Global Arctic

Abstract

In this introduction, we place our book within the context of our GlobalArctctic project, which was launched back in 2014, together with Professor Lassi Heininen. In this project, we make the claim that the Arctic should be looked at as a global region as it already had during the Cold War. After the end of the Cold War, however, with the now-famous Murmansk speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 calling for the Arctic to become a “Zone of Peace”, the Arctic’s global dimension declined somewhat, at least among politicians and academics. Yet, the Arctic is now being transformed by global forces and this changing Arctic is, in turn, affecting the globe, be it ecologically, economically, or in terms of geopolitics. This introduction also summarizes each of the chapters contained in this book.