Vetenskaplig expertis och nordområdets naturresurser

The essay reflects on political pressures exerted by and on scientists and technologists acting as advisors on political and economic matters of the high north.It uses two case studies to do this. One consists in the group of scientists from several nations who engaged as advisors to their foreign offices in the process leading up tothe ratification of the Spitsbergen/Svalbard treaty in 1920. The focus is on the discourse regarding hunting, mining and nature protections on these islands. The second case is the way technologists and geological scientists were engaged in the industrialisation of the USSR. These contexts of course differ in scale and in many other ways but are similar in certain respects. The discussion is centred on the problems of technocracy which is commented based on the Frankfurt school's elaborations on the open society and differing interpretations of technological determinism. This is related further to contemporary contentions over the balance between scientific based environmental stewardship and technological management in northern raw material extraction

The geopolitics of northern travels: Enactments of adventure and exploration in the Norwegian-Russian borderland

Critical geopolitics is used in analysing discourses on a micro-social level in the performances and enactments taking place during fact-finding tours and leisure journeys in northernmost Europe. The cases of journeys focussed are those of Scandinavians travelling along, and sometimes departing from, the highway between the Norwegian village of Kirkenes and the Russian city of Murmansk. In travels undertaken for professional or leisure purposes alike a hyperreal meta-script is enacted mediated on the cosmopolitan cultural experiences held collectively by the travellers; simulacra provide the context for the enactments of fact-finding and drama taking place during border-passage. Three ways in which geopolitics enters travels in the northern borderland between Scandinavia and Russia are identified: scenarios of future regional developments, popularisations of research obsessed with any problems of bilateral relations, and what has been termed in this article the geopolitical anecdote. In considering the aesthetics of the simulations taking place in cross-border travels this study suggests focussing the meta-script of the American and the European road movie film genres. The essay argues that the cosmopolitan mind of any traveller, and its collective mediated content of cultural and political discourses, has been underestimated so far in the socio-political research regarding the borderlands of the European north

Tracks across the Tundra: Making a Living from Nature in the Borderland of the Russian Northwest

By drawing on our experiences from living in this part of the world and by comparing developments on each side of the Norwegian-Russian border, we apply a broad contextual and place-oriented approach to study this subarctic borderland. We ask what characterizes the differences found when comparing Soviet industrialization and contemporary developments to akin or related processes elsewhere in the world? Traveling slowly across the tundra makes seeing the tracks of different humans possible. Environmental traces of human activity viewed over longer periods of time mirror diverse worldviews, value systems, and economic goals. Scaling out in a geographical sense is necessary to explain the impact of geo-economic power vectors up north. Southern events can hamper vital cross-border trade at the local level, and sometimes they have brought war up north. Centralist policies have often spurred northern in-migration by creating favorable opportunities for new waves of settlers

The Quest for Authenticity in Narratives of Northern Borderlands

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Experience of Norwegian-Russian cooperation in the field of education at the University of Tromsø - Arctic University of Norway Campus Alta and Kirkenes

The leader and a developer of the Bachelor of Northern Studies (BNS) present this English language, online, interdisciplinary university course program in social sciences and the humanities. BNS is today part of the multi-campus UiT Arctic University of Norway output of higher education. An overview of BNS is given, noticing its 2010 origin in the University of the Arctic initiative, and the challenges it has faced in recent years when having to move its institutional base several times. The conclusions highlight the importance of personal commitment among BNS teaching staff, of networking, and of stable interests in Russia and elsewhere in the High North to jointly provide domestic and international students with interdisciplinary course programs and social events, building on the Euroarctic tradition of crossborder collaboration and the innovative mind-set it fosters

Euroarctic Strategies and Synergies

Source at https://www.barkhuis.nl/product_info.php?products_id=144.A comparative discussion is made of contemporary national and organisational strategies on Northern and Arctic Europe to identify common interests in the Euro-Arctic region and to evaluate how some of these interests may relate to the global context. This dialogue will be considered in relation to the post-Cold War transition from Realist to geoeconomic perspectives on the world. My tentative conclusion is twofold. First, the social science communities committed to northern research do not receive as much credit and funding as they should for providing businesses, administrators, and various stakeholders with data and interpretations of use in their lobbyism and undertakings in the Arctic and Subarctic. Second, because the established organisations and multinational institutions now claiming expertise on the High North are mainly closed forums with little policy-maker turnover, there is room for more studies focussing the neglected issues of this part of the world. One way to fill these needs is to expand university-based research networks conducting diversified analyses and to facilitate their outreach

Futures of Northern Cross-Border Collaboration

The Barents Institute of the University of Tromsø and the Centre for North European and Baltic Studies of the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations (MGIMO) jointly launched, in 2011, the so-called Futures of Northern Cross-Border Collaboration Project. It brought together academic researchers and public and business managers with different specialities into a multidisciplinary network. This publication is a selection of the presentations held by the group at a round-table organised at MGIMO in 2011. In the first part of the book the “New North” is discussed, i.e. the new geopolitical power-field that has resulted from Arctic melting. The latter causes many environmental problems but on the bright side of things, at sea, diminishing ice opens new routes in the Arctic Ocean that will be important to international shipping. This also facilitates access to off-shore fossil fuel extraction on the large continental shelves of the circumpolar North. The second section of this book discusses the various challenges that are now urgent to address. Sound stewardship and sustainable economic growth can only be based on proactive development of knowledge through research, by continuing the successes of cultural and professional partnerships in the European north and by expanding the scopes and availability of cross-border programmes in higher education

A.E. Nordenskiöld in Swedish memory: the origin and uses of Arctic heroism

For Nordic nations scientific activities in the Polar Regions proved significant in defining national identities and shaping scientific profiles. Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing throughout the next century, polar research proved instrumental in inculcating national honour and expressing small-state colonial aspirations. It provided a source of heroes for forging collective memory and the fostering of youth by presenting the polar explorer as a model character. This study explores the ideological lineage of the nineteenth century polar hero by first relating this idol to historical archetypes of Western culture. It identifies the special traits of the Nordic polar hero and discusses how it was used for patriotic purposes. As a case in point the article looks at the career of the Finnish-Swedish mineralogist and Arctic expedition leader Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and the ways he, with the help of others, successfully navigated not only the drift ice of polar seas but also the international republic of science, and the three national scenes of Sweden, Finland and Russia. In the process he was turned into a national hero both in Finland and Sweden, and presented as a patriotic role model for adolescents in the arts of postponing gratification and enduring hardship