A variety of global developments, both political and environmental, have pushed the Arctic region to the forefront of an equally wide range of disciplinary studies. Exploring these myriad changes, Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, is an ambitious effort that speaks to the history of a dynamic region, its evolving circumstances and peoples, as well as its uncertain future. Unfrozen’s authors seek to explain why the Arctic is equally a site of planetary ecological emergency and a place of regional and global political competition, thus combining their respective disciplinary homes of geography and geopolitics. They offer their shared reflection on what they have seen and heard since the late 2000s, not by making predictions, but by reviewing the trajectory of these combined processes both backward and forward. The authors bring a wide breadth of expertise to the table. Mia Bennett is a geographer with extensive on-the-ground experience in the Arctic. Klaus Dodds is a prolific scholar on the geopolitics of the melting ice, who has published on the scramble for resources and negotiations in the region. The insights that their combined interdisciplinary knowledge brings to this urgent set of questions about the Arctic’s future are welcome.

The book’s style is more literary than other social scientific or historical texts. Each of the 10 chapters could be described as depicting a different “scene” in the Arctic, with information about the relevant history, politics, and social circumstances. The first chapter reviews the Arctic’s cooperative framework, the second looks at its unstructured boundaries, and the third considers its economy. The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters address different aspects of the changing sea dynamics there. In the seventh and eighth chapters, the book returns to the transformational political dynamics in the region at the start of the twenty-first century that began with an exceptional degree of cooperation and turned into a series of crises, such as Russia’s annexation of Crimea and NATO expansion. The ninth chapter addresses the identity of the Arctic native peoples. The tenth situates the Arctic within a broader set of historical epochs from 1300 into the future. A section of glossy-page color photographs in the center of the book gives the reader a sense of the beauty and diversity of the region.

Unfrozen’s nonlinear style will appeal differently to different groups of readers. Some who are interested in a specific political-science aspect of the Arctic may be frustrated that their concern is integrated in different ways in the various chapters. Those looking for a formal social scientific model will not find it here. Nonetheless, others may appreciate that Arctic issues are not separated from broader political, economic, or social considerations that the reader might have otherwise missed. For example, the book situates the history of the Arctic Council prominently in the first chapter, returns to it in chapter 6 to address its pause, and mentions the Arctic Council intermittently throughout. Some readers, too, might benefit from the sixth chapter’s information earlier in the text, whereas others might find it helpful where it is. Chapter 8 takes on a series of flashpoints, including between Arctic states and Russia at the end of the Cold War, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the question of Greenland, disagreements over Russia and NATO’s borders, the matter of Svalbard, and contestations over the Bering Strait and the Central Arctic Ocean. A reader interested in contemporary trouble spots will find this grouping helpful, whereas it might confuse another reader who would question how these flashpoints were selected and why they were organized as they were.

Unfrozen’s exact contribution to literature in political science is thus difficult to pinpoint, most likely because the authors did not attempt to use conventional approaches. Other scholars have carved out specific disciplinary aspects of politics, such as Elana Wilson Rowe’s Arctic Governance (2019) on international relations and governance, Elizabeth Buchanan’s Red Arctic (2023) on Russian foreign policy, Walter Berbrick, Gaelle Piche, and Walter Zimmerman’s Newport Manual on Arctic Security (2022) on Arctic security, or Michael Byers’s International Law and the Arctic (2013) on international law. Yet Unfrozen eschews such approaches with its relatively shorter timeline, its thematic approach, and its projection into the future.

The authors’ instinct to show how the Arctic’s changing environment intersects with other global processes is laudable; however, they do not make a case for why the juncture of these two areas is the most important among the many lines of inquiry (e.g., anthropological, sociological, or environmental) that they could have chosen. For example, Bathsheba Demuth’s 2019 piece in the American Historical Review analyzes competing ways of harvesting energy in American capitalism and Soviet communism and makes the case that the caloric harvest in these two Arctic states was as important to their state formation as national security and social welfare were. In her vision, the Pacific walrus sits at the intersection of energy and environmental management history. By showing that the United States and the Soviet Union were both involved in finding and processing biological calories, Demuth challenges the premise that it is capitalistic modes of production that are the sole threat to the Arctic environment.

Nonetheless, Bennett and Dodds offer important hints at the shape of things to come, given their multifaceted picture of the present. Considerable insights result. They write, “If you want American support, expect an invoice to come first” (p. 270). Since the book went to press, the United States has now emerged as an Arctic aggressor alongside Russia, with the Trump administration’s repeated statements insisting that the US annex Greenland as part of its newly conceived hemispheric power. Their compelling investigation of the Arctic offers a nuanced understanding of the dynamics in the region involving a range of actors.