Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds’ Unfrozen represents a comprehensive and timely intervention in Arctic scholarship. It offers readers an extensive introduction to a region increasingly characterized by overlapping and far-reaching ecological, geopolitical, and social transformations. Writing at a moment when the post-Cold War liberal international order appears increasingly fragile, Bennett and Dodds position the Arctic as a critical site for understanding how societies and states navigate an environmental and geopolitical landscape radically different from the relative stability of the 1990s. The work covers substantial ground, examining the region’s population history, the evolution of Arctic cooperation, the erosion of Arctic exceptionalism amid states’ rapid militarization in the region, and the escalating ecological crisis confronting circumpolar ecosystems and societies.
The book’s engagement with crisis discourse merits careful consideration. Bennett and Dodds employ language consistent with common Arctic discourse, invoking the ideas of emergency and urgency that dominate current policy and academic discussions. What receives less attention is how approximately four million Arctic residents continue their lives without an omnipresent sense of crisis or emergency. This tension between external crisis narratives and lived Arctic realities raises important questions about perspective, representation, and the politics of Arctic knowledge production. Climate change manifests tangibly through lengthening wildfire seasons and unseasonal weather patterns, and militarization has become increasingly visible. Yet daily life persists with a complexity that resists reduction to crisis rhetoric alone.
The volume’s treatment of Indigenous peoples distinguishes Unfrozen from many Arctic books that give Indigenous issues only perfunctory treatment. The penultimate chapter, titled “Nothing About Us Without Us,” provides a substantive, detailed engagement with Arctic Indigenous peoples’ political organizing, experiences, and contemporary challenges. This attention reflects both the demographic reality—Indigenous peoples comprise approximately one quarter of the Arctic population—and the globally unique institutionalization of Indigenous participation through Permanent Participant status in the Arctic Council, which the authors examine carefully throughout the book. As an Indigenous Sámi academic teaching Arctic Indigenous governance and gender, I was delighted to see how the chapter successfully conveys “the many paths of Arctic Indigenous Peoples” (p. 226), emphasizing diversity and specificity rather than homogenization. The inclusion of Anishinaabe intellectual Gerald Vizenor, who is hardly a standard reference in Arctic literature, signals the authors’ willingness to engage Indigenous thought.
The chapter also addresses topics frequently omitted from Arctic geopolitical analysis, including socioeconomic challenges facing Indigenous communities, including gendered violence against Indigenous women. The authors acknowledge that, despite these circumstances, Indigenous women frequently emerge as cultural and political leaders at local, national, and international scales. However, Bennett and Dodds miss an opportunity to explore the relationship between addressing gendered violence and implementing Indigenous self-determination—a connection Arctic Indigenous women have articulated forcefully by arguing that meaningful self-determination remains elusive without confronting violence against Indigenous women and girls.
Despite its strengths, the Indigenous chapter contains problematic elements that warrant critical attention. There are occasionally comparative framings whose purpose is unclear. For instance, the assertion that “a young woman from a Greenlandic town like Sisimiut hoping to attend university in Copenhagen very likely has little in common with an elderly Chukchi reindeer herder born under the Soviet Union, aside from some deep-rooted genes” (p. 228) appears intended to demonstrate Indigenous peoples’ complexity and contemporaneity. Yet such comparisons state the obvious while making a rhetorical move that inadvertently reinforces the stereotypes it purports to challenge.
More substantively, certain generalizations require qualification. The claim that “apart from Russia, the Arctic states largely agree that Indigenous Peoples should be granted greater say in their own affairs” (p. 229) overlooks significant tensions and gaps between rhetorical commitment and policy implementation across all Arctic states. Also, the suggestion that some Indigenous peoples prioritize economic agency while others focus on political agency oversimplifies internal diversity within Indigenous communities and the interconnections between economic and political dimensions of self-determination. Ample research suggests political agency frequently depends upon economic agency, rather than constituting a separate trajectory, complicating the authors’ formulation.
Two passages exemplify the problematic reduction of Indigenous peoples into mere cultures. In Chapter 6 on geopolitical breakdown, the authors open with: “Despite imaginings of Indigenous Peoples as living in harmony with nature and one another, oral histories and archaeological traces indicate that there were power struggles long before European empires and states arrived” (p. 138). The statement conflates Indigenous ontologies or worldviews characterized by relationality (which do not presume absence of struggle) with romanticized harmonious living. There’s no denying that some Indigenous people tend to romanticize or simplify, but as many Indigenous scholars emphasize, no societies, including Indigenous ones, are conflict-free. Later, the authors argue that “building robust societies and economies in Arctic Indigenous communities requires reconciling Indigenous values with the rapacious demands of market capitalism” (p. 242). While this formulation sounds fashionable, it obscures more fundamental prerequisites: enhanced jurisdictional authority, territorial restitution, and capacity building constitute more immediate preconditions for robust Indigenous societies than a philosophical reconciliation with capitalism.
As a Saami Council representative in the Arctic Council’s formative meetings, I find the authors’ retrospective analysis of the Council striking. The authors argue that the Council’s avoidance of military and security issues was understandable during the optimistic peak of the liberal international order in the mid-1990s, when Russia was diminished and China had not yet emerged as a significant global power. This prompts difficult questions about whether addressing military and security issues during the 1990s might have yielded different outcomes; such questions only gain urgency as Arctic cooperation fragments along geopolitical fault lines.
Unfrozen succeeds in explaining how the Arctic simultaneously embodies ecological emergency and geopolitical competition. It provides readers unfamiliar with the region an accessible yet sophisticated introduction, while offering specialists a detailed analysis of contemporary developments. The book’s tone appropriately reflects current global volatility; its relevance will only increase as the international order continues to fragment. For scholars, students, and policymakers seeking to understand the Arctic’s role in planetary futures, Bennett and Dodds have produced an important resource, even as the region’s unsettled fate ensures that Arctic scholarship must remain perpetually attentive to rapidly evolving circumstances.
In conclusion, Unfrozen benefits from being extraordinarily current. However, as I write this review during a fragile ceasefire in the US-Israeli-Iranian conflict, global events continue to reshape Arctic futures in ways that exceed even recently published scholarship. The authors’ observation that “what happens in the wider world will have consequences for the Arctic” (p. 20) gains additional salience when we think about the Arctic’s substantial remaining oil reserves and its strategic significance in great power competition. The authors are certainly correct that “the fate of the Arctic is not settled” (p. 17).
