Christopher C. Joyner

The Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities : an attempt to break new ground

This study describes and analyzes the content of a proposed Draft Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities. This Draft Convention was, in several respects, meant to serve unique objectives. First, it had to accommodate the interests of states claiming territorial rights concerning parts of Antarctica, and those objecting to such claims. Second, since the Antarctic environment is unique and fragile, the Draft Convention had to provide for the strictest protection of the environment, so far, in international law. Even if the Draft Convention never enters into force, its rules concerning the protection of the Antarctic environment, on responsibility and liability as well as on arbitration, may serve as a model for the further development of international environmental law.

Public international law

ion and capitalist relations of production. This leads to neglecting the causal role of different contexts of social relations in constructing and deconstructing legal strategies of expansion. In effect, this is problematic for understanding Britain’s abstraction of the universal. If the previous chapters showed this method to be costly in the face of different legal strategies of expansion developed by Spain and France, there is no reason to assume this should not also apply to England. If so, can PM provide a sounder basis to explain Britain’s paradoxical pluralisation of sovereign forms on one hand, and the universalisation of the international legal order on the other? Specifically, how does PM explain British imperialism, and is this narrative compatible with the present research on juridical expansion? Wood (2003) argues that British capitalist imperialism differed significantly from contending early modern imperialisms because of the notion of land improvement relative to agricultural productivity (she cites the invasion of Ireland (1649) as the first act of English