Don't bury the Arctic Council yet

For a dead institution, the Arctic Council has been remarkably busy.

Serafima Andreeva draws on four years of research to explain how the Arctic Council survived Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and why it may be one of the more quietly resilient bodies in international diplomacy right now. She goes back to the Council's 1990s origins as a route into post-Soviet Russia, walks through the "temporary pause" of 2022 and the chairship handover from Russia to Norway, and ends with a prediction about what threatens it next. The uncomfortable part: Russia may not be the Council's biggest problem, and the United States belongs in that conversation too.

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For a dead institution, the Arctic Council has been remarkably busy.

This is The Circumpolar. Welcome back. I'm your host, Serafima Andreeva, and this episode is going to be a little different. Usually I have guests on to talk through a topic, but today is more of an audio essay, or an analysis, coming from me. My credentials, I suppose, are that I'm a researcher at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, where I work on Arctic geopolitics. For the past four years I've been analysing the Arctic Council: why it has survived, how it has survived, and the state of scientific cooperation in the current geopolitical landscape.

To understand why we shouldn't bury the Arctic Council yet, we have to go back in time. Not just before 2022 and the war against Ukraine, or before the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but all the way back to the 1990s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Arctic hasn't always been a geopolitical hotspot. That's a recent development. Many of the foundations the Council is built on were laid in a different landscape. It has always been political, but it was political in a different way. Take the Council's predecessor, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. It was created as one of many initiatives that opened up cooperation with, and data access to, Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. It was one of the ways the new window to Russia was opening.

I once interviewed a key scholar many of you will know, Lars-Otto Reiersen, who was part of establishing the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, one of the Council's working groups. He told me this was one of the reasons that working group came to be: to get access to Russia, to Russian data, to monitoring. Access was what started it. So in many ways the Arctic Council was a child of its time. You could point to the optimism of the 1990s, the end of history and all of that. But for the Council, and for its older, now non-existent predecessor the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, it was symbolic and political, yes, but a lot of it was also technical. Russia was available. You could look at what was happening in the Arctic.

Today the Arctic Council comes up whenever we talk about governance. At the Arctic Circle Assembly, at Arctic Frontiers, at all these conferences, it gets named as a key pillar of Arctic governance. The Council has three levels. Its main mandate is scientific, and that work happens in the working groups. Then there are the Senior Arctic Officials and the ministerial meetings, which give the Council its political traction and stability. Its predecessor had a similar structure, but the Senior Arctic Official level was only formalised with the Ottawa Declaration, which is also when the Arctic Council itself came to be.

After the Ottawa Declaration there were many ministerial and chairship meetings. I went through a lot of the available minutes and documents, and if you look at the lists of attendees, the high-profile names mostly turn up in recent years. At the Council's establishment there was an important political dimension, but it wasn't the main stage the way it is today. It didn't carry the same significance. Going back through those documents, the early Arctic Council almost reads like a niche peace-building or environmental-monitoring project. At the time, there wasn't much awareness of how big it would become.

The first time the Council really blew up, if we can put it that way, was with the ACIA report, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. It talked about rising sea levels, about how melting Arctic ice would drive a catastrophic global rise in sea levels, and many other climate predictions, work that eventually fed into the UN's climate change efforts.

Science was a tool for geopolitical interests back then too. I did a study on this with my colleague Geir Hønneland in 2023, a report we called Arctic Research and Its Actors, and we concluded what's hard to avoid: science has always been a tool for foreign policy. But at that time the science was more technical, the foreign policy interests were different, and the landscape was completely different. We have to keep that in mind when we talk about where the Arctic Council is now. I don't think we always remember that it wasn't created for this geopolitical landscape.

Now go to 2022. Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine while holding the rotating chairship of the Arctic Council, and many lines of contact with Russia were cut immediately, both institutional and technical. Cooperating and sharing data was no longer possible. The restriction came from both sides. From the Western Arctic states, of course, but also from Russia, where cooperating with the West carries its own risks, like being labelled a foreign agent. So this became a strained relationship from both directions. That created a huge problem, because the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, and in some areas six or seven times faster. Without data from Russia, which covers roughly half of the Arctic, getting the full climate picture is nearly impossible.

There's been a debate since the war about whether we can compensate with remote sensing and satellite climate data. But from the panels I've listened to and the experts I've spoken with, remote sensing only takes you so far.

Back in 2022, while many cooperative forums made little effort to keep things going, the Arctic Council looked different. Look at the initial statements from the Western Arctic states. They said their participation was on a "temporary pause." A temporary pause. That's a pleonasm. Temporary and pause mean essentially the same thing. And yet even those two redundant words, in a very short statement, made it to the top diplomatic level. To me, that sounds a lot like governments and officials being careful, keeping the door open.

Alone and together with my colleague Svein Vigeland Rottem, I've published a couple of peer-reviewed papers on how and why the Arctic Council survived. Because when everyone proclaimed it dead, and there were so many news pieces saying the Arctic Council was dead and that Arctic exceptionalism was dead, the Council had become a symbol of that exceptionalism: born in the 1990s, killed in 2022. On 3 March, not long after the full-scale invasion, the Western Arctic states issued a statement condemning the invasion and pausing their activities. You could see the same disruption in other forums: Russia withdrew from the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, and it was suspended from the Council of the Baltic Sea States.

The discussions inside the Arctic Council at the political level at this point were largely confidential, and they didn't always include the permanent participants in decision-making. What was happening was mostly happening at the confidential diplomatic level, and a lot of it was between Russia and Norway, which would take over the chairship after Russia. By May 2022, Norway confirmed it would go ahead with preparations for its upcoming chairship despite the ongoing pause. The following month, June 2022, the "Arctic 7," a term that appeared and then disappeared, issued a statement signalling they would partially resume Arctic Council work without Russia. At the same time, Russia was proceeding with its own chairship.

