 2007).
Like the fact that India and Antarctica used to be connected millions of years ago,
this sacred geography had to be retooled as a piece of geologic evidence instead of
a claim to nationalistic, spiritual Antarctic places for the Indian people—making a
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modest discursive shift from the river to research. Like the broader Gondwana argument, though, situating this part of the Larsemann Hills as a sacred Indian geography
implied a longer timescale of legitimacy and a deep, inalienable relationship between
Indians and this piece of Antarctica.
Both the Indian and international press were interested in this dispute and encapsulated the case using different registers. National press surrounding the new Indian
base described efforts to gain and sustain public support and interest, and the Indian
Antarctic Program and other relevant government agencies provided press releases
to the local and national media as their key communicative tool for generating public
support for the new base. In The Hindu on September 2, 2003, a headline reads, “India
plans to set up permanent base station in Antarctica” and describes the upcoming
exploratory trip to search for a location for this new base (Mallikarjun, 2003). On
May 26, 2006, The Hindu reporter Kamat described scientific potential for India
in Antarctica, including medical bioprospecting, fisheries research, climate change
research, and, possibly, a solution to tsunamis. After the fractious outcome at the
ATCM, though, there was more of an emphasis on India’s controversial positioning.
For example, a news update in The Hindu: “India is set to defy international opinion
and set up a base in a planned Antarctic protected area to research the prehistoric
origins of a Hindu holy river” (Kamat 2006). In this article, nationalism is as much
about sacred geographies as it is about internationalism and world positioning.
In our interview, I asked Ravindra about the controversy at the Antarctic Treaty
Consultative Meetings about the location of India’s new base. I asked him to comment
on this controversy and he responded in a diplomatic manner:
First of all, I don’t think there should have been any controversy and,
in fact, from our point of view there is no controversy. Antarctica is a
continent of peace, tranquility, and we are a signatory to the Madrid Protocol. We are the people who want to maintain the scientific significance
of Antarctica, the pristine environment of Antarctica. From that point of
view we don’t find that there is any controversy. The only point which
has been raised in the last ATC meeting was about the ASMA; that is,
the Antarctic Specially Management Area plan by Australia and other
countries. And think that will also be sorted out because we told them
that we are not against the ASMA, we joined the ASMA consortium. We
will begin to manage and protect this area. Staying away possibly one
cannot do much but if you are part of the management activity possibly
you can do much more [taped interview, July 13, 2006].
Ravindra does not mention the accusations that have been made in relation to the
Indian Antarctic program or that his program had decided to build a new base after
an ASMA had been planned in that area for the better part of a decade. Instead, he
emphasizes the common environmental and scientific goals of the Indian Antarctic
program with other states.
In India, as elsewhere, science is marketed among nationals as a mode of governance
(Anderson 1983). Scientific “conspicuous technology” helps legitimize scientific
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activities to the Indian middle classes, as Ashis Nandy (1990) and Itty Abraham (1998)
have shown. Scientific work can be taken up as a nationalistic project to articulate
political positions in international relations, demonstrating military capabilities and
forwarding arguments about science being conducted in tropical places away from
colonial metropoles. Nationalistic justifications of scientific research help create
public support. Justifications among the international public, though, can require
different tactics to be convincing.
Indian spokespeople provided rationales that were meant to complement the spaces
in which they presented them: in the formal Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting
space, which required less attention to scientific detail; in the sideline negotiations of
the meetings, in which people probed scientific argumentation much more closely;
to nationalistic spaces in the media, where the argument was framed as political
conflict. Scientific publications and vast amounts of raw and partially analyzed data
were often presented in backstage settings, while, in the more presumably official
settings, people deployed less strong scientific arguments because they could not be
contested outright. The official meetings, it must be noted, exist to enact politically
tolerable decisions among all of the delegates. While delegates often issue calls
for and deflections towards a vague “science,” the work of consensus is a tenuous
alchemy that incorporates a range of considerations and audiences.
