Suchergebnisse

Remarks at the conclusion of a workshop, sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, and held in Oslo, Norway, from 12-13 May 2015, to discuss the historic place names of the High Arctic archipelago of Franz Josef Land. Discussed are new approaches to toponymic research suggested at the workshop, as well as perspective based in the author's research on the toponymic history of Kong Karls Land in Svalbard.

Critical geopolitics is used in analysing discourses on a micro-social level in the performances and enactments taking place during fact-finding tours and leisure journeys in northernmost Europe. The cases of journeys focussed are those of Scandinavians travelling along, and sometimes departing from, the highway between the Norwegian village of Kirkenes and the Russian city of Murmansk. In travels undertaken for professional or leisure purposes alike a hyperreal meta-script is enacted mediated on the cosmopolitan cultural experiences held collectively by the travellers; simulacra provide the context for the enactments of fact-finding and drama taking place during border-passage. Three ways in which geopolitics enters travels in the northern borderland between Scandinavia and Russia are identified: scenarios of future regional developments, popularisations of research obsessed with any problems of bilateral relations, and what has been termed in this article the geopolitical anecdote. In considering the aesthetics of the simulations taking place in cross-border travels this study suggests focussing the meta-script of the American and the European road movie film genres. The essay argues that the cosmopolitan mind of any traveller, and its collective mediated content of cultural and political discourses, has been underestimated so far in the socio-political research regarding the borderlands of the European north.

The Barents Institute of the University of Tromsø and the Centre for North European and Baltic Studies of the Moscow State Institute of Foreign Relations (MGIMO) jointly launched, in 2011, the so-called Futures of Northern Cross-Border Collaboration Project. It brought together academic researchers and public and business managers with different specialities into a multidisciplinary network. This publication is a selection of the presentations held by the group at a round-table organised at MGIMO in 2011. In the first part of the book the "New North" is discussed, i.e. the new geopolitical power-field that has resulted from Arctic melting. The latter causes many environmental problems but on the bright side of things, at sea, diminishing ice opens new routes in the Arctic Ocean that will be important to international shipping. This also facilitates access to off-shore fossil fuel extraction on the large continental shelves of the circumpolar North. The second section of this book discusses the various challenges that are now urgent to address. Sound stewardship and sustainable economic growth can only be based on proactive development of knowledge through research, by continuing the successes of cultural and professional partnerships in the European north and by expanding the scopes and availability of cross-border programmes in higher education.