The Circumpolar Podcast - Don't bury the Arctic Council yet
In this solo episode of The Circumpolar, Serafima Andreeva speaks about her own research on the Arctic Council. Photo: Serafima Andreeva
The Circumpolar is a podcast on Arctic geopolitics, governance, and security. Created and hosted by Serafima Andreeva, and supported by The Arctic Institute and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. The podcast brings together leading experts from various fields of Arctic geopolitics and many Arctic and non-Arctic states to unpack key developments, challenge common misconceptions, and discuss the current dynamics of todays changing Arctic.
Don’t bury the Arctic Council yet
In this solo episode, Serafima Andreeva steps out from behind the interview chair for an audio essay built on four years of research into why the Arctic Council survived 2022, and how. She starts in the 1990s, when the Council and its predecessor, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, were designed for a different world, one organized around access to a newly open Russia and its environmental data. The political heavyweight we talk about today came later. The science was technical first, and the geopolitics grew on top of it.
Then Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine while holding the Council’s chairship, and the lines of contact were cut almost overnight. That left a hole in a region warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, six to seven times in places, where Russia makes up roughly half the map. Serafima traces the diplomacy that kept the Council alive, from the carefully worded “temporary pause” to the handover from Russia to Norway in 2023, and argues it held for three reasons: a consensus-based legal framework that shapes decisions rather than makes them, the symbolic pull of the Arctic Club, and a shared interest in keeping the Arctic order intact.
She closes with a prediction and a worry. Russia is the obvious disruptor, but it may not be the Council’s biggest problem. Two states have broken international law and pursued expansion in their spheres of interest, Russia and the United States, and the deeper risk is a slide back to great-power business as usual, where climate catastrophe drops to the bottom of the agenda and cooperation becomes just another foreign-policy tool.