Planetary Approaches to Arctic Politics: The Arctic Institute's Planetary Series 2025
The eroding coastline of a permafrost covered Nunivak Island on the Bering Sea. Photo: Juho Karhu
The Arctic Institute Planetary Series 2025
We live in the age of polycrisis (or permacrisis), characterised by the combination of long-term, complex and intertwined risks related, inter alia, to health, energy, climate change and economic shocks. It has become evident that new imaginaries, practices and knowledge about human-nature relations are necessary to cope with this situation. When it comes to international politics and governance, there is no doubt that the current global order has failed to offer efficient governance frameworks that would ensure planetary resilience. Six of the nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. To prevent the looming ecocrisis and guarantee the continued survival of humanity, Anthony Burke and colleagues have famously urged that, “Planet[ary] politics must emerge as an alternative thought and process: a politics to nurture worlds for all humans and species co-living in the biosphere.”
Although the Arctic is often viewed as a showcase of ongoing global climate change, research on Arctic politics and governance tends to be very state-centric. It often overlooks how non-state actors and non-human agents shape those processes. This new series explores more-than-human aspects and actors in the Arctic to challenge traditional human-centric starting points of Arctic politics and governance. It raises critical questions, such as: How would Arctic politics and governance look from a more-than-human and multi-species point of view? What kind of agency does the melting sea ice have in Arctic politics? How could we better incorporate the needs of more-than-humans in Arctic policy debates?
The Arctic Institute’s Planetary Series 2025 is a part of our ongoing project that proposes a new paradigm for world politics: the Planetocene, which emphasizes that all forms of life – including humankind – are dependent on the well-being of nature. Planetocene is a normative concept for envisioning a desirable future epoch. The series will be running until spring 2025.
Planetary approach to politics and governance
As claimed by Jason Moore in 2016, we live in the Capitalocene, the age of capital, in which capitalism does not only organize the global political and economic order but also profoundly shapes how nature is being valued and organized. Since this state of affairs has led to intensifying ecological crises globally, many social scientists have sought inspiration from natural sciences. Especially the concept of Anthropocene, adopted from geology, has gained popularity as a valuable narrative to conceptualize the human-nature relationships and articulate political agendas to decrease the environmental harm of human conduct at a global level.
Yet, the Anthropocene, like its sibling Capitalocene, has also been criticized due to its human-centric ontology, technocratic belief in future solutions, and ignorance of the role of economics in causing environmental crises. As the recently emerged lively academic debate about planetary politics and the rights of nature demonstrates, new kinds of ecological imaginaries about the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature are urgently needed to induce fundamental changes in our political and economic systems. However, this task looks overwhelming in the current world dominated by capitalism and Realpolitik – dynamics that have also turned the Arctic into the focus of international policy debates and strategies.
It is hardly surprising that the bulk of Arctic political and legal studies view the Arctic in terms of sovereignty and territoriality. Similarly, political and legal maps and discussions of the Arctic Ocean divide the ocean into internal and territorial waters, coastal states’ exclusive economic zones, and high seas, and the seafloor into partly overlapping claims for extended continental shelves made by the littoral states, and seabed beyond any state’s continental shelf. In such discourses, no attention is paid to the unique features of the Arctic marine ecosystems, more-than-human communities, pluriversal ontologies, or imaginaries and (traditional) ways of life of the many communities, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, living on the Arctic Ocean coast.
In our forthcoming chapter in Routledge Handbook of Critical Ocean Studies, edited by Paul Foley and Jennifer Silver, we will introduce our own ongoing scholarly effort to recast International Relations theory by drawing insights from the Arctic Ocean. We underline that the intensifying ecological crisis of oceans and land alike calls for deep normative transformation of global (ocean) politics and rethinking how we think, study, and act with the oceans. In particular, our concept of the Planetocene seeks to develop intellectual tools to go beyond the conventional human-nature divide in global governance and to place multispecies relationships at the heart of politics. To succeed in this task, creative and imaginative ways of thinking about human-nature relations are necessary – an effort that this series seeks to contribute.
The Arctic Institute Planetary Series 2025: an outline
The Arctic Institute’s Planetary series will include seven articles contemplating the role of more-than-humans in Arctic politics and governance. To lay out the conceptual basis for thinking about the Planetary Arctic, the series starts with Vesa Väätänen’s account of the socio-material relationality as a basis for understanding Arctic politics. Then, Romain Chuffart, Mana Tugend, and Apostolos Tsiouvalas explore how such a relational approach shapes legal imagination in the field of polar law. The key takeaway from these two texts is that the lines between humans and more-than-humans can be blurred by expanding the way we think about governance and socio-material practices in the Arctic, including the law.
The rest of the series examines more specific empirical cases of Arctic politics from a planetary perspective. The first two empirical texts focus on the thawing permafrost. Exploring the risks related to the emergence of ‘zombie viruses’ from the thawing permafrost, Isabella Turilli draws attention to the degree human agency has in preventing outbreaks of pandemics and in the role of framing the discourses related to them. Next, Lynn Heller analyses factors that have led to the exclusion of permafrost emissions from Arctic states’ national climate strategies and gives important recommendations on how the rapid thaw of permafrost could be addressed in international climate politics.
The following two articles focus on the Arctic Ocean and encourage us to view it as a site of care where humans and more-than-humans co-exist and collaborate. The article authored by Mana Tugend explores the potential of a legal personhood of the Arctic Ocean, however in a manner in which care and reciprocity guide the relationships. Sohvi Kangasluoma focuses on the role of sea ice in the Northwest Passage, and through her own experience of sailing the passage, the article demonstrates the overarching agency ice has in the Arctic marine routes, and the geopolitical imaginations of that. The idea of thinking with the ocean hence guides both Tugend’s and Kangasluoma’s texts.
Finally, Barry Zellen takes us back almost a billion years in history to consider the temporal planetary-scale dynamics that may help contextualise contemporary Arctic geopolitics and make long-term plans for the future.
Together, the seven articles of The Arctic Institute’s Planetary Series 2025 challenge dichotomic thinking about the Arctic and offer much food for thought for rethinking Arctic politics and governance in a manner that ensures the integrity of the planet. We hope this series will encourage the development of novel imaginaries and ambitious planetary visions for sustainable futures.
Sanna Kopra is a Senior Fellow at The Arctic Institute and a Research Professor at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland. Sohvi Kangasluoma is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland.