Geopolitics of the Arctic and IR Scholarship

Abstract

The Arctic region was for a long time considered to be of marginal importance for international relations (IR) research due to what is framed as “Arctic exceptionalism”. Because of the region’s special ecology and placid political relationships, the High North was generally seen as detached from global political dynamics and hence uncompelling or unsuitable for IR theory and analysis. With few analytical tools at hand, many studies in Arctic political science have remained overly descriptive and a-theoretical. It is only since the “new age of the Arctic” has received wider academic and political attention that the region has become more and more attractive as a testing site for the application of traditional concepts and theories from across the field of IR research.