Klaus Dodds is Executive Dean and Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London. He is author of Border Wars (Penguin 2022) and an earlier co-authored book The Scramble of the Poles (Polity 2016).
Now that a deal has been struck with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, the government’s focus should be on the UK’s southernmost overseas territories. There are three of them: the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) and the British Antarctic Territory (BAT). As increasingly tense geopolitics make the world more hostile,
There is an ‘icebreaker gap’ between Russia and the United States. For decades, the Soviet Union and now Russia have recognised that icebreakers not only allowe their remote northern settlements to be resupplied by sea but also ensured that the waters north of this vast country were navigable. Moscow can boast that it has a fleet
In the years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the west has been forced to tackle the question of national defence with a renewed sense of urgency. As Cold War strategic planners appreciated in the last century, hostile forces can approach not just from underwater, land, sea and air, but also through space. On 9 August
Russia’s reported discovery of 510 billion barrels of oil in Antarctica has led to warnings of a new ‘Cold War’ of sorts. ‘Russia could rip up a decades-old treaty and claim oil-rich Antarctic land,’ Yahoo News told its readers. The Daily Telegraph said ‘Russia (has) sparked fears of an oil grab in British Antarctic territory’.
