Arctic State Identity : Geography, History, and Geopolitical Relations

This book explores what it means for state personnel from Norway, Iceland, and Canada that their country holds a formal title as an ‘Arctic state’. It asks what an Arctic state identity might look like through geographies, pasts, futures, and geopolitical relations across different scales, from the international to the personal. -- .

This book sets out to answer what it means to hold a formal title as one of the eight ‘Arctic states’; is there such a thing as an Arctic state identity, and if so, what does this mean for state personnel? It charts the thoughtful reflections and stories of state personnel from three Arctic states: Norway, Iceland, and Canada, alongside analysis of documents and discourses. This book shows how state identities are narrated as both geographical and temporal – understood through environments, territories, pasts and futures – and that any identity is always relational and contextual. As such, demonstrating that to understand Arctic geopolitics we need to pay attention to the people whose job it is to represent the state on a daily basis. And more broadly, it offers a ‘peopled’ view of geopolitics, introducing the concept and framework of ‘state identity’.