Arctic Exceptionalism as Myth, Method, and Mirror

Meteor shower and Northern Lights over Snæfellsnes glacier, Iceland. Photo: Diana Robinson

There is a story we tell ourselves about the Arctic. Every Arctic expert knows it by heart. It began in Murmansk, 1987, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech that would later be inscribed as a founding moment in Arctic cooperation. It offered the promise of the Arctic as a zone of peace, disarmament, and science to protect the Arctic environment in light of the decade’s zeitgeist and optimism toward international law, economic (liberal) cooperation, and the emergence of terms such as “sustainable development.” We were all primed to have reached the end of history.

What followed became the spine of what many of us now refer to as “Arctic exceptionalism”: the early 1990s Finnish initiative, the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, the creation of the Arctic Council in 1996, the rise of Indigenous representation (although Indigenous peoples had been politically organising in the Arctic at least since the late 1970s, outside the region since the time of the League of Nations, and Indigenous resistance since the onset of colonisation), the institutional layering of chairships and declarations (or lack thereof), the careful choreography of consensus-ish even when global politics fractured elsewhere. It is a story that has been repeated so many times, it is now part of the canon of Arctic governance. And like any good story, its power lies not in what it says, but in how it is told.

This is not accidental. The architecture of this Arctic story has become mythical. The Arctic is cast as the setting for a drama of international harmony. Arctic cooperation became narrated through the idea of Arctic exceptionalism: an idea that relationships in the region could be sheltered from geopolitics elsewhere. The normative claim of this narrative is that there is a possibility, in the emerging global age, to avoid the reoccurrence of a Cold War–style, East-West confrontation, by bringing into political existence the best version of the Arctic as an “exceptional” region. Again, like any good story, it had its detractors‏. International relations scholars and practitioners who would question, sometimes with accuracy, whether the Arctic was truly geopolitically exceptional or if governance in the region barely reflected the world order. At the start of the war in Ukraine, most of us were met with a “told you so!” from more realist colleagues.

Like any good story, the myth of Arctic exceptionalism still endures. The explanation is rather simple: it follows the familiar arc of heroic narrative: a visionary call, an assembly of characters, a moment or moments of crisis, a rise through trials and, at least for now, a work toward the restoration of balance. It contains all the elements of enduring myth: hope, danger, transformation, and moral clarity. The myth can be seen as a normative concept that prescribes the Arctic as a unique region with a set of unwritten rules, beliefs and history that have given it a degree of immunity to many of the world’s geopolitical problems. However, as any myth told and retold through countless generations, some aspects were misunderstood, and along the way, we potentially conflated the health of a small, peripheral political and scientific body for the health of Arctic governance itself. We mistook what could be achieved with the limited tools available. Even the geopolitics that came crashing on the Arctic’s doorstep in 2022, which suspended the work of the Arctic Council, was narratively absorbed. The Council is not broken, we are told. It is paused. It will resume. It has resumed in limited capacity. The story goes on and the gavel is passed. That is not to say the Arctic Council is not important; far from it. However, it is only one aspect of what makes the Arctic exceptional. The real question is what happens when the myth outlives its capacity to explain what truly occurs in the region?

The persistence of this narrative structure has, in recent years, become a form of conceptual inertia. It has allowed Arctic governance to remain anchored in a self-image that no longer reflects the region’s political or ecological realities. The Arctic of 1987 and 1996 is no more. This is no longer a periphery, even when, too often, it still feels like it is in states’ foreign policy. And, for the people in the region it never was. It is central to global climatic systems, to shifting patterns of economic investment, to the geostrategic calculations of state and corporate actors. The region is marked by new forms of extraction, new technologies of surveillance and intervention, and new claims to resources to serve in the so-called green transition (we all need the critical minerals, you see?!). These are not outside disruptions. They are part of the Arctic now.

