Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022 was the end of the Arctic cooperation between states and others as we knew it, despite the fact that Russia’s illegal actions are not occurring in the Arctic region. Russia’s attack on Ukraine caused pronounced security fears and responses, particularly from the European and North American countries, including the other Arctic states. This naturally affected Arctic cooperation because it is precisely in the Arctic region that Russia is such a vastly central actor. For example, the region’s pre-eminent inter-governmental forum, the Arctic Council, is struggling to continue its activities in full, as the seven western Arctic states paused participating in meetings held in and activities involving Russia. On the other hand, the first in-person meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) under the Central Arctic Ocean (CAO) fisheries agreement in late November 2022 successfully adopted its COP Rules of Procedure by consensus, including Russia. The purpose of this article is to investigate how adversely Arctic international cooperation in inter-governmental forums and treaties has suffered due to the Ukraine war, utilising a qualitative research methodology to collect internal and sensitive information from key informants. In particular, the article aims to find an answer to the following question: In which types of Arctic inter-governmental structures have the states been able to continue the cooperation and for what reasons? The hypothesis that will be tested in this article is whether treaty-based cooperation has fared better than cooperation founded on soft law. This article will flesh out the current state of Arctic cooperative frameworks and actual cooperative activities under them, analysing three soft law-based cooperative frameworks, including the Arctic Council and several treaty-based cooperative frameworks, such as the CAO fisheries agreement and Arctic Science Cooperation Agreement. This article is based on the facts as of 22 February 2023.

The development of an Internationally Binding Legal Instrument (ILBI) for the conservation and sustainable management of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) has profound implications for the future regulatory activities of a host of regional governance structures exercising competence over these waters. In the rather stilted vernacular of the BBNJ Process, the ILBI aspires to “not undermine” the work of preexisting institutions and initiatives. Inevitably, given the emphasis upon future institutional symbiosis, a key challenge facing the ILBI is to promote its four thematic priorities—marine genetic resources, area-based management tools, environmental assessment, and capacity building and technology transfer—in a manner that can be effectively harnessed by current regional and sectoral frameworks. One region in which the intriguing set of challenges and opportunities presented by the ILBI are strikingly manifested is the Arctic. Some have argued for a regional treaty or clearer recognition of the “special” nature of Arctic conditions. However, we view the ILBI as a potential milestone in Arctic governance that can provide a firm platform to build on current cooperative arrangements for these vulnerable and rapidly changing marine ecosystems. Moreover, we argue that the present legal and institutional framework for the Arctic need not be revisited at this juncture, as it provides a strong regime through which to implement the core objectives of the ILBI. Its ability to do so, however, will depend on whether the ILBI (1) is effectively designed to work with preexisting machinery and (2) succeeds in clarifying and advancing universally-agreed methodological requirements for its four priority areas.

Norway will soon celebrate that 100 years ago, the former ‘no-man's land’ of the Svalbard archipelago was placed under its sovereignty. However, this paper focuses on another important and often omitted element also brought about by the 1920 Svalbard Treaty regarding its demilitarisation and neutralisation. We ask how has the Svalbard security regime been able to meet the various challenges it has faced over almost 100 years of existence? Also, given that the treaty was drafted at the beginning of the 20th century, are the security provisions of this regime already obsolete or are they seen still as valid, and more importantly functional against the backdrop of rapidly changing security realities? This paper then goes further and while it uses Svalbard as a case study, it tries to assess the role of demilitarisation and neutralisation in the modern context by trying to infer possible lessons from two similar regimes, which apply to Antarctica and the Åland Islands.

The Arctic was one of the main theatres for strategic military confrontation during the Cold War between the blocs led by the United States and the Soviet Union. There was no place for multilateral cooperation, other than for very limited issue areas, such as the 1973 Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears between the five states with polar bear populations. Yet, the warming of relations by the end of the Cold War changed all this. Inspired by Secretary-General Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech in 1987, in which the Soviet leader pro-posed various possible areas for Arctic cooperation, differing ideas for international cooperation were advanced. Canadians, in particular, were trying to advance international treaty-based general cooperation for the Arctic, but this never came to pass and it was eventually Finland who was able to broker soft-law collaboration between the Cold War rivals.

