Sovereignty cubed: The Arctic as a territorial and ontological volume

Abstract

State sovereignty over space has traditionally been viewed as confined to a bounded land area. However, scholarship in critical cartography, political, and social theory shows this understanding to be flawed. This perspective not only limits understandings of sovereignty density, but also weakens our understanding of the limits of the state. This is particularly evident in the Arctic, where sovereignty discourse often fails to address the complexities of space in connection with authority and legitimacy for decision-making in the region. This article first critically examines Arctic sovereignty, challenging the notion of sovereignty as merely a horizontal area with land or sea boundaries. Instead, it argues that Arctic geopolitics and governance are better understood when sovereignty is considered as a scalar concept encompassing a territorial volume. Second, it contextualises the processes involved in the legitimisation of sovereignty and governance practices across the Arctic, framing this as ontological sovereignty. The article contends that Arctic sovereignty and governance are more comprehensively understood by shifting from a strictly material perspective to an ontological framing, which encompasses control over the nature and existence of Arctic spaces, with implications for future development and understandings of Arctic governance.

Introduction

Sovereignty in and over the Arctic is a shifting and contested ontological landscape defying traditional concepts and structures of Westphalian sovereignty, a condition which exists for several reasons. First is the nature of the international system and of the normative operators for this system which evolved over time to create new rules for either establishing or maintaining claims to territorial sovereignty, narrowly construed. Second, is the expanding nature and character of space that can be effectively occupied or administrated with respect to capabilities provided through technological advances. Third, is the expansion of claims to sovereignty from an exclusive domain of states to include Indigenous sovereignty with the rights and privileges of authority and self-governance over ancestral lands. Finally, a critical departure for Arctic sovereignty, broadly construed as both practices and understandings, is that the limits of state authority and its influence over decision-making in the region flex over spaces and resources that are traditionally divided between state territory and international spaces, with recognised legitimacy both domestically and internationally. This latter condition can be described as ontological sovereignty.

The Arctic region provides a unique space to consider principles of Westphalian sovereignty, such as territorial integrity, recognition of states, equality between states and non-intervention are practiced, how they are practiced, and where and how state patterns of practices deviate from international norms of sovereignty. This is particularly relevant because, in its natural environmental context, the Arctic region is situated as a critical region linking a number of natural systems (Crépin et al., 2017) such as climate regulation, carbon sequestration, or ecosystem biodiversity. In its geopolitical context, it is noted for its exceptional condition as a laboratory for governance (Young, 1985) as seen in international collaboration for environmental protection, maintenance as a zone of peace and cooperation, science diplomacy and the elevation of Indigenous participation and knowledge systems in science and decision-making within the Arctic Council. This makes considerations of sovereignty in the Arctic not only related to its role within natural systems and boundaries of physical geographies that correlate to legal classifications, but also its role within social and political systems, revealing matter for understanding how sovereignty pivots on an axis of not only the horizontal spaces on the map, but also the often, unmapped vertical spaces and to a third invisible axis of ontological space.

Descriptions of the material domain of state sovereignty and geographic descriptions of states almost without fail describe territory as an area ascribed to particular legal categories defined through physical geography (e.g., Elden, 2013; Ratzel, 2017; Whittlesey, 2017). This description invokes a horizontal configuration for the domain under the jurisdiction of state sovereignty. Yet this conception of territory as area is limited and fails to account for different spatial categories of territory which are often included as de facto sovereign space with various forms of exclusiveness when located beyond the state's borders proper. This article first forwards the idea that the territory of a state within the Arctic should be seen as a territorial volume rather than as an area with limited dimensionality.

Commonly understood as three-dimensional space in mathematics, volume is a multiplication of the length, width and height of a given shape, called cubing, with some variations dependent on the form of the object under consideration (James & James, 1992). If applied to a large form, such as planet Earth, calculations for the volume of our sphere use a formula that includes pi. While these particular calculations do little for our understanding of the political organisation of the space contained within this sphere, they are useful if, in the calculation for volume, you think of length or width as the distance across a map and height as either atmospheric altitude or oceanic depth. The political and sovereign volume of the earth is a complex reality because, within this volume, we find that air, water and soil fill this volumetric space in the form of mountains, rivers, oceans, boreal forests, sky, and so on.

