Geopolitics and Ice Humanities: Elemental, Metaphorical and Volumetric Reverberations

ABSTRACT

This paper develops further interrogation into ‘icy geopolitics’ and what it might tell us about how we treat substances like ice as geopolitical matter. It brings together various literatures that speak to ice as a substance and substantial matter. Second, ice is represented and experienced in a multitude of ways, from oral cultures of indigenous communities living and working in the Arctic and mountainous environments. This matters again because ice as metaphor is often complicitous with the settler colonial framing of empty, unstable and ungoverned spaces. The paper takes this icy interrogation and brings it into contact with the experiences and struggles of Arctic peoples and states alongside non-Arctic states that seek to press their interests in the midst of ongoing melting and thawing. Icy geopolitics is being reconfigured; melting is said to be ‘triggering’ further expressions of territorial colonization and resource extraction and/or commitment towards indigenous autonomy, stewardship and conservation. The territorial volume is being put to work while at the same time it is being melted, thawed, opened and closed by human and more than human forces.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Peter Adey, Franck Bille, Harriet Hawkins, Ian Klinke, Kim Peters, and Chih Yuan Woon for their supportive comments and conversations. The referees for Geopolitics were superb and thank you editor, Corey Johnston, for your support. Earlier sections and versions of this paper were presented at a University of Warwick workshop on Territory, Law and the Anthropocene in December 2017, a University of Newcastle seminar in March 2019, and a New Frontiers in Politics Geography workshop at St Johns College, Oxford in May 2019. My thanks to the participants for their feedback as well. The Leverhulme Trust kindly funded my research via a Major Research Fellowship (2017–2020). The usual disclaimers apply.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. My thanks to Stuart Elden for encouraging me to writing about icy geopolitics in 2008 for an editorial later published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

2. Sverker Sorlin has spoken about an ‘Arctic humanities’ and Michael Bravo and Gareth Rees have reflected on what they term a ‘cyropolitics’.

3. Legally speaking Antarctica, outer space and the high seas share similar principles: international management, non-appropriation of territory, equitable use and peaceful purposes.

4. I will be working on an edited collection with Professor Sverker Sorlin, which will flesh out further what a field called ice humanities might entail.

5. Ice and snow were on the proverbial frontline of Cold War techno-scientific investment and endeavour. Cold weather engineering. Specialist journals such as Journal of Cold Weather Engineering provide fascinating insights into how the science of cold has progressed from the late Cold War era to the current era.

6. Ice metrics is something that deserves further reflection from polar humanities and social science scholars.

7. National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) URL available here: https://nsidc.org/news/newsroom/arctic-sea-ice-2018-minimum-extent .

8. See the forthcoming special issue in Geopolitics on ‘subterranean geopolitics’ edited by Rachael Squire and Klaus Dodds.

9. There is clearly a wider literature here on how other ‘empty spaces’ have attracted their own disputed and disturbing monikers such as ‘dark continent’.

10. It is recognised that terms such as indigenous and aboriginal are heavily freighted with meaning and legal and political significance. This has been officially discussed in Canada and in the US among stakeholders, while being largely used without discussion in Russia, e.g. Коренные малочисленные народы Севера, Сибири и Дальнего Востока Российской Федерации/and at times “аборигены” (“Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia, and the Far East,” and “aborigines”). “Indigenous Peoples in Canada” have been engaged in promoting educational course title changes to support the use of “Indigenous,” revising books and eBooks. By recognizing First Nations, Inuit and Metis as “Indigenous Peoples,” the government is acknowledging their internationally legal right to offer or withhold consent to development under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Thank you to referee 2 for this detailed point.

11. The term ‘Cold War’ was popularised by the American journalist, Walter Lippman. Baruch’s use of ‘cold war’ was credited later to his speech writer Herbert Swope. George Orwell spoke of a ‘Cold War’ in 1945 to warn of the dangers of the Soviet Union being in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbours.

12. First published in Russian in 1954. Earlier expressions invoking a ‘thaw in the ice’ including Emily Bronte’s 1851 novel Wuthering Heights.

13. Russian cinema also provides potent examples of ice acting as a metaphorical representation of Stalinism and its demise. The 1991 film Clear Skies would be one such example where a drifting iceberg might be said to represent the departure of Stalin and Stalinism from Soviet political culture.

14. World Meteorological Organization (WMO) URL available here: http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/ccl/faq/faq_doc_en.html .

15. This observation comes from conversations with indigenous representatives across the European and North American Arctic in a variety of forums, including the annual Arctic Frontiers conference in January each year in the northern city of Tromso in Norway.

16. See also the Limes project on ‘mobile borders’ which inspired the book: http://www.italianlimes.net/project.html.

17. The Svalbard seed vault is notable for its dependence on permafrost to act as a natural freezer of the world’s plant and seed samples. In May 2017, it was reported that thawing permafrost has resulted in localised flooding of the vault. URL available at: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/19/15664298/svalbard-global-seed-vault-norway-doomsday-climate-change .

18. The Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean (2018). URL available at: https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/10/286348.htm.

19. Pikialasorsuaq Commission URL available at: http://www.pikialasorsuaq.org/en/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [Major Research Fellowship].