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The (Arctic) Show Must Go On

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Date01 December 2011
Published date01 December 2011
AuthorGeneviève King Ruel
DOI10.1177/002070201106600411
Subject MatterI. Issues
| International Journal | Autumn 2011 | 825 |
Geneviève King Ruel
The (Arctic) show
must go on
Natural resource craze and national identity in Arctic politics
Geneviève King Ruel is research fellow and Canada Research Chair in Canadian foreign and
defence policy at the Université du Québec à Montréal.
With climate change radically transforming the geopolitics at the top of the
world, the Arctic has entered the global limelight, and the media periodically
put northern issues front and centre. This interest, it was said some years
ago, was novel—a product of the rapid melting of the Arctic icecap, the
uncovering of natural resources, and the opening of the Arctic waters. And
yet media and scholars keep conveying more or less the same information
and address the same issues year after year. Every so often, a great deal of
words and ink f‌low on the one hand to depict the rising tensions between
Arctic nations, and on the other to debunk what many now call the myth of
a new cold war.
With the rapid melting of the Arctic icecap, great confusion has arisen
with regard to the politics of the north. A plethora of statements has been
provided by political actors and the media to the effect that the north is rapidly
becoming a battleground—an issue many believe to be directly linked to the
resource craze—as the result of an assumed vast, even fabulous, amount
of natural resources buried there. The notion that the Arctic is a potential

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