The Indian Antarctic program worked on generating national will before introducing
their intentions to the international Antarctic community. Primarily communicated
through the national press, a constituency was raised as Indian nationals were enrolled
into this project and convinced of its legitimacy (see Jasanoff 2005). When India
framed their rationale for the location of the new base in the Larsemann Hills, they
used tectonic time to put into play a much longer legitimating timescale of Antarcticnational relationality. Paleogeological relationships between India and the Larsemann
Hills imply a long-term notion of territoriality, instead of the more conventional longterm cultivations of expertise and physical human presence that many Antarctic states
use to create nationalistic political legitimacy and authority. This deft deployment
of regional mythology, popular culture, and notions of what science can mean for
a national society succeeded in generating the requisite public support within the
Republic of India, but these claims failed to tie into international Antarctic rhetoric.
Meetings on the Margins of Meetings and Other Tools of Consensus
Returning to the plenary session of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, some
delegates organized small scale maneuvers to present their opposition to the new
Indian base: (1) they held marginal meetings with Indian delegates, and (2) they
orchestrated an intervention to embarrass the Indian delegation. People working in
consensus organizations must smooth over discord in a manner acceptable enough
for the body to function. The Committee for Environmental Protection had to create
a response with the Republic of India and the states involved in the initial Larsemann
Hills ASMA management plan: Australia, Russia, Romania, and China.7 By the end
of the meetings, a few paragraphs of official report text had been constructed, often
on the sides of the formal meeting (for a somewhat analogous case study, see Riles
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2000). The production of this text is the result of editing during the Committee for
Environmental Protection (CEP) meetings, as well as the marginal meetings and orchestrated intervention. Here, activities on the sidelines of the official, ritualized, and
procedural steps of the CEP and the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings compose
the eventual text of the negotiated report. The meetings proper put into documents
the negotiations occurring at tea breaks, casual conversations, intersessional work,
and other informal and ad hoc moments (Riles 2000; Scott 1998).
After India announced their plans to build a new base in the middle of a proposed
protected area, the chair of the CEP instructed delegates from the ASMA management
team and India to meet during tea for an off-the-record “meeting on the margins”
where people from multiple delegations try to reach consensus about the matter and
compose appropriate report text. Writing policy and reports are considered extraneous
to the work of presenting, questioning, and approving these documents, and so the
majority of this writing must occur before or on the sidelines of the meetings.
During the meetings, there was often whispering among the delegations. There was
movement, though not a lot, as a delegate would go over to speak to another delegation
about something. Papers were passed around and edited and passed back: this was
quiet text negotiation ordered by the chair on certain more contentious parts of
the final report. As the languages used shifted, delegates put on and took off their
translation headphones, attached to a transmitter. Some people kept their headphones
on at all times, as their channel continuously transmitted in their chosen official
Antarctic Treaty language—English, Spanish, French, or Russian.
For the Larsemann Hills marginal meeting, six delegates met, standing in a cluster
at the rear of the CEP meeting room, near the translators’ booths. One delegate I
spoke with explained that the ASMA management group’s goal was to get their
management plan through to the ATCM plenary at these meetings. During the brief
but intense meeting on the margins, an ASMA management team delegate suggested
that India write a revision for the ASMA management plan, stating that India may
add an operational zone later. An Indian delegate replied that India would like to
wait and resubmit the ASMA management plan the following year. Another ASMA
management team delegate said that they had been working on this plan since 1996
and would really like to see it go through that year.8 The parties decided to meet later,
since they were not able to agree during the fifteen-minute tea break.
The next day at the CEP meetings, the CEP chair asked for an update on the ASMA
management plan from Australia, and an Australian delegate announced that they
were no longer seeking endorsement for the plan, that they need more discussion
over the next year among all of the “stakeholders,” including India. The Indian
delegation had decided to join the ASMA management team and would help rewrite
the management plan taking the new Indian base into account. They made plans to
meet at another set of international Antarctic meetings in Hobart, Australia, in July.9
At the end of the meeting, the CEP attendees finalized the committee’s report to send
up to the larger Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting plenary. Paragraph by paragraph, the committee edited the information being passed up to plenary. The report
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adoption became quite interesting—this activity is notoriously tedious in general—
with the Larsemann Hills ASMA management plan section. One national delegation
coordinated an intervention to publicly complain about the insertion of a new Indian
base into the ASMA. This intervention was a surprise to the Indian representatives,
in a space where surprise is rare, causing some embarrassment and requiring some
explanations in the more public space of the general meeting assembly.
