| Summary: | The chapter explores how in the Cold War period large terrestrial and extraterrestrial regions came into focus as sites of strategic importance, areas of expansion or valuable resources: the deep sea, the polar regions and outer space. While the modern world since the 19th century had been subjected to extensive processes of imperial expansion and territorialization, these regions had escaped sovereign rule; they entered international debate when technology made national claims viable. The chapter studies political ambitions to set up new political and legal regimes of access. It discusses the contested concept of global commons and its legal equivalent, the Common Heritage of Mankind principle, and argues that seemingly opposing concepts of territorialization and communalization were closely related. The commons-regimes of the 1970s, so the suggestion, need to be reinterpreted as a double-edged sword, which failed to introduce a feasible common-based regime and did not overcome but reinforced the earth's spatial organization in terms of territory and sovereignty. QC 20141017 Assessing Arctic Futures: Voices, Resources, Governance
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