Call for Abstracts
for a proposed panel on ‘Projecting Geopolitics on the Arctic’
at the 5th Open Conference of the ‘International Relations’ Section of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft (DVPW), University of Bremen, 4 to 6 October 2017

Panel Organizer: Christoph Humrich (University of Groningen), Sebastian Knecht (Freie Universität Berlin)

Projecting Geopolitics on the Arctic
In the past decade, media, political and academic interest in the Arctic as a political region has steadily been on the rise. Climate-induced geophysical changes in the region, its presumed richness in resources, its strategic importance in the wake of increasing tensions between Russia and ‘the West’ and its possible future relevance as a maritime transport corridor often make the lead story for research and debate about the political state of Arctic affairs. Many contributions to the debate make use of the terms ‘geopolitics’ or ‘geopolitical’ to either characterize or highlight political interests and conflict constellations in the Arctic, or to use them as analytical and theoretical concepts. The often invoked ‘return of geopolitics in the Arctic’ has a double-meaning in that regard: A renewed interest in geopolitical ideas and strategies for political action in or with respect to the Arctic region on the one hand, and as a case for academic scrutiny and theoretical reflection that would suggest or even exemplify these terms, on the other. For both, geopolitical action and geopolitical theory, the Arctic has become a scenery for projecting geopolitics.

However, the prominence of the term in public and academic discourse seems to have diluted its overall distinctiveness, analytical precision and theoretical substance. If the terms ‘geopolitics’ and ‘geopolitical’ cannot even be substituted with ‘politics’ and ‘political’ without any loss of meaning, they often insinuate little more than the security or economic relevance of Arctic change or connote alarmistic scenarios of the Arctic as a scene for climate or resource wars, a regional theater of a new ‘Cold War’, or global power transformation processes. In turn, theoretical assumptions and causal mechanisms associated with these scenarios often remain unspecified.

The proposed panel thus wants to use the example of the Arctic to clarify the analytic potential, theoretical substance and empirical value added of the terms ‘geopolitics’ and ‘geopolitical’. This shall be done, first, in a positive manner by distinguishing geopolitics as a theoretical research program from other international relations (IR) theories so that characteristic and distinct assumptions and causal mechanisms or conditioning contexts become visible. On the other hand, a more critical review of current political science research on the Arctic will have to show whether and where geopolitical terminology distorts or obfuscates the empirical analysis rather than enlightening it. To this end, we ask for innovative papers that:

develop theoretical hypotheses for political analysis of Arctic affairs, distill those from the existing IR literature or deduce them from classic or modern works on geopolitics (and contribute to concept and theory development). The notions of “spill-over” or “proxy conflicts/wars” within a new “Great Game” could be interesting conceptual venues for probing the value added of geopolitical theory for the Arctic.
test or refute such hypotheses in a comparative analysis with other cases inside the Arctic region (including also historical comparison with Cold War times or even earlier epochs of Arctic explorations and politics) or with other maritime regions.
or critically reflect on the usage of the terms ‘geopolitics’ and ‘geopolitical’ in the discourse about Arctic change (either historically or along a conceptual differentiation between popular, formal and practical geopolitics) or combine a positive and critical application of the terms in the sense of a critical geopolitics of the Arctic.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent to Christoph Humrich (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) and Sebastian Knecht (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) by 28 March 2017. Full-length paper manuscripts are due in late September 2017. Please note that no funding to cover travel and accommodation costs is available for this conference.