do so would risk a debilitating demonstration of weakness and a loss of credibility regarding the capacity of the council to operate effectively in other areas. Nevertheless, the Arctic Council, with its Working Groups taking responsibility for major initiatives, may well be the right body to address the sorts of issues identified in the preceding paragraph. This suggests that it is time for a reset regarding Arctic governance, directing the efforts of the Arctic Council toward issues that it is in a position to tackle effectively and turning to other bodies to address issues in which coming to terms with the linkages between the Arctic and the global system constitutes a critical feature of any effort to make progress.32
This may seem disappointing to some, especially to believers in the idea that the Arctic can be set aside as a zone of peace and that mechanisms like the Arctic Council may even be able to play a role in fostering cooperative activities designed to defuse conflicts occurring in other regions. But the best advice at this juncture may be to think about disaggregating the Arctic agenda, steering individual issues toward those policy arenas most likely to have the capacity to address them effectively. The alternative is to risk an outcome in which the very real achievements of the last 30 years dissolve into a free-for-all in which there is little hope of arriving at constructive results regarding any Arctic issues. Interestingly, developments along these lines may lead to a situation featuring the deployment of distinctive policy narratives in different settings, with the Arctic zone of peace narrative providing a framework for efforts to address a range of Arctic-specific issues in settings like the Arctic Council and one or more of the other narratives offering ways to organize thinking about links between the Arctic and the overarching global order.
Notes
1 1. The following account draws on my own experience as a close observer of and, in some cases, an active participant in Arctic affairs starting in the 1970s. During the 1980s, I developed the concept of “the age of the Arctic” and became active in a group promoting the idea of the Arctic as a distinctive region with a policy agenda of its own. As a participant, I have served as co-chair of the Working Group on Arctic International Relations, vice-president of the International Arctic Science Committee, chair of the Board of Governors of the University of the Arctic, co-chair of the Report Steering Committee of the Arctic Human Development Report, and chair of the Steering Committee of the Arctic Governance Project. A more thorough treatment of the topics I cover in this chapter might make use of content analysis of official documents, interviews with participants, a review of the secondary literature, and other related methods.
2 2. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Speech in Murmansk on the Occasion of the Presentation of the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star to the City of Murmansk, 1 October 1987,” https://www.barentsinfo.fi/docs/gorbachev_speech.pdf.
3 3. Oran R. Young, “Is It Time for a Reset in Arctic Governance?” Sustainability 11 (2019), 4497, doi:10.3390/su11164497.
4 4. Ibid.
5 5. Ilulissat Declaration, “Declaration of the Arctic Ocean Governance Conference adopted on May 28, 2008, https://cil.nus.sg/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2008-Ilulissat-Declaration.pdf.
6 6. Oran R. Young, “Constructing the ‘New’ Arctic: The Future of the Circumpolar North in a Changing Global Order,” Outlines of Global Transformation 12 (2019), pp. 6–24.
7 7. John English, Ice and Water: Politics, Peoples, and the Arctic Council (Toronto: Allen Lane, 2013).
8 8. Oran R. Young, Creating Regimes: Arctic Accords and International Governance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
9 9. Rovaniemi Declaration, “Declaration on the Protection of the Arctic Environment adopted on 14 June 1991,” https://arcticcircle.uconn.edu.NatResources/Policy/rovaniemi.html.
10 10. David P. Stone, The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
11 11. Ottawa Declaration, “Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council adopted on 19 September 1996,” http://hdi/handle.net/11374/85/.
12 12. Douglas Nord, The Arctic Council: Governance within the Far North (London: Routledge, 2016); Malgorzata Smieszek, “Informal International Regimes: A Case Study of the Arctic Council,” PhD Dissertation, University of Lapland, 2019.
13 13. Alun Anderson, After the Ice: Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2009).
14 14. Robert W. Corell et al., eds, The Arctic in World Affairs: A North Pacific Dialogue on Global-Arctic Interactions (Busan and Honolulu: KMI and EWC, 2019).
15 15. AMAP, “Arctic Climate Change Update 2019,” (Tromsø, Norway: Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme of the Arctic Council, 2019); NOAA, NOAA Arctic Report Card 2019, https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2019/ArtMID/7916/ArticleID/837/About-Arctic-Report-Card-2019.
16 16. Mark C. Serreze, Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
17 17. Robert W. Corell, “The Arctic: Tomorrow’s Changes … Today!” paper to be published in Paul Wassmann, ed., Whither the Arctic Ocean (forthcoming).
18 18. Tatiana Mitrova, “Arctic Resource Development: Economics and Politics,” in Corell et al., op. cit., pp. 205–24.
19 19. Jian Yang and Henry Tillman, “Perspective from China’s International Cooperation in the Framework of the Polar Silk Road,” in Corell et al., op. cit., pp. 275–92.
20 20. Mark Nuttall, “Greenland Matters in the Crosscurrents of Arctic Change,” in Corell et al., op. cit., pp. 89–107.
21 21. Rebecca Pincus, “Three-Way Power Dynamics in the Arctic,” Strategic Studies Quarterly 14, 1 (2020), pp. 40–63.
22 22. Michael R. Pompeo, “Looking North: Sharpening America’s Arctic Focus,” speech delivered in Rovaniemi, Finland on May 6, 2019. URL: https://www.state.gob/looking-north-sharpening-americas-arctic-focus/.
23 23. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
24 24. Atossa Araxia Anrahamian, “How the Global Battle for the Arctic became the new Cold War,” New Statesman, August 29, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2019/08/how-global-battle-arctic-became-new-cold-war; “Northern fights: America and Britain play cold-war games with Russia in the Arctic,” The Economist, May 10, 2020, https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/05/10/america-and-britain-play-cold-wargames-with-russia-in-the-arctic.
25 25. Rob Huebert, “A new Cold War in the Arctic?! The old one never ended!” in Arctic Yearbook 2019, https://arcticyearbook.com/arctic-yearbook/2019/2019-commentaries/325-a-new-cold-war-in-the-arctic-the-old-one-never-ended.
26 26. Michael Klare, “World War III’s newest battlefield,” February 16, 2020, distributed via the arctic-nuclear-weapon-free google group.
27 27. Congressional Research Service, “Changes in the Arctic: Background and Issues for Congress,” updated May 22, 2020. URL: https://crsreports.congress.gov. R41153.
28 28. Tom Barry et al., “The Arctic Council: An Agent of Change?” forthcoming in Global Environmental Change.
29 29. Arctic Council, “Vision for the Arctic Adopted at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden on 15 May 2013,” http://hdl.handle.new/11374/287.
30 30. Corell et al., op. cit.
31 31.