Space itself is an abstract concept because it is ‘a self-subsistent, homogeneous, isotropic medium in which objects exist’ (Schatzki, 1991, 651) and frequently, space is imagined as an empty void, rather than as filled with either material or social meaning. Although our planetary boundaries certainly include a physical and geographic spatial volume framing the fundaments of our material being, critically, this is also a socialised and ontological space that frames the normative understanding around our political organisation of territory. In this volume, we find objective space that acts as our material container, relational space that connects people and the built environment within this container and territorial space, defined by the boundaries and demarcations between all sorts of political and politicised units.

This positions territory as a multi-dimensional configuration throughout space, considering not only land and sea in the horizontal plane but also the atmosphere, planetary crust and the water column of the oceans on a vertical axis, or requiring ‘an Escher-like representation of space, a territorial hologram’ (Weizman, 2002). Corresponding to this expansion of the territory of states, the sovereignty of the state must also be considered with some variations in exclusivity within this volume of space. Sovereignty in this territorial volume cannot presently be seen as an absolute condition but must be understood as having shades of relativity; and without the horizontal confines emerging from definitions of area, it should be considered as a volumetric and scalar module. As a result of this complexity, the second contribution of this article is to expand the thinking about state sovereignty over the Arctic from beyond its physical manifestations of area and volume into that of ontological space.

As an ontological space, the Arctic becomes the playground for explanations of its features and for the relations between these features and their incorporation within social and political systems. Some examples include the long-debated nature of Arctic exceptionalism or its positioning as an infinite resource base. This ontological space is a void to be filled with meaning and interpretations of ideational forms and normative operators, or rules that create ‘predictable patterns of behaviour and in producing stability in the relationships between agents within a system’ (Wood-Donnelly, 2023a). This results in shared understandings of the Arctic and of its place within social constructions of place where spheres of discursive authority can be disconnected from territorial boundaries (Weber & Biersteker, 1996). In addition, within this ontological space, territory is used as a political technology that frames understandings around the ontological spaces of the Arctic and normative understandings around its political organisation with the effect of creating ontological sovereignty. This ontological sovereignty is also subject to a criterion of Westphalian sovereignty, that is, legitimacy created through international recognition by states.

The contributions of this article are threefold: first, it argues for a scalar understanding of sovereignty as territorial volume; second, it contends that the legitimisation of sovereignty in the Arctic (and globally) is an ontological process occurring within an ontologically and socially constructed geopolitical space, limited only by normative acceptance and material capability; and third, it describes how these arguments collectively transfer understandings of sovereignty from vertical and horizontal dimensions to scalar understandings of legitimate authority, encapsulated as ‘cubed’ sovereignty. The article develops its arguments in five sections: first comes a discussion of the material elements of sovereignty in the Arctic, the second and third parts present the evolution and expansion from physical to ontological territorial sovereignty, the fourth section discusses ontological space and ontological sovereignty, followed by a short discussion of the future of Arctic sovereignty.

Sovereignty of the Arctic

The earliest surviving (Western) representations of political space and territory in the Arctic date back several centuries, such as those produced by Mercator, depicting the region through mythological, or perhaps from influences of lost knowledge sources (1595). In this oldest map, you can find the mythical islands where the pygmies of the north dwelt and between those islands, rivers leading to a large magnetic stone (Taylor, 1956). As lore gave way to scientific knowledge, so changed the depictions of the Arctic. Cartographic representations of the Arctic instead mapped the empty white spaces where territorial knowledge was incomplete and as the region was explored, charts and features of the region became populated with the places named for explorers, monarchs and other important persons to represent de jure governance and authority with mapping described as ‘an enterprise of naming and possession, charting the world and then colonizing it’ (Pickles, 2004, p. 115). In this process, the allocation of political authority of territory transferred from inhabitant to empire through ontological sovereignty and associated power in rulemaking.