This article studies the role of observers under both the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS) and the Arctic Council (AC) before the Nuuk ministerial meeting that took place in May 2011. In this meeting, the AC actors were able to find consensus on criteria for admitting new observers, an issue that has received much media attention, given that China and the European Union, for example, are queuing to become observers in the AC. It is of importance to examine the content of these recently adopted Nuuk observer rules and their potential to impact decision-making on whether the external actors can be included as observers. Moreover, this article studies how, if at all, the Nuuk observer rules might affect the position of the AC in the broader setting of circumpolar cooperation.

The European Union's (EU's) intention of becoming a permanent observer in the Arctic Council and the reluctance of Arctic actors to grant it that status have made the union's aspirations in the Arctic the subject of a continuing debate. The discussion appears to be dominated by geographical considerations and the EU's gradually emerging Arctic policy. This article puts forward a different view of the EU's presence in the region, one drawing on an analysis of relevant EU competences. As a complex international actor, the EU has acquired a broad array of decision-making powers from its member states, powers that partly extend to Iceland and Norway via the EEA Agreement. Moreover, the EU has in many cases become a relevant actor in international negotiations and treaty making processes the outcomes of which are of crucial importance for the governance of the Arctic. Our argument in the third and concluding section is that only by including the EU in Arctic governance can the international community provide better prospects for the union to sensitise its policies and discourses to the Arctic realities and for other Arctic actors to understand how the union functions. This argument is supported by an analysis of the EU's restrictions on the import of seal products and the ensuing litigation.

In a very short time, discussions on Arctic governance have moved from being a topic of scholarly attention and NGO advocacy onto the agendas of states and of the European Union (EU). Increasingly, the various alternatives propounded by a diverse set of actors over what Arctic governance should look like appear as pre-negotiation tactics, a type of testing period before a regime change. The article examines whether the still predominant inter governmental forum, the Arctic Council, is facing a threat of being supplanted by other forms of governance. It will study how resistant the Arctic Council, and its predecessor the 1991 Arctic environmental protection strategy, are to change in order to understand whether the council could renew itself to meet future challenges. It will also examine the various proposals for Arctic governance set out by states, the EU and the region's indigenous peoples. All this will permit conclusions to be drawn on where the Arctic Council stands amid all these proposals and whether, and in what way, it should change to support more sustainable governance in the Arctic.

Indigenous peoples regularly regard international law as a very important tool for the advancement of their political goals. This is most likely because in many nation-states their opportunities for influencing political development are rather limited. Even though international law seems to be an important means for indigenous peoples to advance their goals, these peoples should be aware of its inherent limitations. One such shortcoming is that international law seriously restricts indigenous peoples' opportunities to participate in the international law-making processes; that is treaty and customary law. The contention in this article is that the recent norm-making method of soft law provides indigenous peoples with a better opportunity for influential participation than is afforded them by traditional methods. If these peoples are to benefit from this opportunity, however, we must appreciate the revolutionary potential of the concept: a potential that is suffocated if the concept is understood only from the perspective of international law. A good example of indigenous peoples gaining a better standing in inter-governmental co-operation is the Arctic Council, which based its work on the soft-law approach from the outset. There would seem to be good prospects for adopting the Arctic Council's approach in other regions of the world in order to improve indigenous peoples' international representational status.

There has been increasing dissatisfaction with the way Arctic-wide cooperation under the Arctic Council operates. Scholars and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have taken up the idea of finding a new direction for the work of the Council by drawing on the experience of the other pole, the Antarctic, and its well-established structures of governance. At first sight, this may seem like a misdirected idea, given that the two poles show more differences than similarities: the Arctic consists of ocean surrounded by continents, whereas the Antarctic is a continent surrounded by ocean; the Antarctic has no permanent human habitation, while the Arctic is inhabited by indigenous peoples and other local communities. Yet, the two polar areas also resemble each other in many respects. Both have extreme climatic conditions, receiving less radiation from the sun than other parts of the globe, and the ecosystems have had to adapt to very cold and dark environments with short and light-filled growing seasons. In such conditions, the ecosystems are simple, containing only a few key species, and are thus more vulnerable to human-induced pollution than those of more temperate areas.