11 Geopower and Sea Ice: Encounters with the Geopolitical Stage

Geopower and Sea IceEncounters with the Geopolitical Stage Duncan Depledge commentators expect the behavior of nation-states to "revert to form." 2 They argue that the essential features of the international system are extending into the Arctic; what was once regarded as a different kind of geopolitical stage, due to the presence of sea ice, is being brought back into line with the "natural laws" of the international system."Critical" Geopolitics has, since the 1980s, sought to challenge Geopolitics by reconceptualizing it as a "discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft 'spacialize' international politics and represent it as a 'world' characterised by particular types of places, peoples and dramas." 3 Geopolitics is treated as a "problematic set of discourses, representations, and practices" in order to expose the ways geographical knowledge is used to justify relations of power between "selves" and "others"-relations that are subsequently reinforced and legitimated through a range of texts, images, performances, and practices.4 The perceived openness of the Arctic and indeterminacy of geographical space in general is thus read by Critical Geopolitics as suggestive of a vulnerability to enrollment not just in various state-building projects (most prominently in Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark/Greenland, and the United States), but also in schematics for how international relations should be orchestrated (in the Arctic, this is centered largely on the privileges of a combination of the five Arctic Ocean littoral states, the eight Arctic states, indigenous peoples groups, and the Arctic Council).The term vulnerability is important here, as it implies that the Arctic (and geographical space more broadly) is powerless to resist the ways in which it is put to use as a stage for geopolitical machinations.Thus, in both "cClassical" and "Critical" formulations of geopolitics, geography essentially provides the stage on which various political dramas can unfold.In the former, the stage is relatively stable, resting on claims about enduring and objectively knowable geographies, which naturally direct the course of international relations and global affairs.In the

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