Contemporary Geopolitics of the Polar Regions

SAMPLE SLIDES

Klaus Dodds

‘Core’ Course

Frozen Planet

• Why do the Polar Regions matter?

• Environmental – links to ‘planet earth’

• Resource potential – oil, gas, timber, minerals, fish

• Inhabited (human and non-human populations)

• Strategic/military – access, shipping lanes, air space

• Sovereignty and sovereign rights

Who owns the Arctic?

Cold War and Polar Regions

• Strategic spaces and geopolitics of proximity

• Arctic and Antarctic as ‘testing grounds’

• Military, polar science and grand strategy

• Populating the Arctic – human security?

Submarines, surveying and spying

Frontier Nationalism

• Frontier discourses/practices

• Russia and the Arctic – Conquering Nature

• Australia and the Australian polar frontier

• Everyday geopolitics and polar nationalism/national security

An independent Greenland?

Polar Regions and Global Commons

• How does the international community address areas of the earth such as Antarctica and potentially the central Arctic Ocean?

• What role do property rights, international regimes, national security, technology and regional co-operation play in regulating the Antarctic and oceans?

• Can securitization help avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’?

Some Key Readings

• K Dodds (2012) The Antarctic: A Very Short Introduction (OUP)

• K Dodds (2012) ‘Introduction – The governance of the global commons’ Global Policy 3: 58-60

• J McCannon (2012) A History of the Arctic (University of Chicago Press)

• A Hemmings, D Rothwell and K Scott editors (2012) Antarctic Security in the 21st Century (Routledge)

• C Emmerson (2010) The Future History of the Arctic (Bodley Head)

• F Griffiths, R Heubert and W Lackenbauer (2011) Canada and the Changing Arctic (Wilfred Laurier University Press)