Mercator's map is important, not only for perhaps being the first map of the Arctic but also for providing a foundation for the idea of territory beyond the glacial sea. Although the norms of freedom of the seas legally limited claims to maritime sovereignty in the region, reinforced by limitations imposed by the polar climate, the long-held belief in the existence of another continent in the far north kept twentieth-century explorers looking for this northern mythological land. Explorers searched for this so long into the twentieth century, that aeroplanes were used in the endeavours. Worrying about the accelerating speed of exploration, during this process some littoral states began using sector boundary lines drawn from their peripheral borders with other nations to the North Pole (Svarlien, 1958). These lines have also been repeated by polar scholars, explorers, and significantly, on maps issued by government agencies or in international treaties.

It was the advent of aeronautical technology and the turn to exploration of the Arctic from the skies that caused a rapid change in the mapping of the region (Miller, 1925). The first sign of this change came from the Canadian government presenting maps of their territory that implemented the use of the sector principle. This depicted their territory extending up to the North Pole and referred to a declaration detailing their sphere of interest. The practice of drawing these lines even today continues by Canada and Russia, which suggests that their sovereignty, or the jurisdiction of state authority in the Arctic Ocean extends in lines radiating from the land boundaries of the littoral states to a terminus at the North Pole. However, as simple two-dimensional depictions showing a line across the surface of land and sea, they create and reinforce the notion of state territory as an area on a horizontal plane.

Although these maps seem to depict the delimitation of state authority in geographic representations, they are in direct contradiction to understood norms of sovereignty in the international system – despite the modern expansion of relative sovereignty into maritime spaces. Even though these maps do not have high rates of circulation, they serve to suggest that at some level, sovereignty over the Arctic does not follow the usual patterns for authority and jurisdiction over space by states corresponding to normative frames within specific historical moments (Wood-Donnelly, 2019). This first suggests that these long-standing depictions of Arctic spaces as incorporated into specific political affiliations violate the standard understandings of state authority relative to legal spaces of territory. With sector lines never solidifying as a norm of the international system, these maps and their lines do not subscribe to standard practice for norms of sovereignty over territory.

Because territory is a political technology, sovereignty in the Arctic is not restricted to the dichotomy between land and not land, nor is the discourse of sovereignty framed between absolute versus relative conditions. Rather, practices of sovereignty over territory are evident in every tangible and material dimension across the Arctic, including land, air and sea. States use practices that permeate the space known as the Arctic into their jurisdiction using legal and governance mechanisms for authorising their power and authority over this space while exercising normative mechanisms for creating legitimacy for this authority outside of peopled spaces. These are practices that began in the Arctic even before volumetric sovereignty was technologically or normatively feasible through government administration.

A second political technology pervasive in reinforcing a volume of sovereignty in the Arctic can be found in the practices of mapping Arctic spaces. These practices in the representation of Arctic spaces as belonging to the territories of specific states are critical to shaping the norms of sovereignty for the Arctic. In this regard, maps are important when they actively create reality, construct knowledge, exercise and communicate power over space (Crampton & Krygier, 2006). In this, states have used borders and boundaries on maps and legal documents, to create their sovereignty over territory in the Arctic, sovereignty that is acknowledged by states outside of the Arctic as a condition of becoming an observer to the Arctic Council (Arctic Council, 2023). These spatial divisions are repeated and reinforced by popular, scholarly and governmental discourses.

The state's sovereign relationship to territory in the Arctic is a complex system spanning both national and international spaces against the backdrop of normative evolutions in the international system. On one hand, the Arctic states are securing the legitimacy of their authority in the region by coercing non-Arctic states to acknowledge their sovereignty in the Arctic region when they join as observers to the Arctic Council. This has the effect of indicating the integrity of sovereignty and legitimacy for decision-making in the region. On the other hand – they recognise that other states may wish to capitalise on some economic activities, such as fishing or commercial shipping routes. Their inability to unilaterally prohibit these activities, given the constraints of international law demonstrates that these activities would occur in a space outside of sovereign control. With these alternate projections occurring in the same space, it is little wonder that evaluations regarding potential conflict and cooperation in the Arctic vary widely when outside observers perceive the Arctic as an internationally contested space.