This brought the Council more media attention again and added a lot of fuel to the debate about its future, and at that point the outlook was bleak. It was nail-in-the-coffin territory, it was dead, all of those things. The turning point came at the Arctic Circle Assembly in October 2022. We spoke with people who engaged with the Council daily at the time. Until that assembly, the approach had been to avoid public discussion of the Council's survival, to prevent further complications, to depoliticise it. The problem with that approach is that it fed speculation about the Council's future. After the assembly, it was deemed necessary within the Council to assert that the Arctic Council was still relevant and to show the commitment of all Arctic states to its survival.

That mattered, because in November 2022 the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, invited the Arctic states to a ministerial meeting in May 2023. The invitation was formalised, and Norway accepted it. The fact that Norway accepted at all signalled a mutual desire for a smooth chairship transition and for the Council's survival. The handover from Russia to Norway was completed on 11 May 2023, despite all the challenges and the absence of in-person participation from some Arctic states. When Norway set out its priorities, it focused on oceans, climate, environment, and sustainable development, but it also said that one really important goal was simply for the Arctic Council to survive.

Russia, for its part, was skeptical, even negative, about the Norwegian chairship, because of NATO's potential influence in the Council. By then every Arctic Council member except Russia was a NATO member, with Finland and Sweden having joined. Still, Russia didn't push for alternative multilateral platforms. When Russia's then Senior Arctic Official, Nikolai Korchunov, was asked about this, about BRICS as an option, he said it was not an alternative for them at that time. So yes, Russia was skeptical, but the Arctic Council still mattered to it. When I read pieces now saying the Council is over and done with, my reaction is that there is still interest from all states. We can't ignore that.

After the transition, new guidelines were approved to resume some scientific work in the working groups. The collective effort of the Arctic states under the Norwegian chairship has been crucial to preserving the Council's role through this period. The future is uncertain, but what happened during the pause is fascinating from a diplomatic point of view, especially at a time when diplomacy so often fails. From an international relations perspective, it's wonderful. I think it helps to see it this way: there is a version of the Arctic Council that died in 2022, and a version that didn't.

All member states have stayed engaged to varying degrees, and all of them, including Russia, have expressed a desire to maintain cooperation. That's quite unique in the current landscape. If we want to explain why, we can look at the legal framework, the strategic framework, and the foreign policy engagement. On the legal framework, the key points are the consensus-based decision-making among member states, and the fact that the framework deliberately avoids anything to do with military security and lacks the authority to impose sanctions. The working groups can make clear recommendations about climate or policy, but they can't impose constraints the way other decision-making bodies can. Some of those working groups, like the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, predate the Council itself, and they've been instrumental in shaping environmental policy. The Council is a decision-shaping body, not a decision-making one, and I think that's part of the reason it survived.

The strategic framework matters too. Global interest in the Arctic has expanded exponentially over the past decades. Partly that's because the Arctic is strategically important, partly because of the climate crisis, but it's also because being part of the Arctic Club, the Arctic Council, comes with its own benefits, and those benefits carry symbolic power. Non-Arctic states will note in their Arctic strategies and policy papers that they are observers to the Arctic Council. It's legitimising.

The last reason is foreign policy engagement. The Council has been a central arena for international cooperation. By promoting multilateral cooperation through it, the Arctic states can counter any expansionist ambitions from non-Arctic states. They can say: you can show your presence in the Arctic, but you have to do it through the Council. And to be an observer, you have to accept the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These legitimacy frameworks give the Arctic states credibility. The Council's structure, which includes Indigenous peoples' organisations as permanent participants, adds further legitimacy and makes sure there are diverse perspectives in decision-making. So the Arctic Council has a role in generating knowledge and, importantly, in maintaining the Arctic order of things. I think that's the common interest Russia and the West actually share: maintaining the Arctic order.

The last part of this episode is, of course, about the future. We've covered the distant past and the not-so-distant past. Scientists usually hate predicting the future, but I've made every guest on this podcast leave their comfort zone, so it's only fair I do the same. We know Russia is a disruptor in geopolitics today, across many arenas. But I'm not sure that, when it comes to the Arctic Council specifically, Russia is the biggest challenge. It's an important one, certainly, but maybe not the largest, and not the only one. There are two states that have broken international law and pursued expansionist ambitions in their spheres of interest: Russia and the United States.

My main worry is really two things. First, the trend we already see today, where everything turns back into a great-power game, the Arctic included, and where the inevitable climate catastrophe becomes the last concern, after competition and conflict. Those concerns about competition and conflict are important, of course they are. But it's easy to forget that we are facing major environmental disasters, in the Arctic and in the rest of the world, and the Arctic feels those disasters most strongly. My second worry is that if we keep using cooperation as a tool for foreign policy interests, and not just us, but Russia, the United States, Norway, all of us, we lose something important. What we lose is problem-solving, the ability to solve the common problems we share no matter how much we disagree with our adversaries. And one of those common problems is the climate crisis.

For me personally, looking at these trends, that's what worries me about the future. But it's also why I think the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Norway's Senior Arctic Official at the time, Morten Høglund, got something right. They had an implicit understanding of this in the way they handled the diplomatic crises. So if I force myself out of my research comfort zone and down to my core values, or core worries, I can only hope that the current Danish and Greenlandic chairship, and the upcoming Swedish one, will keep up the tradition of tackling the common problems we share.

I know this was a different format from what you're used to. I hope you still enjoyed it. We'll be back with guests next time. Thanks for listening.