The growing importance of the Arctic in international affairs is evident also in the massive proliferation of academic and popular literature on northern governance and politics these days. Readers of Polar Record's book review section will be well aware of that. Almost all major publishers (and many more minor ones) with international distribution and readership have over the past few years published monographs or edited volumes on the consequences of Arctic transitions for diplomatic and societal relations in the region and beyond. This trend should be welcomed for the Arctic as an object of study and for polar research as a discipline. At the same time, the plurality and higher frequency of contemporary publications might overstrain both the ordinary and the advanced reader and calls for a lighthouse to provide orientation and guidance in stormy Arctic waters. No less than that is what International relations and the Arctic: understanding policy and governance edited by Robert W. Murray and Anita Dey Nuttall is.
This is a fantastic and elaborate collection of essays to think about sovereignty, security and stability in Arctic affairs and the way forward for regional governance. Sovereignty is as much about security as it is about the effective handling of pressing policy problems. So no doubt, this book is right on time. To approach these topics, the book follows a tripartite structure beginning with a theoretical discussion of the concept of sovereignty in Part I, then moves on to investigate the eight Arctic state policies and strategies in Part II, and finally extends the book's analytical scope towards actors and institutions below and beyond the Arctic state in Part III. The volume's length of more than 700 pages and 20 essays is indicative of the time and attention to various local, national and international perspectives, interests and interpretations that is required to better understand what sovereignty is all about in a globalised Arctic. The good news about the present volume is that it does not simply treat the region as just another case for the application and replication of paradigmatic international relations (IR) theories. Rather, the book shall ‘throw light on how the Arctic as an area of study contributes to the development of the IR discipline’ (page 3–4). The contributors have done a great job doing so and their efforts will be of great interest to both the Arctic studies community and IR scholars more generally.
The editors have ceded most chapters in Part I to IR scholars rather than Arctic experts. This turns out to be a reasoned decision. The concept of Arctic sovereignty is explored from the angles of realist, neoliberal institutionalist and English School IR theory in the first three chapters with a strong focus on relevant concepts and assumptions. True, this comes here and there at the expense of debates of Arctic histories and politics, but the authors manage to pull the Arctic out of its long peripheral position in world politics and push it into the mainstreams of IR research. The fourth chapter of Part I differs from the other three in that it outlines a theory of post-sovereign/transnational politics in the Arctic; a valuable and provocative, albeit normatively inspired intervention in current debates of Arctic sovereignty and one that is reflected in later chapters discussing particularly indigenous peoples’ rights and participation in Arctic governance.
Given that the book seeks to overcome the territorial connectivity of the concept of sovereignty in IR, readers might be surprised to see all chapters in Part II of the book dedicated to the eight Arctic Council member states’ policies and strategies under the subheading ‘Arctic sovereignty in practice’. Yet, to start from more conventional discussions of Arctic politics to which these states are undoubtedly central is justifiable for analytical reasons. The book would still have benefitted from including a more cautious and contextualized discussion of what sovereignty as understood here really means ‘in practice’ though. One should be reminded that this section's definition of Arctic sovereignty as contained by nation-states in the region is necessarily as varied as the definitions of the Arctic itself. Understandably a consequence of the IR perspective the book adheres to, this conception is deeply rooted in a historical-institutionalist interpretation of who belongs to the Arctic and who does not. As one of the authors notes, the establishment of the Arctic Council in 1996 ‘changed the more traditional conception of the Arctic as related to five states – the littoral countries – into an eight-state body that included Sweden, Finland, and Iceland’ (page 292). Yet, these states, often called sub-Arctic, have little in common with the five littoral states when it comes to sovereignty issues as manifest in overlapping territorial claims in the Arctic Basin, offshore resource development, border control, monitoring, patrolling and surveillance, and so on.
Advanced readers might further object that discussions of the national policy and strategy documents of the eight Arctic states have already been discussed at length elsewhere. They will be surprised by the enormous reflectivity and substantial (re-) interpretation many of the chapters provide of why the north matters for Arctic states’ sovereignty and security considerations in regional and global contexts. For all others not yet too familiar with Arctic politics, here is the state of the art of what you should know about the eight Arctic states’ ambitions and concerns in the region.
Finally, Part III of the book zooms out to address instances of ‘Shared sovereignty and global security interests’ with regard to the Arctic region. This is a necessary advancement of the concept of Arctic sovereignty and governance as examined in Parts I and II in the light of the well-documented surge of international interest across a wide array of state and non-state actors in recent years. The ways the roles and interests of indigenous groups, non-Arctic states from across Asia (China, Japan, South Korea and India) and Europe (the United Kingdom), and the European Union interfere with traditional notions of state sovereignty are well covered here. These chapters are further embedded in discussions of how involvement of these actors has serious repercussions on the complex governance regime in place for the Arctic and how international law and institutional settings like the Arctic Council and the United Nations system co-evolve and adapt. Reading these chapters is highly recommended. If one was to look for drawbacks of this third section at all, it would have been good to re-connect this part to the theory chapters of Part I and to make explicit the theoretical contribution that this book has to offer.
All things considered, this book will be of great value to researchers of Arctic studies and international relations. Each chapter is easily accessible to get a thorough assessment of the respective topic. Together, this is a rewarding compendium about sovereignty and international relations in the Arctic. Good to have this book close at hand.
