دانلود کتاب قطب شمال – مقدمه ای بر پویایی چند وجهی قطب شمال

When the GlobalArctic project was launched back in 2014, together with Professor Lassi Heininen, we made the claim that the Arctic should be looked at as a global region as it had during the Cold War. After the end of the Cold War, however, with the now-famous Murmansk speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 calling for the Arctic to become a “Zone of Peace”, the Arctic’s global dimension declined somewhat, at least among politicians and academics. While it was true that the Arctic Council, the main governance body in Arctic matters, had been admitting “observers” since its inception in 1996, they had only remained as observers, until today. As for academia, one could indeed note an increased interest in Arctic research, but almost no researchers looked at the big picture; that is, at how the Arctic was transformed by global forces and in turn affected the globe, whether ecologically, economically, or in terms of geopolitics. At around the same time (2013–2014) the Arctic Circle Conference was established, and the GlobalArctic project has been present there ever since. But the Arctic Circle is more of a trade show, channeling all the new interests in Arctic matters, especially the business interests. With the changing Arctic, the business interests became ever more global. The Arctic Frontiers Conference was a precursor to this (starting in 2006), but had more of a niche focus. Nevertheless, our GlobalArctic project was not created as a reaction to these conferences; rather, it was geared toward the academic community. We wanted to help it to conceptualize what we saw unfolding, namely the melting of the Arctic ice, the ensuing environmental problems, especially the global ones, and simultaneously the new gold rush to extract whatever resources one could find in the Arctic, as well as the ensuing new geopolitics. The geopolitical situation has worsened in recent years, especially since the 2014 Ukraine Crisis. This introductory chapter has three main aims. In the first section, we present the GlobalArctic project and how it has unfolded since its inception. This section serves as the context and raison d’être of this book. The second section stresses our substantive conceptualization of the GlobalArctic, as well as how this conceptualization has (somewhat) evolved over time. In the third section we summarize the main contributions to this book and explain what we want to achieve with it. At the end of the chapter, we will offer some considerations about the future perspectives of the GobalArctic project.