It was a real privilege last year to give a guest lecture about Arctic political geography to students on the ‘Polar Seas’ module at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS).  So I was enormously pleased to be asked back this year to teach the new cohort of students taking the module.

Though the Arctic Council is now operating again, at least at the technical Working Group level, relations between Russia and the other Arctic States remain extremely strained thanks to Russia’s immoral war on Ukraine.  Sadly, it’s still pertinent to ask whether we can we think of the Arctic as a coherent region now.  Yet we can also continue to ask a more hopeful question:  should Arctic politics begin with the states who colonised the region and still govern it, or with the peoples who call it home?  As before, my lecture focused on both of these questions.

Many thanks to Dr Kim Last for inviting me into his classroom!  It was wonderful to see some of the SAMS students who served on the Secretariat of my first Scotland Model Arctic Council two years ago, and who are now in the final year of their Marine Science degrees.

Download a copy of my lecture slides from this website.