New voices in the Arctic

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. 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. 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 circumpolarity). 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. Circumpolar cooperation was even beginning to extend into military affairs, although that would prove short-lived.