Arctic Geopolitics, Media and Power

Annika Nilsson E., Miyase Christensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367189822
• eBook ISBN: 9780429576461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Arctic Geopolitics, Media and Power provides a fresh way of looking at the potential and limitations of regional international governance in the Arctic region.

Far-reaching impacts of climate change, its wealth of resources and potential for new commercial activities have placed the Arctic region into the political limelight. In an era of rapid environmental change, the Arctic provides a complex and challenging case of geopolitical interplay. Based on analyses of how actors from within and outside the Arctic region assert their interests and how such discourses travel in the media, this book scrutinizes the social and material contexts within which new imaginaries, spatial constructs and scalar preferences emerge. It places ground-breaking attention to shifting media landscapes as a critical component of the social, environmental and technological change. It also reflects on the fundamental dilemmas inherent in democratic decision making at a time when an urgent need for addressing climate change is challenged by conflicting interests and growing geopolitical tensions.

This book will be of great interest to geography academics, media and communication studies and students focusing on policy, climate change and geopolitics, as well as policy-makers and NGOs working within the environmental sector or with the Arctic region.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9780367189822 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 The regional? Mediation, scale and power

We see Earth from space in a projection that highlights the northern polar region and where water rather than sea ice dominates. At times, potential or real shipping lanes are superimposed onto the image. At other times, the image depicts the latest claims to mineral rights under the continental shelf that might become accessible once the ice recedes even further and new offshore technologies have been developed. Other images focus on military capacity, in a region with a three-decade record of peaceful international cooperation but an even longer history as a heavily militarized meeting point between east and west.

At first shocking in their stark new reality, such images have quickly become the new ‘normal’. These images appear in the major news media outlets, as part of expert reports, and in scientific presentations. The future of the Arctic region (see Figure 1.1) is also discussed in a plethora of forums where interested parties from around the world gather to claim their right to co-shape this vast space. Meanwhile, the approximately four million people living in the region are starting to make their own voices heard. Such interventions come from indigenous peoples who assert their rights to land, resources and knowledge, as well as their cultural identities in all their complexities. This is visible in explicit messaging through the media, particularly regional outlets, and at political forums, such as the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and through popular communication channels, such as film and music. The award-winning movie Sami Blood is one such example. The many expressions of Saami joik and joik-inspired music also reach a broad range of listeners in the mainstream media. Meanwhile, local elected politicians are creating new links across national borders, asserting their special role in the delivery of essential public services and ensuring that their communities are resilient and sustainable in the long term (Declaration of Arctic Mayors, 2017; Kristoffersen, 2017).

Over the past decade, the images and narratives that circulate through traditional news outlets have been accompanied by web-based specialist news services providing daily updates about the circumpolar north that reach readers both within and far beyond the Arctic. As fibre optic connections improve, social media are becoming more prominent in spreading individual local stories across the region and to an audience that might have had no previous connection with the Arctic. The reach of such messaging—once aimed at highly specialized audiences or meant only for local communication—is not unique to the Arctic but rather an illustration of a global development in which the local can instantly become global and where no part of the world can escape the influence of global environmental and social change. Environmental scientists have in recent decades emphasized that we live in a new geological era in which human activities have a major influence on planet Earth as a system. Thus, in only a few decades, Earth system science has moved from an emphasis on the Earth as a self-regulating system with only a limited role played by human agency, captured in the Gaia metaphor (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974), to one denoted by the term Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). This shift in the biophysical dynamics of planet Earth is accompanied by equally fundamental social and technological changes, commonly known by the paradigmatic rubric of globalization.

Figure 1.1 Map of the Arctic. There is no single definition of the Arctic region. Scientific definitions tend to emphasize climatic conditions or vegetation zones, whereas politically guided processes, such as the Arctic Council working groups, have used varying delimitation for deciding the southern boundary for information to be included in the assessments. Descriptive synonyms for the Arctic include the northern polar region, the circumpolar north or simply the north. In this book we use these terms interchangeably but treat only the Arctic as a proper noun for naming the region. In addition to these circumpolar references, some countries have their own names for designating their northernmost regions. These include the Norwegian designation of the ‘High North’, the Russian ‘Far North’ and the ‘Arctic Zone’ as well as the ‘Far North’ as a designation for Canada north of the Arctic Circle. Map prepared by Hugo Ahlenius, Nordpil.

