In Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, authors Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds examine the multifaceted politics of the world’s northernmost region. Combining Bennett’s work on the political geography of frontiers and Dodd’s expertise in polar geopolitics, the book adopts an expansive, interdisciplinary approach. Each chapter of Unfrozen employs a distinct analytical lens—ranging from environmental security, to geopolitical competition, to Indigenous politics—to provide a nuanced understanding of the contemporary Arctic and its possible futures.
Unfrozen casts the Arctic not as a static area, but as a space of geopolitical contestation and experimentation. As the authors note, the region is literally and metaphorically “unfreezing” as states increasingly recognize its military, economic, and political potential. Such regional developments, in turn, are heightened and accelerated by the impact of climate change in this “emerging Arctic Anthropocene,” as Bennett and Dodds describe it. China’s “Polar Silk Road” initiative, for example, is an extension of its other trade and infrastructure projects made possible only by the increasingly unfrozen waters along Russia’s northern coastline.
The book makes a notable contribution to the field of Arctic studies by offering a succinct snapshot of the pole’s evolving politics. As Jennifer Spence reflects in her review, the book’s argument is “particularly powerful … in its diagnosis of a region in transition.” The scope of the study does justice to the Arctic’s complexity, particularly to the wide range of actors and communities, human and nonhuman, who have built lives in the region. This symposium brings together the perspectives of eight scholars, who reflect on the book’s political urgency, its incorporation of nonstate actors, and its distinct narrative style.
As Rauna Kuokkanen observes, “Unfrozen benefits from being extraordinarily current.” The authors published this book before US president Donald Trump threatened to annex Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat, yet their analyses already highlighted the emerging “global volatility” of Arctic politics. Stefan Wolff notes that Unfrozen provides a useful guide to the recent “breakdown of cooperation, the decline of Arctic exceptionalism, and the worrying proliferation of flashpoints and gray zones.” For Kathryn Lavelle, by contrast, the value of the book’s intervention lies not in its predictions, but in the authors’ “shared reflection on what they have seen and heard since the late 2000s.” Bennett and Dodds consider the historical “trajectory of combined processes” that have shaped the modern Arctic, Lavelle notes, thereby offering a “multifaceted picture of the present.” Such an attention to historical change and multiplicity, in turn, challenges the stereotyped but “enduring vision of the region as remote, empty, or frozen in time,” as Anna Varfolomeeva argues in her response.
In contradistinction to other scholarly analyses of the Arctic, Indigenous politics is central to Unfrozen’s analysis. As Spence remarks, this discussion of Arctic peoples as “not peripheral or symbolic” but as “foundational to the past, present, and future” of the region is both necessary and refreshing. Kuokkenen, an Indigenous Sámi academic, praised the book’s penultimate chapter for its “substantive, detailed engagement with Arctic Indigenous peoples’ political organizing, experiences, and contemporary challenges.” Yet she offers a crucial caveat, noting how certain framings in the book can run the risk of problematically reducing “Indigenous peoples into mere cultures.” Wolff also wonders whether the authors remain too optimistic about the political “say” Indigenous communities will have when it comes to the growing geopolitical interests of major petrostate actors like Russia, China, and the US in the region.
As Varfolomeeva puts it, Unfrozen provides a “comprehensive and accessible entry point” to Arctic geopolitics, with the authors’ “commitment to accessibility” and “argumentative clarity.” Yet while some reviewers praised the book’s holistic approach, other scholars worried that the narrative style occasionally came at the expense of analytical precision. Lavelle observes that “those looking for a formal social scientific model will not find it here,” making the book’s “exact contribution to literature in political science … difficult to pinpoint.” The choice to eschew conventional disciplinary approaches in favor of a thematic organizational structure also means the authors “do not make a case” for their chosen argument “out of the many lines of inquiry they could have chosen.”
Bennett and Dodds conclude Unfrozen with a call to scholarly self-reflection as they grapple with the implications of this Arctic Anthropocene. For all that many in political science may have previously treated the polar region as little more than a periphery, there is no denying that its future will be central to the geopolitical and ecological struggles reshaping our world. Or as Alexander Arroyo notes in his review, “climate change … render[s] the Arctic as a whole into a planetary frontier for the accelerated and amplified effects of warming.” Unfrozen offers a thought-provoking and nuanced guide to today’s Arctic, which will be useful to the scholar, the practitioner, and the curious student alike.
