The Arctic is undergoing a profound transformation. As the region literally unfreezes under the pressures of climate change, established political relationships, imaginaries and assumptions about its future are also being unsettled. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, Anna Niia Varfolomeeva speaks with Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds about their book Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic .
Together, they explore who gets to shape the region at this critical moment: as governments and global powers increasingly look northwards, whose interests guide its transformation? And how can northern and Indigenous communities retain meaningful agency over the places they call home? Moving between geopolitics and everyday realities, Bennett and Dodds challenge portrayals of the Arctic as an empty wilderness or simply a new arena of great-power competition. Instead, they invite us to see it as a complex and lived space whose future is being negotiated at multiple levels, and to pay closer attention to whose voices and visions are heard as that future takes shape.
Mia Bennett is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Washington and a political geographer whose research explores the geopolitics of infrastructure development in the Arctic and orbital space, with particular attention to Indigenous empowerment.
Klaus Dodds is Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at Middlesex University and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, specialising in the geopolitics and governance of the Polar Regions and the cultural politics of ice.
Anna Niia Varfolomeeva is Guest Editor at the Review of Democracy. She is an environmental social scientist, Academy Research Fellow at the University of Oulu, Finland, and Principal Investigator of the DATAVOID project.
The interview was conducted by Anna Varfolomeeva. Alina Young edited the audio file.