Starting in the 1980s, social theory accounts of globalization have emphasized the compression of time and space through digital mediation and the dialectics of space, where the local can no longer be conceived without bringing in the global, and vice versa. Moreover, the discursive scopes of the national and the local had become too narrow to accommodate the political, economic and cultural transformations that were becoming visible. Beneath globalization were multilayered material and symbolic denationalization processes, from financial markets to economic and cultural exchanges of goods to political decision making, as well as an expansion in the technological environment through digital networks changing the media ecology. The earliest accounts of globalization in particular highlighted dynamics associated with deterritorialization as both drivers of change and the consequences of intense mediation and connectivity. Such intense spatialization through a hyper-connected media and politico-cultural environment and its societal implications are addressed in both celebratory accounts of globalization and critical research (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Garnham, 1990; Mattelart, 1994; Mcchesney, 2000; Mosco, 1996; Murdock, 1993; Schiller, 1991). Hafez (2007), for one, notes the mythic role of the globalization paradigm and the way it ‘discursively obfuscates . . . the local, national, and regional’ (Christensen, 2013b: 2401). As David Morley (2014: 42) puts it: ‘In some versions of the story of globalization, we are offered what I would characterize as an abstracted sociology of the postmodern, inhabited by an un-interrogated “we”, who “nowadays” live in an undifferentiated global world’.

Spatial imaginations based on abstracted notions of globalization thus subsumed the particularities of locales and regions. They also failed to account for the dialectics of ‘global spatiality’, which oscillate between phases of deterritorialization and reterritorialization—the challenging of existing borders and how they limit economic, socio-cultural and political activities followed by the establishment of new borders as a result of such activities. Such dynamics bring about consolidated structures of spatiality as well as regulatory regimes that use these structures for the purposes of dominance and integration.

Specifically in the Arctic context, because relatively few people live in the region, economic globalization is often framed as a strong driver of change (Andrew, 2014). A prominent example is the growing influence of large transnational companies in resource industries, such as the forestry, mining and oil and gas sectors (Keskitalo and Southscott, 2014). Globalization has thus become a key issue in analyses of the vulnerability of Arctic communities (e.g. Keskitalo, 2008) and in relation to adaptation (e.g. AMAP, 2017). However, globalization has also been discussed as an opportunity to break with old trajectories of national colonization, where local actors can jump scales directly to global economic and political contexts (Keskitalo and Southscott, 2014).

This book seeks to highlight how the region’s growing connections to global economic and political systems combine with the shifts in the global communication landscape in ways that have engendered a new discursive and material terrain for debating the future of the region. The shift goes beyond new Arctic actors and the oscillating power relations within the region and among the global players that have been highlighted in the recent literature (e.g. Keil and Knecht, 2017; Paglia, 2016; Raspotnik, 2018; Dodds and Nuttall, 2016). While Arctic change is often narrated as a consequence of the physical impacts of climate change, such a narrative is too simplistic. Climate change, as such, is more than just a physical force affecting the region. It also comprises complex social and technological dimensions that affect both its causes, such as emissions of greenhouse gases, and its effects, where impacts and adaptation are nested within local contexts with economic, political and cultural dimensions (Nilsson et al., 2017). As is the case elsewhere in the world, climate change in the Arctic is closely intertwined with globalization in all its aspects. These include both international news and digitalized connectivity, as well as their implications for the discursive shaping of space. At the heart of the Arctic are intertwining narratives about its future(s) and relations between the global, the national, the regional and the local, not least in relation to responsibility for climate change (e.g. Dale and Kristoffersen, 2018).

Amid this complexity, simple images are attractive. They get our attention, especially when they allude to something we recognize. Media images of the Arctic are no different, and part of their power comes from how easily we can relate them to old colonial narratives about the region (Bravo and Sörlin, 2002). Examples include headlines about ‘a race for resources’, images related to national sovereignty and identity, and the renewed emphasis on the risk of military conflict. These and other images are also power tools, as they make it more difficult to see other perspectives. They create a frame within which we understand the region and act as an effective filter of new information, which is absorbed or ignored depending on how well it fits our preconceived notions. Media frames become especially important in discussing the future of a region that few people have first-hand experience of or deep knowledge about. At the same time, the dynamics of change themselves make it timely for many actors to position themselves in relation to what the future might bring and how they would like to either be a part of it or absolve themselves of responsibility.