Within the editing comments about the report, a speaker stated that their delegation
just discovered that a building—a portable structure called a melon hut—had already
been erected on the proposed new base site by India, with no environmental evaluation
paperwork filed, as required by the Antarctic Treaty and the Madrid Protocol. After
some tense discussion, the chair told the involved delegations to meet during lunch
to work out the text.
After lunch, the drafting group offered new paragraphs for the report. The Indian
delegation claimed that they did not have to do an initial environmental evaluation
because they have a comprehensive environmental evaluation being drafted. The
Indian delegation then made a claim to be obeying a different order of rules—a
gesture of compliance that worked well enough that the other states could credibly
accept it. There is nothing in the paragraphs about the melon hut, since nothing
technically could be done about this situation and perhaps there was no willingness
to embarrass the Indian delegation further. The paragraphs were adopted into the
report. The devices of the meeting-on-the-margins and the planned intervention help
create the text, though there is no reference to such activities in the meeting reports.
This meeting-on-the-margin resulted in the Indian delegation achieving their goal:
the Larsemann Hills ASMA management plan was set aside for another year, while
Indian activities in the area were implicitly given clearance. The Indians used the
marginal meeting to insert themselves and their plans into the policy process. In
just 15 minutes of off-the-record discussion, a seemingly inevitable international
environmental management plan took a new direction. The orchestrated intervention,
while not stopping India’s planned new base, was an attempt to force the Indian
delegation to formally address their activities in the Larsemann Hills, which subverted
formal Antarctic procedures.
Tectonic Time and Sacred Geographies in Policy
From the many people and states involved in the conflict over the new Indian base
at the Larsemann Hills proposed ASMA, two dominant stories arise. First, Indian
claims about the ancient connections of India and Antarctica during Gondwana, and
particularly of the Godavari River, bespeak a sacred geography, both historical in an
extremely long time frame and one made to do the work of one nation, somewhat on
the social fringes of the Antarctic Treaty System. Second, many of those in opposition
to India’s plans to build a new base in the proposed protected area make claims that
Indian policy makers are not following Antarctic Treaty procedures—at minimum the
informal procedures—to the letter. The slippage between the onstage and backstage
of bureaucratic negotiations is indicative of detailed understandings of how power
works there.
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The sacred and ancient geologic landscape of the Godavari River, while picked
up in the press and mentioned by the Indian delegates when they first outlined
India’s plans to build a new base, became simply quiet, populist, and nationalist
talk largely subsumed by other parties’ attempts to enlighten India about the process
in their apparent failure to comprehend it. In short, the Godavari River argument
was marginalized in the Antarctic Treaty System; met with jokes, rolled eyes, or,
in the case of India, turned into a story about a compelling scientific need for the
country to locate a base and their scientists there. The claim about the territory
of this particular patch of the Larsemann Hills was reframed in the international
arena to be about science, not about territory, though the persistent claims about
the Gondwanan continent are, of course, both. The management process allows and
even encourages idiosyncratic arguments because only national representation—not
scientific consensus—is required. As long as the formal and informal processes are
followed, the actions of the delegates working in Larsemann Hills suggest, there is
little room to negotiate on scientific matters.
These claims were only partially successful, as some delegates suggested that India’s
planned research merely repeated work already conducted. Publicly, other Antarctic
states zeroed in on a critique of India’s Antarctic policy-making process. What the
process is not well defined: it hints at the procedural rules that underlie the Antarctic
Treaty, but there is no standard operating procedure for this process. There are formal
rules of procedure for the Antarctic Treaty meetings, but these do not encompass the
informal and unspoken process at play for achieving the goals of the meetings. Instead,
the process involves following the procedural rules, but with flourishes that remark
upon international cooperation, good faith, and good manners. Therefore, science
packaged correctly can be deployed as a rationale for nonscientific motivations such
as national pride and the promotion of national interests. Science, then, is a constraint
in the Antarctic Treaty System—a weak constraint, but integral nonetheless.
