From Sovereignty to the Web of Life: Environmental Restorative Justice and Peacebuilding in the Antarctic Commons

Felicity Tepper, Australian National University (Australia)

Having maintained geopolitical peace for over six decades, the state-centric Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) is experiencing a security transition. While the ATS has prevented military conflict, rising tensions over marine protected areas, illegal fishing enforcement, tourism regulation and climate-driven resource access are straining consensus-based governance and creating conditions for escalation between treaty parties and non-state actors, exposing limitations of existing mechanisms designed for a different era. Environmental peacebuilding recognises such conflicts as relational and structural, rooted in governance gaps, unequal harm distribution and competing claims over shared ecological systems. I argue that multispecies informed environmental restorative justice (ERJ) offers a conflict prevention and transformation framework for relationally building Antarctic peace and cooperative security by addressing what Morizot (2022) identifies as the ecological crisis's blind-spot: ruptured relationships between humans and Earth kin. As great power competition intensifies in a multipolar world, developing conflict-transformative governance models for Antarctica has implications beyond the continent, offering pathways for an extended understanding of cooperative environmental security in contested global commons. By centring harm, accountability, dialogue and repair, ERJ provides alternative pathways to address grievances as relational failures rather than technical problems requiring top-down management, thereby creating inclusive pathways to prevent escalation into diplomatic or physical confrontation. I explore three friction points with security implications: legacy contamination disputes between treaty parties, human–wildlife conflicts as tourism expands, and IUU fishing undermining resource governance. Drawing on restorative processes and First Nations relational ethics (Country, kaitiakitanga), I demonstrate how ERJ can transform the Antarctic Commons from frozen geopolitical tensions into a model for cooperative environmental security – a web of reciprocal responsibility. If ERJ is essential anywhere, it is in a land dedicated to ‘peace and science’. Keywords: Antarctica; Madrid Protocol review 2048; multispecies; environmental restorative justice; environmental peacebuilding; international environmental law Key references: Brady, Anne-Marie. China as a Polar Great Power. Cambridge UP, 2017 Celermajer, Danielle, et al. "Multispecies justice: theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics." Environmental Politics 30(1-2) (2021): 119-140 Dodds, K. & Hemmings, A.D. (2015). "Frontier vigilantism? Australia and contemporary maritime challenges in the Southern Ocean." The Polar Journal 5(2): 320-33 Forsyth, M., et al. "A future agenda for environmental restorative justice?" The International Journal of Restorative Justice 4(1) (2021): 17-40 Ide, Tobias, et al. "The past and future(s) of environmental peacebuilding." International Affairs 97(1) (2021): 1-16 Morizot, B. Ways of Being Alive. Polity Press, 2022 Schlosberg, David. "Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse." Environmental Politics 22(1) (2013): 37-55 Whyte, K.P. (2018). "Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestry and alliance as critical tools for environmental justice." Environment and Planning E 1(1-2): 224-242.