Why does all this matter? A short answer would be that images and narratives have generative power in influencing the positionalities of various actors and their claims to a legitimate right to make decisions about the region’s future. The longer answer is elaborated throughout the chapters of this book and based on the notion that the Arctic of today illustrates dynamic shifts that are global in scale. We need to understand the scope of such shifts—beyond the effects of a warmer climate and beyond Internet connectivity or economic globalization—if we wish to develop political solutions that enhance human well-being rather than adding to social tensions and human insecurity. Understanding the context in which visions of the future are shaped becomes even more urgent given the call in the 2018 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for immediate and drastic measures to cut emissions of greenhouse gases (IPCC, 2018). Transitioning to a post-petroleum world will add yet another dimension to both global and Arctic change.

Changes in the physical geography of the Arctic play into geopolitics, in both the classical and the constructivist sense. For some Arctic states and especially those with coasts facing the Arctic Ocean—Russia, Canada, the United States, Greenland (and by extension Denmark), Norway and Iceland—the extent to which the ice recedes has consequences for industrial activities, commercial shipping and tourism, with further implications for governance. Longer periods of an ice-free Arctic also make the Arctic attractive to global players, such as China and the European Union (EU), and big corporations. The EU’s interests exemplify the complex connections between changes in geography, policy choices, and its role of representing its members’ and affiliated countries’ interests as well as those of the corporate players with which the EU is linked in economic terms.

While recognizing the importance of how states fashion their international relations and foreign policy based on their geographic positioning (i.e. classical geopolitics), this book adopts a critical understanding—or critical geopolitics—that challenges the assumption that ‘the state’ and other geographical constructions are fixed entities (Dodds et al., 2013; Burkart and Christensen, 2013). We thus also turn our attention to how media and mediation influence the rapidly changing, and at times fluid, role of other actors such as NGOs, commercial interests and local communities. Moreover, we suggest that a ‘geoeconomic’ emphasis in geopolitics is essential in an era where economic activity can be both the reason for, and a means of, contestation and conflict in the Arctic. Increased maritime traffic can be framed in relation to potential risk for accidents or oil spills, and the need for cooperation and governance that follows, but Arctic voyages can also be understood as manifestations of capacity and power to operate in challenging polar environments.

Frames and narratives

The generative power of images and narratives lies in how they place specific information within overarching discourses and frames that can serve different interests. A focus on the context in which an event or a piece of information is placed rather than the details of the text reveals the frames that situate a specific story within a societal discourse (Nisbet, 2009; Nisbet et al., 2003). As the literature on frame theory elaborates (for reviews, see Christensen and Wormbs, 2017; Pincus and Ali, 2016), frames can be described as a cognitive mechanism that people use to grasp the most relevant information in the vast amounts of sensory input they are exposed to. They help us make sense of new information because they link it to our earlier understandings but also exclude or reinterpret information that does not comfortably fit our priorities, and thereby also set the boundaries for what becomes visible and audible. In political discourse, frames make certain debates legitimate and natural, while other ways of describing something can appear odd or out of place. The process of framing and reframing is a key aspect of policy-shaping processes as the reframing of an issue can make it more urgent or relevant for a larger group of people. For the Arctic, media and connectivity that facilitates mediation play central roles in public understanding of the region and thus in shaping narratives that can have geopolitical implications.

Mediation takes place in a range of contexts, such as the articulation of national Arctic policies, texts and images in popular culture, museum exhibits and new media, and the role of such expressions in public life and politics has come into increasing focus in studies of the critical geopolitics of the Arctic (e.g. Dittmer et al., 2011; Dittmer and Dodds, 2013; Steinberg et al., 2015; Wegge and Keil, 2018). Secondary information about the region is likely to play a prominent role in how the Arctic is framed, as relatively few people have any first-hand knowledge of the region. News media play a particular role as they have the potential to reach large audiences, either directly or indirectly, through narrowcasting and spillover to social media.

Before the late 1990s, the Arctic did not figure prominently in the mainstream media. Over the past two decades, however, various media have been paying more attention to the region, not least due to the impacts of climate change. While most studies of media discourses focus on recent years and s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 The Regional? Mediation, Scale and Power
• 2 Media Narratives–Media Cartographies
• 3 A Circumpolar Narrative Takes Shape
• 4 Reconstruction and Consolidation
• 5 A Post-Petroleum Region?
• 6 Arctic Geopolitics in Times of Transformation
• Index