Relating to the Planetary Arctic: More-than-human considerations

A boat is one medium through which human practices relate to the material world, and through which matter can therefore express its agency in relation to human practices. Photo: Ilona Mettiäinen

The Arctic Institute Planetary Series 2025

• Planetary Approaches to Arctic Politics: The Arctic Institute’s Planetary Series 2025
• Relating to the Planetary Arctic: More-than-human considerations

In both academic and public discussion there is a tendency to resort to a chronological, often Euro-and human-centric narrative through which the political history of the Arctic region is told. At least the following consecutive “epochs” are usually identified in the narrative: the age of exploration; the era of geopolitical rivalry during the Cold War; the rise of multilateral cooperation since the turn of the 1990s; the period of growing economic and geopolitical interest in the region due to climate change in the 2000s; the subsequent emergence of the “Global Arctic” in the 2010s; and the return of “hard” security and geopolitics in the 2020s. While these epochs identified in the narrative illustratively tie the history of the Arctic region as a geographical entity together with the social practices that have been prevalent within—and therefore constructing a commonly held understanding of—the region at a specific point in time, in this short commentary I discuss the notion of the Planetary Arctic as a way to go beyond the social realm and human-centrism into the world of socio-material relationality as a basis for understanding Arctic politics. Indeed, I suggest that the Planetary Arctic can act as a conceptual vantage point from which to disclose the socio-material embeddedness of different ways to frame and enact— or do—the Arctic region.

First, some intellectual background. The notion of socio-material relationality is perhaps the key issue foregrounded by thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Karen Barad, who have advocated posthuman, post-anthropocentric, and more-than-human philosophies during the past decades. From the many contributions that this line of thinking has had for academic research, perhaps the most important one is its critical stance on the division between humans and nature—the social and the material. By re-casting the notion of agency to include not only humans but also non-humans, and by approaching agency as a phenomenon distributed between different human and non-human “actors”, the notion of socio-material relationality helps to foreground that what we do is always materially embedded. In other words, we, as humans, do not act upon a passive “nature” but the materiality of that which exceeds and includes us (and, is indeed included within us) is always implicated in that agency in the first place. How does this, then, translate into the notion of the Planetary Arctic?

The notion of the Planetary Arctic, as I wish to define it here, is predicated on an ontological position (i.e. the position one adopts on the “nature” of reality), that the Arctic is not a pre-defined region “out there” in which things happen. Rather, the Arctic, that is, what we understand the Arctic to be, is always incorporated in the things we do “out there” in the physical world. In other words, the Arctic is coextensive with the practices that enact it. This means that the practices that have enacted and enact the Arctic as a region of exploration, geopolitical rivalry, multilateral cooperation, and as a “changing” or “global” region are all materially embedded, and there are distinctive geographies to the different practices that are not constrained by any pre-set regional boundaries. Importantly, it is through the materiality of the practices through which the Arctic region is done that matter itself expresses its vibrancy. To get this point, one only needs to consider how, for example, ice can—through its movement, melting, or relative fixity—impede or make possible the practices of scientific exploration, natural resource extraction, and military operations that all enact the Arctic region in distinct ways. Through this point of view, the notion of socio-material relationality directs the attention toward different(ly) situated micro-contexts in and through which the Arctic is done, and through which human practices relate to the “more-than-human” world.

Concurrently, while foregrounding these micro-contexts, the notion of socio-material relationality also suggests that it is through these contexts, and the relations that form them, that our practices (such as Arctic extractivism) become connected to planetary processes like climate change or global capitalism. This implies that it is futile to make scalar distinctions between macro and micro processes, or the global and the local, since, in practice, macro/global is always constituted through micro/local. From this perspective the Planetary Arctic therefore offers a unique vantage point to the political history and present of the Arctic: the political history of the Arctic is a history of the practices through which different ways of understanding/knowing the region become enmeshed in various constellations of socio-material relations that are parts of, and therefore constitute, planetary phenomena and processes. This underlines that if we are to focus on Arctic politics from a more-than-human perspective and attempt to steer clear of adopting the Arctic region as a ready-made “geographical context” in which we analyse such Arctic politics, the interface between Arctic knowledge and practices from a material-relational perspective offers a fruitful starting point. Concurrently, by adopting this position, various Arctic practitioners from scientists to policymakers, military strategists, investors, and entrepreneurs can start to consider how their practices become articulated as constitutive parts of the ever-evolving Planetary Arctic.

Vesa Väätänen is an Academy Research Fellow at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland.