New voices in the Arctic

Introduction

A little under ten years ago, The Polar Journal published a collection of papers by a new generation of early career researchers from the humanities and social sciences writing on the geopolitics of the Polar Regions.¹ This guest editor was fortunate to be among them. As a doctoral student, my contribution on Britain as an Arctic nation was one of my first single-authored journal articles. I remain grateful to Klaus Dodds and Richard Powell for providing me with a platform to begin developing my voice. Naturally, when I was asked to collate this Special Issue, I seized the opportunity to provide a similar platform for a new generation of Arctic researchers.

The sense of ‘unfolding polar drama’ that Dodds and Powell described has proceeded unabated, especially in the Arctic. Scholarly and practitioner interest in the high latitudes has if anything intensified. When Dodds and Powell put their collection together, Arctic geopolitics looked very different. An Arctic ‘hype machine’ was in overdrive regarding the prospect of an ‘armed rush’ to secure precious resources, sea lanes and territory. Despite this expected activity, many scholars and practitioners nevertheless remained sanguine about the region’s future. In retrospect, these were the heady days of ‘Arctic exceptionalism’: that is the idea, or belief, that whatever happened elsewhere in the world, circumpolar cooperation would be able to resolve the many challenges facing the region. This included concerns about sovereign rights and borders, the plight of indigenous peoples, the legacies of colonialism, the sustainability of development and the unfolding climate crisis.² Regional geopolitics was defined by the primacy of the eight Arctic states and a consensus-based approach, institutionalised in the form of the Arctic Council (what I have elsewhere termed the principle of circumpolarity³). At the point when Dodds and Powell’s issue went to press, China, Japan, India, South Korea and Singapore were yet to be welcomed as Arctic Council ‘observers’. No non-Arctic state had published a formal policy or strategy setting out an approach to regional interests.⁴ Circumpolar cooperation was even beginning to extend into military affairs, although that would prove short-lived.⁵

This mood music was very much reflected in the contributions to Dodds and Powell’s collection, six of which pertained to the Arctic. Collectively, these papers offered a more measured response to the idea that a ‘New Arctic’ was ‘opening up’, although all acknowledged that the region’s geopolitics were becoming increasingly unsettled. Indeed, most of the contributions seemed concerned one way or another with an Arctic wrestling with how to balance national, regional and extra-regional interests amid growing attention from states, business and civil society. Few anticipated that within a year, the storm clouds that were gathering over Eastern Europe would cast a shadow over the region: a shadow that has only darkened since Russia intensified its bloody assault on Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

New voices

Amid all the recent attention to inter-state rivalry in the Arctic, it is important that we recognise that there has also been a notable an expansion of Arctic scholarship over the past decade. Indeed, an emerging generation of scholars from a variety of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds have sought to broaden out our understanding of the region’s emerging place in the world, as well as what is at stake for who. The aim of this Special Issue was to again utilise the pages of this journal to create space for some of these early career researchers. Significantly, all the contributions were drafted before Russia’s full-scale of invasion of Ukraine and so this Special will perhaps now also preserve a sense of what was preoccupying upcoming Arctic researchers before that crisis struck. Only time will tell whether other sources of scholarly interest in the Arctic will be crowded-out by a revitalisation of concerns about great power politics and war.

The initial call for papers announced in March 2021 asked for ‘new voices’. This was defined primarily in terms of career stage. Over thirty expressions of interest were received from emerging Arctic researchers (primarily PhD students and post-docs, as well as a handful of MA students). However, some might query whether that is where the ‘newness’ ended. After all, over half of the submissions received came from researchers based in one of the eight Arctic states, with two, notably, from Greenland. The remainder came mostly from a handful of non-Arctic European countries with long-standing scholarly interest in the region: namely, the UK, France, Germany and Spain (all Arctic Council observer states). Newness in a geographic sense was limited to a handful of other countries including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal and Turkey. None were received from Asian-based scholars. Much of this geographic ‘newness’ was subsequently lost during the process of rigorously selecting the papers to be taken forward for this collection. What all this demonstrates is that established scholarly geographies remain very much in play: the wider academic community still looks to researchers in the Arctic states to lead inquiry into regional affairs. The newness of voices in this collection therefore speaks more to a vital replenishment of the ranks with the next generation of Arctic researchers. Ultimately, then, this Special served as an opportunity to refresh Arctic scholarship with upcoming voices, rather than to provide a radical break with what has gone before.

