This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111.5).
The modern state system is founded on an idealized distinction between land and water: land is conceived as solid, controllable, and developable, whereas water is conceived as fundamentally external to society. While such a territorial imaginary has never perfectly reflected human societies' relationships to the physical world, it is particularly inappropriate for the Arctic, where the division between land and water is complicated by the presence of ice, which in the context of global climate change is increasingly temporally and spatially dynamic. Thus, as actors from outside the region further increase their presence in the Arctic and seek to incorporate it within the state system, they are faced with a dilemma: How can this space, which challenges the idealized distinction between land and water, be incorporated into the state system or, conversely, how must this system adapt in order to incorporate the complex and evolving environment of the Arctic as well as the lifeways of its residents?
In this research project Drs Philip Steinberg from Florida State University, Hannes Gerhardt from University of West Georgia and Jeremy Tasch from Towson University ask: (1) What role do explicit and assumed imaginaries of a place's elemental nature, its geophysical properties, and its geographic location, play within the broader cultural imaginaries of the Arctic? (2) How do territorial imaginaries of the Arctic intersect with state and non-state actors' proposals for exercising (or not exercising) sovereignty in the region? (3) Do territorial imaginaries of the Arctic point to a transformation of sovereignty in the region, and what impact might this have on the potential for regional cooperation? These questions will be examined through a collaborative, multi-sited study in five Arctic nations -- Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the United States -- in which the researchers will analyze data from a variety of sources including extant texts such as policy documents, reports, and news stories, as well as directed but open-ended interviews with individuals involved in Arctic policy debates.
As a region whose incorporation within the state system is generally weak and uneven, escalations of small-scale conflicts are likely to occur as climate change leads to potential increased economic and political opportunities in the Arctic region. In this context, this research will improve understanding of the political challenges posed by global environmental change in the Arctic and elsewhere and suggest new ways for peaceful accommodation between the state system and the peoples and environments that presently lie on its margins.
