Berkner Land War (Great White South)

The Berkner Land War was an irregular armed conflict between settlers from Argentina, Chile, British Antarctica and Russian Antarctica over control of the Berkner Bay region (now ). The War was never "official", as none of these countries made formal Declarations of War, and little of the fighting was done by the Regular Military.

Background
In the 1870s, Berkner was a sparsely inhabited wilderness, with overlapping claims by the British and Russian Empires. Neither country was particularly invested in the region, no borders were drawn up, and there was no attempt to officially divide the region - though both sides expected that the situation would be handled when the area became more populated.

The Russian presence in the region consisted of several small log-cabin villages, which were almost all on the mainland, close to the rest of. At best, the government of this colony had little power, and in a frontier region such as Berkner, the Russian colonists lived in effective anarchy, with village mayors being the only real authority.

Meanwhile, the British settlers lived in small fishing villages, similar to those in New England and Atlantic Canada; and they had control of most of the region's islands. , a British explorer, had discovered the region a decade earlier; and his had become the de facto "Governors" of the region (though the Governor of  officially held this position), and they were seen as the local government. The, which operated fishing, shipping and transportation, almost completely dominated the economy of the British settlements; and its owners, the , were another authority in the region.

There were some tensions between the local settlers of each Nation, and this occasionally led to skirmishes between them, but these were rare and usually very minor.

It was two decades later that settlers from and  entered the region, which was still empty enough that they had a good chance of claiming it for their own Nations.