(Un)frozen Spaces: Exploring the Role of Sea Ice in the Marine Socio-legal Spaces of the Bering and Beaufort Seas

Abstract

2018) '(Un)frozen spaces : exploring the role of sea ice in the marine socio-legal spaces of the Bering and Beaufort Seas.', Journal of borderlands studies., 33 (2). pp. 239-253.The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. AbstractSea ice is a dynamic physical element of the greater Arctic marine system, one that has myriad connections to human systems on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Changes to the spatial extent of sea ice simultaneously permits and endangers maritime operations, as well as impacts current debates over maritime boundaries, presenting an interesting challenge for international law. Sea ice is not a stationary object; it moves through time and space in response to the physical forces of wind, ocean currents, and heating. It has a tangible, material and substantive role in contestations over territory, resources and marine boundaries in both the Beaufort and Bering Seas. We suggest here that sea ice's material nature in these marine regions continuously challenges stationary conceptions of law in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Building on recent work on the human geographies of sea ice, the dynamic field of legal geography and recent contributions in ocean-space geography, we outline how the dynamism of sea ice could influence notions of boundary, resources and climate change in ocean-spaces of the greater Arctic region.

Maritime borders: A reconsideration of state power and territorialities over the ocean

“…The migration routes of different fish species, like the salmonid migration mentioned above, entail different state strategies for fishing or conservation governance. Additionally, different oceanic spaces have different materialities, such as how the “in-betweenness” of intertidal zones (Hung, 2020) differs from the high seas (Gray, 2018), and how the seabed (Zalik, 2018) differs from the melting Arctic Sea (Shake et al, 2018; Stephenson, 2018). Such multiple materialities push the state to apply different approaches to ocean territorialization, and the effectiveness of maritime borders depends on the state’s responsiveness to the specific materialities of different nonhuman actors or oceanic zones.…”