Navigating Political Borders Old and New: The Territoriality of Indigenous Inuit Governance

This article looks at the ways in which borders have and continue to construct, define, and redefine Arctic collective political identities, the Arctic’s political geography and finally the implications of changing borders for Arctic policymaking. The article begins by engaging with critical international relations and geography literature regarding border construction as a physical entity and as an intellectual construct. The following two sections focus on the making and remaking of Inuit borders and the reconceptualization of political space which has accompanied this process. Through a case study of what is defined here as the Inuit polity (Shadian, J. M. 2014. The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice, and Inuit Governance. New York: Routledge), sections three and four re-examine the sedimented and traditional notions of borders, the newly created borders carved out of the land claims, those political entities which transcend state borders through Inuit Arctic politics, and the less well-defined borders that exist between water and land, ice and land, ice and water. The article then turns to the specific policy case of Arctic Search and Rescue and the tensions between conventional state-centered policy and Inuit political spaces. The point is to draw out the ways in which conventional thinking about borders limits the complex realities and challenges for Arctic Search and Rescue. Lastly, this paper brings this critical analysis of borders and territoriality to think about what critical political geography may impart regarding questions of governance, legal space, and policy in the Arctic.