And yet, the language of exceptionalism lingered. The notion that the Arctic can remain somehow above politics, or at least adjacent to tensions, persists in public statements and institutional documents. Of course, this rhetorical insulation is narratively convenient. It allows actors to defer difficult questions, about militarisation, sometimes about Indigenous rights or about our shared (non-)extractive futures, mostly because they do not fit the mythic arc. But the Arctic was never truly insulated. The peace it projected was always partial, the cooperation conditional, the exclusions structured. To say “the Arctic is exceptional. Period.” therefore lacks nuances. This is not to say that there are not serious academic debates going on about whether Arctic exceptionalism went away in 2022 but, rather, what we need to develop is a more complex story about the production of the myth itself and the outcomes no one could have predicted when the myth first formed in the late 1990s. Arguing against the old blanket exceptionalism and for a renewed engagement of why exactly the Arctic remains “exceptional” beyond geopolitics does not diminish the real achievements of Arctic diplomacy. On the contrary, it acknowledges that the myth, if left unexamined, can become a form of forgetting.

If Arctic exceptionalism is to remain meaningful, it must be redefined, not as an absence of conflict, not as an excluding footnote in a 1990s political declaration, but as the presence of a different kind of people to people cooperation and political imagination that both take more seriously climate threats and sustainability. We need to ask ourselves how do we retell a story of Arctic exceptionalism that is truer to what we experience? One closer to reality that does not begin with heroic declarations, but with the lived realities of Arctic communities, people, and peoples. One that centres Indigenous governance not as consultative, but as constitutive. One that links environmental protection to justice, and justice to epistemic humility. One that pluralises Arctic exceptionalism(s) and makes visible what truly is at stake in the region: climate change is endangering any single form of life on the planet and we need Arctic cooperation.

This is not about discarding the myth. It is about reconsidering it. Not into a tragedy of lost innocence or paradise lost through ever-(re)increasing militarisation, nor into a triumphalist tale of science diplomacy, but into something more complex, more nuanced. A story that recognises the Arctic as a space of contestation and cohabitation. A site where peace cannot exist without sustainability and sustainability cannot exist without peace. And perhaps, even in this messier telling, there is still something truly exceptional about the Arctic. Not the exceptionality of a pristine wilderness somehow untouched by and sheltered from politics, but the much quieter exceptional quality of a region that still holds open the possibility of a governing otherwise; a governance that can be something more than realist competition, missiles routes in the air and new shipping lanes at sea in need of ever more securitisation and militarisation.

Beyond the myth, Arctic exceptionalism, then, functions both as a mirror, which reflects the contradictions of global governance in the present, and as a method (i.e., a verb) for prefiguring alternative futures. As mirror and method, the idea of Arctic exceptionalism is a way of practicing diplomacy that does not simply defer to the normative hegemony of security at all costs while facing in good faith all present challenges. In this sense, Arctic exceptionalism becomes a kind of anticipatory jurisprudence, a mode of governance that does not yet fully exist but is continuously gestured toward. It is a provisional collective grammar through which all Arctic actors might begin to articulate modes of cooperation however imperfect. That cooperation needs not mean consensus, but commitment. It needs us to keep showing up and to become collectively responsible for our shared future. Arctic exceptionalism(s), however fragile, are worth building and re-building as many times as necessary, not because the Arctic is different, but because it shows us how differences can be understood‏. That is the story of Arctic exceptionalism that is worth telling. Not because it reassures, but because it challenges. Because it resists closure. Because it leaves space for the next pressing chapter: a climate crisis that poses an existential threat to the Arctic and the globe.

On June 11 and 12, 2025, The Arctic Institute – Center for Circumpolar Security Studies and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft co-organised a closed-door workshop and a conference on the topic of “Restoring Arctic Exceptionalism” in Washington D.C.

Romain Chuffart is the Managing Director, Pavel Devyatkin a Senior Associate and Leadership Group Member, and Andreas Raspotnik a Senior Fellow and Leadership Group Member at The Arctic Institute.