If the Indian delegates had followed the conventional steps toward base building in
Antarctica, their opponents argue, other states would have been satisfied because the
Indian delegation would have appeared to act in good faith and as good members in
this body that emphasizes international cooperation and information sharing.
Instead, delegates working for the Indian Antarctic program subverted the quiet
claiming that takes place in Antarctic matters, even though territorial claims are, on
paper, not to be exercised. In contemporary times, claims are not recognized. Instead,
Antarctic claiming is a long-term cultivation of expertise, national presence, stateof-the-art scientific programs, due diligence in environmental management, public
outreach, and international profile. Most Antarctic states have mastered many of
these features, but few Antarctic states can demonstrate these features over the long
term in Antarctica. Because people reportedly did not sight the Antarctic until the
1700s, a long-term Antarctic human presence is usually measured in decades: such
a presence also lends authority to those states at the ATCM. This authority is moral,
not official—their official status is equal to any other signatory state in the Antarctic
Treaty System. However, their vocal advice and positions in relation to the Antarctic
activities of other Antarctic states shape the continent’s future. States with less clout
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must rely on their ability to halt consensus decisions at Antarctic Treaty Consultative
Meetings and use other tactics that destabilize the cliques of long-term Antarctic
states.
If the Indian delegation had proceeded in accordance with the tacit rules of the Antarctic Treaty System’s epistemic community, it would have made India look like a good
member, but it would have also undermined the Indian state’s ability to shape their
Antarctic research and logistics strategies. This is another consideration: the Indian
Antarctic Program needs to convince Indians, especially for funding appropriations.
The states that would most likely be expected to consult with and advise the Indian
delegation about their site selection and logistics for their new base would be the most
well-established, wealthy, and powerful national Antarctic programs. Their advice is
couched in collegiality, information sharing, or environmental concerns. The Indian
Antarctic program subverted the advice-seeking process, one that strongly guides the
research and logistical directions of the Antarctic continent, by refusing to participate
in the process that opens up opportunities to be bullied and pressured. Instead, managers from the Indian Antarctic program did not make their new base plans public
until their national government had approved and committed to them.
This counterhegemonic policy approach—that of refusing full compliance with informal, moral, and bureaucratic norms—can be successfully cultivated by less powerful
states (Gupta 1992). To do this, Indian spokespeople appropriated scientific discourse
and reconfigured notions of time and space to claim political legitimacy in Antarctica,
akin to the Antarctic states with a longer-term presence. Instead of trying to make
nationally oriented ideas work through uniform procedural rules, people working
within international governing bodies can reshape the contours of acceptable policy
making procedure, and by extension, the political possibilities of the organization in
play. In this case, the core Indian delegates had to maneuver between the mainstream
conceptions of how to package scientific knowledge into international documents and
the sacred geographies that sparked Indian national support. These maneuvers are
not simply communicative; the Indian delegates had to make themselves insiders and
outsiders enough in multiple social worlds (the national media, the other Antarctic
Treaty delegates, their own governmental institutions) to be convincing.
Regardless of Ravindra’s carefully measured, process-oriented approach that he used
in explaining to me India’s decision to locate their new base in the Larsemann Hills,
or the more fanciful, nationalistic, tectonic and spiritual reasons that captured the
imaginations of journalists reporting on this conflict, Ravindra and other Indian
Antarctic Program employees know that Indian national interests will be upheld
regardless of international approval. Their plans reshape the future of the Larsemann
Hills ASMA, requiring a significant replanning for the environmental protection of
the relatively highly populated Antarctic area. Simply stated, despite the international
treaties signed into law by the signatory states to the Antarctic Treaty, these states, as
well as nonmember states, can do what they like in Antarctica (see Bastmeijer and
Roura 2008). It is the domain of no one. The Antarctic Treaty is largely based on
good faith, as it is politically costly to internationally enforce the small infractions
that some states might take. Ideas made to seem somewhat silly in international
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Page 228
forums—such as the ancient, holy Godavari river bed—can be retooled to resonate
with scientific research activities and a desire to understand the technical minutiae of
plate tectonics.
