What are the implications hereof for the geopolitical imaginations of the poles?
I think this is very much related to something I wrote about recently: in 2007, a Russian submarine planted a flag on the bottom of the Arctic Basin, thus claiming a big stretch of that area. Many of its Arctic neighbors, and especially Canada, felt threatened, especially because there are vast amounts of oil estimated in the Arctic Basin. You would’ve expected the North Pole to become demilitarized after the Cold War, but now we’re witnessing the opposed: it is increasingly being seen as one of the ‘last regions to contest and divide’. If the North Pole is coming to be considered more and more as ‘just another stretch of ocean’, then the disputes over the legitimate exploitation of the resources in this region will increase – with all the consequences that implies: ecological problems, less space for the indigenous population, and so forth. Again, apart from these tacit practices, it all depends on how discourses of dominant actors about the North Pole will change and how those change
