Science as national belonging: The construction of Svalbard as a Norwegian space

Abstract

This article examines how science has been employed to establish, maintain, and contest senses of belonging on Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago administered by Norway since 1925 under an international treaty. Our central argument is that the process of constructing Svalbard as a space belonging to Norway has long been intertwined with the processes of describing and representing the archipelago and that participating in those processes has also permitted other states to articulate their own narratives of belonging - on Svalbard in particular and in the Arctic more generally. We deploy the concept of belonging to capture a sense of legitimate presence and stakeholdership that we do not believe can be adequately captured by narrow concepts of sovereignty. Norway's historic and current use of science validates (and even naturalizes) its rule over Svalbard. At the same time, other states use science on Svalbard to articulate geopolitical scripts that portray them as stakeholders in an Arctic that is of transregional relevance due to the effects of climate change.

Disaster risk perceptions and multinational cooperation in Barentsburg, Svalbard

“…About 1/5 of the mined coal remains in Barentsburg to fuel its power station and the rest is exported to Western Europe at low market prices. Following the successful Norwegian example in Longyearbyen, and taking into account the limited time of the mine's operations, Arktikugol has recently begun to rebrand Barentsburg from a mining settlement to a research centre and a tourist destination (Gerlach & Kinossian, 2016;Kelman, Sydnes, Duda, Nikitina, & Webersik, 2020;Pedersen, 2021;Roberts & Paglia, 2016;Schennerlein, 2021;Sevastyanov et al, 2021) 2014) placing research as the first priority for Barentsburg's post-mining livelihoods. Tourism as the second priority represents Russia's own version of the so-called "lastchance tourism."…”

Tourists and researcher identities: critical considerations of collisions, collaborations and confluences in Svalbard

“…Svalbard has a history of exploration dating back to the 16 th Century (Avango et al, 2011). Up until very recently, human activity and imaginaries of this region have been centred on the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, which also dominated the research agenda here (Roberts & Paglia 2016). Tourism and other scientific research were very much on the margins.…”

A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations

“…Thus, in addition to representing particular landscapes, field stations and the research they facilitate reinforce sovereign claims. The empirical articulation of a 'homeland' forms the focus of Roberts and Paglia's (2016) analysis of the Norwegian claim to the international Arctic research hub, Svalbard. In their examination of the successive descriptions of this 'terra nullius' by Norwegian and Swedish geographers, cartographers, zoologists and geologists, their diplomatic consequences and cultural contours, Roberts and Paglia trace the co-production of nature and nation.…”

“…No indigenous communities call Svalbard home. The naturalization of the archipelago as part of the 'Norwegian geobody' inheres in scientific descriptions and state-level intervention (Roberts and Paglia, 2016). The same goes for the Greenland ice shield (Skrydstrup, 2016), although even in these cases, the construction of emptiness requires some historical purification (of Dutch whalers and Russian trappers on Svalbard, for example).…”