Conclusions
People working for the Indian Antarctic program turned a seemingly preposterous
claim into one that had gained enough scientific legitimacy to become credible in
international policy forums. To do this, they had to work within and between several
networks that were at odds with one another—convincing the Indian public and
members of the international Antarctic Treaty System (Riles 2000). First, Indian
delegates forced a shift in the policy discussion from formal procedure to informal
negotiations. Second, when Indian delegates framed their rationale for the location of
the new base in the Larsemann Hills, they used geological time and tectonic history to
put into play a much longer legitimating time scale of Antarctic-national relationality.
The Indian delegates radically reconceptualized what constituted a “historic” claim
to the place. Paleogeological relationships between India and the Larsemann Hills
imply a long-term cultivation of territoriality, instead of the more conventional longterm cultivations of expertise and physical human presence that many Antarctic
states use to create nationalistic political legitimacy and authority. Third, Indian
delegates repositioned their rationale for building in the new location using scientific
language. By reframing their rationale, the Indian representatives made their project
legible, at a minimum, to the Antarctic Treaty representatives as a group. Fourth, the
Indian delegation and those involved in the ASMA management team participated in
small-scale maneuvers during the formal portion of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative
Meetings to negotiate consensus text in the backstage of the meetings. People in the
Indian Antarctic Program ultimately received approval for their new base, while the
ASMA plans were reimagined, retooled, and, in some ways, weakened as a space of
environmental protection.
Delegates working for Indian Antarctic program demonstrated that national scientific
rhetoric must establish political intransigence but does not have to simply mimic
international environmental discourses. Discordant rhetoric is smoothed out in the
gap between national agendas and international management documents—a time
period of consultation, submission of paperwork detailing plans, and some modes of
grappling with other nations’ concerns in an international forum. The Indian delegates
did this through a cultivated series of slippages among the various policy networks
they belong to. These separate but overlapping networks are epistemic communities
that maintain their own boundaries and expectations for establishing legitimacy,
will, and support. People in India’s Antarctic program succeeded at making their
claim fit into scientific requirements, upending official policy-making standards, and
underscoring this bureaucracy’s inherent, implicit flexibility.
Notes
1. Because meetings are closed or off-the-record, I only identify delegates, delegations, and state names when these have been published as part of the public
record (e.g., in news articles or in the ATCM report).
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2. As of 2007, India operated only one base, named Maitiri, established in 1988.
Their first base, Dakshin Gangotri, was established in 1983 but was abandoned
after being buried under drifting snow.
3. This group of delegations, knowing India’s interest in the area, had invited Indian
representatives to join the ASMA management planning group, though India had
not joined.
4. Recently, geologic arguments claiming the Arctic are being deployed. The claim
getting the most attention is Russia’s flag-planting on the sea floor under the
pole, as the nation claimed that the area is an undersea extension of their country
(Blomfield 2007)
5. There is another arc of criticism to this story that this article will not fully explore:
how India circumvented standard etiquette of the Antarctic Treaty System and
circumvented scrutiny of environmental impact assessment.
6. The years 2007–09, roughly 50 years after the IGY, were labeled as the International Polar Year (IPY). Much preparation by national Antarctic programs for
this event occurred during my fieldwork in 2005–06. Governments earmarked
extra pockets of money for supporting some spectacular scientific projects at
both poles.
7. These members did not all join at once. Indeed, the history of the Larsemann Hills
ASMA management team without India’s role provides an insightful genealogy
of membership and clout in the Antarctic Treaty System. Australia and Russia
are the oldest members, with Romania and China joining later. The member
nations have varying degrees of clout and stature in this team.
8. One delegate stated that the ASMA management plan had been in draft since
1996, another since 1999.
9. The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research holds meetings to both showcase
scientific research as well as to organize international research programs and
strategies. The Council of Managers for National Antarctic Programs meets to
report on and coordinate logistics supporting Antarctic research operations.
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