Not only has the latest scramble for control of Greenland made the Arctic an increasing focus of attention among scholars in political science and international relations, but claims by the US President Donald Trump that the United States “needs” Greenland for its security make the new volume on the fight for the future of the Arctic by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds particularly timely. Bennett and Dodds both have an impeccable track record of published scholarship on Arctic issues, and their new volume will further add to their reputation as two of the most insightful scholars on this region.

The volume starts with some brief context on the history, geography, and demography of the Arctic that is particularly useful for readers who come relatively fresh to the subject. These parameters also provide the background against which Bennett and Dodds frame their inquiry into the impact of the “twinned forces of ecological and geopolitical volatility” (p. 17). The interplay of these forces, the authors argue, gives rise to “three directions of travel, which are all intertwined: an extractive Arctic, an endangered Arctic, and an adversarial Arctic” (ibid.).

In subsequent chapters, Bennett and Dodds explore these different scenarios in impressive empirical depth. While they demonstrate the clear geopolitical divide between Russia and the other seven Arctic states (all of whom are now members of NATO), they also point out cross-cutting divides. For example, the United States, Norway, and Russia all extract large amounts of oil and gas from the Arctic and are the only three states that can profitably do so at the moment. Despite environmental costs and risks, this fossil fuel production is unlikely to change. On the contrary, “with geopolitics and security taking centre stage in the 2020s” (p. 73), calculations of what is considered profitable and expedient might well change—in relation to oil and gas as well as to critical minerals.

Environmental change, especially melting sea ice, has made Arctic resources potentially more accessible and their extraction economically more profitable. It has also made the region as a whole more accessible for scientific exploration, tourism, and shipping. This has increasingly attracted non-Arctic states who frame the region variously as a global or planetary Arctic in an attempt to stake their claims—from the United Kingdom’s self-image as the Arctic’s nearest neighbor to China’s assertion of being a near-Arctic power to Japanese, South Korean, and European Union ambitions to play a role in the region. Here, too, Bennett and Dodds go to great empirical length to detail the emerging dynamics of an increasingly global and, in line with their third scenario, adversarial geopolitics in the region that pits Russia and China, on the one hand, against the other seven Arctic states and their partners and allies, on the other.

That “the region’s allure still lies largely in its resources” (p. 85) is a claim that Bennett and Dodds subsequently qualify in what is the strongest part of their book, where they offer detailed analysis of the breakdown of cooperation, the decline of Arctic exceptionalism, and the worrying proliferation of flashpoints and gray zones in and around the region. Over the past 20 years, the Arctic has reemerged as an arena of great-power rivalry, and it is increasingly this zero-sum logic that has shaped interactions in the region between the Arctic states and beyond. While Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has intensified geopolitical competition, Bennett and Dodds correctly point out that—except for a brief moment of pandemic unity and cooperation—relations between Russia and the other Arctic states have progressively soured since the early 2000s. This trajectory was further accelerated after Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, which augured “an aggressive turn in Russian foreign policy” and “signaled that Western expansionism would not be allowed to go unchallenged” by Russia (p. 145).

Intensifying competition, among other things, also led to an increase in investment in military capabilities and an expansion of military exercises in the region, organized again along a principal divide between Russia (and China) and the United States and its NATO allies. Yet the authors correctly point out that “Trump’s designs on Greenland risk reintroducing territorial imperatives into Arctic geopolitics” (p. 138). With the benefit of penning this review in January 2026, this now seems a foregone conclusion and one that underlines that the adversarial-Arctic scenario is not necessarily and exclusively one confined to the more traditional Russia-West divide that has characterized inter-state relations in the Arctic since the Cold War.

Much to the credit of the authors, the book explicitly recognizes that the growing number of geopolitical actors in the Arctic not only includes states and state-based international organizations but also the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. Their sometimes more, sometimes less limited agency is one of the important threads that runs through Bennett’s and Dodds’s analysis. It is also the focus of the book’s penultimate chapter, which is rather optimistically entitled “Nothing about us without us,” taking its cue from Greenland’s 2024 foreign, security, and defense strategy. While the chapter details very clearly the long-standing and deeply embedded connections between the Arctic’s indigenous peoples, it seems a bit of a stretch to call this “a power that no force can break” (p. 255). What, sadly, seems more likely is that the powers that indigenous peoples have will be instrumentalized and manipulated by state actors pursuing their traditional great-power interests. Short of a still highly unlikely military takeover of Greenland by the United States, nothing will happen about the island without the islanders. Given the power asymmetries involved between Nuuk and Washington, it is equally unlikely, however, that this independence will be more than performative.

These recent developments around Greenland are but one piece of evidence supporting the authors’ assessment that “the fight over the Arctic is caught up in a world of possibilities” between peace and conflict (p. 274). In early 2026, these possibilities look diminished, and conflict in and over the Arctic appears more probable than peace.