Text
E-book Arctic Governance : Power in Cross-Border Cooperation
From the days of the Greek cartographers dreaming about Ultima Thule at the edges of the known world, the cold reaches of the northern hemi-sphere have inspired grandiose caricatures of risk and opportunity. The region is often imagined from a distance as sublime, exceptional and prone to extremes. Out of space and out of time, as Poe put it, the cir-cumpolar North is frequently envisioned as fundamentally apart from the complexities, indeterminacies and intricacies of life and politics in other parts of the globe.We see some of this exceptionalism in the application of dichotomies to the Arctic: the Arctic will either be preserved as humanity’s last wil-derness, or plundered by coastal states jealously guarding their natural resource treasure chests. All Arctic states are completely equal in Arctic governance, or the USA and Russia dominate militarily and diplomatic-ally against a veneer of regional multilateralism. The region must be on the brink of a new cold war (a common media representation) or saturated with warm, comprehensive cooperation (a counter-representation by Arctic states, including Russia).This book avoids testing the outer extremes of these ‘either/or’ dichoto-mies about the cross-border politics of the Arctic. Rather, the volume seeks to pose and explore a question that sheds light on the contested, but largely cooperative, nature of Arctic governance in the post-Cold War period: how have and how do relations of power matter in shaping cross-border cooperation and diplomacy in the Arctic? By illustrating relations of deference, plumbing episodes of controversy, and highlighting the quiet ‘work’ of various kinds involved in sustaining and expanding cooperation in the Arctic, I hope to show how dynamic and layered with power relations Arctic cooperation itself is. Acknowledging the exercise of power without positing the existence of open conflict allows us to consider how Arctic cooperation is constantly shored up through various kinds of context-specific performances and broached and resolved contestations, rather than a static output of stale agreement.
Tidak tersedia versi lain