The expressions of interest received also provided a valuable snapshot of some of the research questions that were driving the latest generation of Arctic scholarship, at least before Russia intensified its war in Ukraine. Here, there was a mix of established and emerging ideas. Great power competition, inter-state rivalry and national strategy is evidently a theme that has continued to attract interest as NATO-Russia and US–China relations have deteriorated, and tensions have threatened to spill into the Arctic. Connected to this is the fact that several submissions addressed the prospects of enhancing science diplomacy in the region as a way of mitigating some of these challenges. This is a poignant reminder that eighteen months ago, as Russia prepared to take over the Arctic Council chairmanship, there was still a fair degree of optimism regarding continued circumpolar cooperation. Science diplomacy is of course a topic of great interest to Arctic scholars, given the critical role it played promoting circumpolar cooperation towards the end of, and after, the Cold War. Among the more novel topics being addressed, some scholars were interested in how Arctic geopolitics connects to increasing activity in outer space, while others sought to understand the geostrategic challenges and opportunities facing Greenland as it finds itself caught between the interests of Denmark, the United States and China. Such questions highlight how Arctic sites, agents, processes and spaces keep being entangled with the rest of the world in new ways – and that these entanglements continue to demand and attract scholarly attention.

Another way in which questions of ‘newness’ infuse this Special Issue concerns the theories and concepts that upcoming Arctic researchers are being drawn to. Indeed, when it comes to theoretical perspectives and conceptual framings, the contributions again seem to find inspiration from established and emerging scholarship. For instance, Sanna Kopra, Beate Steinveg and Sara Olsvig turn to more traditional IR theory to underpin their interventions, picking up the gauntlet thrown down by Sebastian Knecht and Paula Laubenstein for scholars to bring more IR to the Arctic.⁶ Ryan Dean draws on ‘securitisation theory’, a long-standing concern for Critical Security Studies. Gabriella Gricius, meanwhile, is inspired by comparatively recent (Western) interest in questions of ‘coloniality’, which also speaks to contemporary efforts to ‘decolonise’ IR.⁷ Pauline Pic’s contribution falls under the umbrella of what Dodds and Powell a decade ago termed ‘Critical Polar Geopolitics’. Pavel Devyatkin’s paper meanwhile builds on and contributes to growing scholarly interest in the role of science and scientists as brokers of peace in periods of deep tension and distrust.

Overall, this collection is tied together by the bid to create space for early career researchers to find and develop their own voices. All the papers in this collection were peer-reviewed, and the editor is immensely grateful to academic colleagues who gave up their precious time to provide invaluable feedback on the papers. A special note of thanks also goes to those colleagues who attended the virtual workshop hosted by Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in September 2021, which gave contributors the opportunity to present early drafts of their papers. All this was crucial to creating a supportive space for our early career colleagues to test their ideas. For those whom this was their first time writing an academic article, the guidance provided by the referees was especially important for helping new scholars understand the process of writing for a journal: especially the need to always have a clear research puzzle in mind, the importance of being selective about what ground to cover, and, ultimately, to recognise that writing for a journal is very different to writing a doctoral thesis. Amid all of this, of course, the contributors also had to reckon with the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, not to mention the inherent difficulties of being held hostage to fortune, as Russia’s war in Ukraine upended so much of what has long been taken for granted in the Arctic.

The contributions

The collection opens with a paper from PhD student Gabriella Gricius from Colorado State University. Her contribution examines coloniality-based narratives of wilderness in US Arctic policy. Through an investigation of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, Gricius establishes how expressions of wilderness rooted in coloniality remain intrinsic to the US’ ontological security, irrespective of who is in the White House. This, Gricius’ argues, is severely constraining the scope of US Arctic policy.

The theme of constraint is also taken-up by another PhD student, Sara Olsvig from the University of Greenland. Olsvig investigates Greenland’s ‘action space’ and the internal and external limitations imposed by Nuuk’s relationships with Denmark and the US. In doing so, she brings to light how the Greenlandic Government is continually testing and learning about the limits of its decision-making powers amid growing tensions between the West and Russia.

Beate Steinveg, who successful defended her PhD thesis in 2021 and is now an Associate Professor at Nord University, contributes to the collection by revisiting her previous research on Arctic conferences through the analytical lenses of traditional IR theory (realism and neoliberalism). Steinveg argues that although conferences have been largely neglected in IR scholarship, there is nevertheless value in examining them through established frames of the discipline. In doing so, she demonstrates how Arctic conferences have served as instruments of statecraft and drivers of innovation in state policy, whilst also enabling non-state actors to exert a greater influence on state preferences and outcomes.

Sanna Kopra, a researcher from the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland, similarly seeks to apply more traditional IR theory to the study of the Arctic, this time by turning to the English School (ES) for inspiration. In her contribution, Kopra considers what Arctic scholars can learn from parsing core concerns with governance and inter-state relations through the ES’ key concepts of ‘international system’, ‘international society’ and ‘world society. She then reflects on how more Arctic-specific concerns can contribute to a broadening of the English School’s research agenda, especially in relation to the search for a more ‘Global IR’.

Pauline Pic, a PhD candidate from Laval University, reminds us of the importance of continuing to attend to the spatial dynamics of Arctic security. Her contribution argues that questions of ‘scale’ in Arctic politics have been largely neglected up to now. In response, through an examination of the Arctic strategies of Arctic and non-Arctic actors, Pic demonstrates the scalar politics at work in how Arctic issues are framed by different actors, and the political consequences that result.

Ryan Dean, a PhD student from the University of Calgary, revisits Canadian security policy during the premiership of Stephen Harper (2006–2015) and asks why, after getting elected, the administration was so quick to drop the ‘securitizing’ rhetoric that it had been using to draw attention to the Arctic. Through this case study of the Canadian Arctic, Dean makes the case that while securitisation is a useful strategy for Opposition parties, once in office, governments gain more by avoiding such rhetoric.

In the final paper in the Special, Pavel Devyatkin, a researcher at the The Arctic Institute – Centre for Circumpolar Security Studies, draws attention to the key role that science diplomacy involving the US and Russia has played in the Arctic, both in terms of advancing knowledge and encouraging deeper circumpolar cooperation. In doing so Devyatkin’s paper also serves as a poignant reminder of what has been lost in the Arctic as a result of the complete breakdown of West–Russia relations.

Alongside the Special, I am also pleased to have the opportunity to include two other papers, which quite by happenstance also come from early career researchers. The first from Karolina Sikora, a PhD student from the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland, investigates the plight of the Izhma Komi People. Based on a combination of field research and secondary sources, Sikora examines the status of the Izhma Komi in Russian law and the extent to which this is matched on the ground. The second comes from Adrian Nae, a postdoctoral researcher from the Romanian Centre for Russian Studies of the University of Bucharest. Nae analyses the strategic narratives that are being deployed by Russian media channels, RT and Sputnik, and how these are used to ‘tell the story’ of Russia’s priorities for the Arctic.

Acknowledgments

I am immensely grateful to all those who have given up time to support the putting together of this special issue. The referees showed exceptional support by providing kind and constructive comments in a timely fashion. I am also especially grateful to Marsha Meskimmon and Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies for hosting the workshop that enabled the contributors to test their ideas. My thanks also to the distinguished panel that provided feedback to the contributors: Poppy Cullen, Klaus Dodds, Rob Huebert, Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Whitney Lackenbauer, James Rogers, Elana Wilson Rowe and Geoff Sloan. Thank you to Brendan O’Hara for the photograph used for the cover image. Lastly, my thanks to the editor-in-chief Anne-Marie Brady for guiding me through the process of putting together this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Dodds and Powell, ‘Polar geopolitics: new researchers on the polar regions’.

² Exner-Pirot, ‘Comment: – Put up or shut up with your Arctic conflict theory’; Käpylä and Mikkola, ‘On Arctic Exceptionalism’.

³ Depledge, ‘Britain and the Arctic’.

⁴ The first state to do so was the United Kingdom, in October 2013, several months after Dodds and Powell’s collection was published.

⁵ The Arctic Security Forces Roundtable was established in 2010. The Arctic Chiefs of Defence Staff Conference was convened in 2011. Both initiatives were undermined by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

⁶ Knecht and Laubenstein, ‘Is Arctic Governance Research in Crisis?’.

⁷ Capan, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’.