The simple explanation for these varying projections is that the exercise of sovereignty and the rules of state territory have undergone a radical transformation over the last century. Sovereignty is no longer an absolute concept but instead has gradients of authority. In tangent, the legal spaces of territory have grossly expanded over the last century to include not only land but also sky and sea. As a result, the strength of authority is dependent upon which type of territory ‘sovereignty’ is applied. What, in another time would have been expressed as a sphere of influence, has become a domain for relative sovereignty. The effect is that the use of the term ‘sovereignty’ in the Arctic relates to different legal categories of space, with varying expressions of rights rather than the absolute expression used in popular discourse. In addition, territorial law and sovereignty norms for space reflect the technological limitations of particular eras in which new sovereignty norms are introduced, leaving states to perpetually renegotiate the constraints of legal norms for territory given the security and resource exigencies of a particular period.

Therefore, this requires an examination of sovereignty as a scalar rather than an absolute concept and of territorial sovereignty (in the Arctic), not as an area, but as a volume. Scalar and volumetric sovereignty can be used to understand the complexities and nuances of territorial control, authority and legitimacy over space and time and to move away from a flat understanding of sovereignty. Using this frame, sovereignty in the Arctic can be described as scalar and volumetric as it can be divided into different sections horizontally and into different layers vertically, permeating across a variety of spatial dimensions, forms and levels of governance. Although the governance of many of these spaces only became legally viable in the middle of the twentieth century, some of the Arctic states have depicted these spaces within their political maps for around a century. While legal norms are evolving so that increasingly, governance of these spaces is now considered to have legitimacy, in addition, these spaces are expanding both horizontally and vertically so that all space found in the Arctic region is claimed as the territory of a state. This has the effect of eliminating any space that could be considered as a global commons and saturates the Arctic as a space of sovereignty monopolies removing global governance agendas powerless against the border of territorial sovereignty.

Physical and ontological territorial sovereignty evolutions

The framing of sovereignty over territory as landed space underwent a major transformation in the twentieth century, even if only in legal rather than practical understandings. This occurred with augmentations in international law creating new legal categories of territory, including maritime and air space. This came with varying sovereign rights associated with these domains established in the Chicago Convention 1944 which granted states ‘exclusive sovereignty over airspace’ (International Civil Aviation Organization, 1944) and the Geneva Conventions Law of the Sea in 1958, which extended sovereignty to territorial waters, including airspace, seabed and subsoil (United Nations [UN], 1958). While in effect, this merely extended the two-dimensional, horizontal conception of territory to a new material realm, it also had the auxiliary effect of introducing the third dimension to the political understanding of sovereign space.

With the original understanding as one of territorial sovereignty being affixed to land, the logics for these territorial expansions is also anchored in land. For both maritime and air space, the size and extent of these legal categories of territory radiate outward from land. The Chicago Convention stipulates that the sovereign air space of a state is the sky above its land and while it defines territory, it does not define the upper terminus of airspace nor its radial angles. Although there is some debate as to whether airspace sovereignty should have a vertical limit (Reinhardt, 2007), the main existing limiter is the stipulation of the Outer Space Treaty which provides that ‘outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty’ (UN, 1967). It is conceivable that there is ambiguity regarding the sovereign authority of a state at certain levels of the atmosphere – and therefore potential for conflict – unless practice dictates that these boundaries are perpendicular to the earth's crust, for example. Given the failure to define the extent of air space in the treaty, it in effect extends indefinitely to the edge of Earth's atmosphere and terminates only when it meets what could be conceived of as outer space, or where at least technological capacity permits regular use and establishment of customary practices.

While the idea of airspace as a legal category of territory may be relatively new, the notion of territorial waters has existed for centuries. In practice, this extension of land-based sovereignty into the maritime was essentially constrained by the horizon, the physical limit to which a state's military could feasibly defend itself out from the state's territory into the sea. Yet, conceptually the description of these non-land spaces as territory or territorial spaces is linguistically problematic and exemplifies the limitations in geopolitical thinking within the territorial trap, with ‘land’ considered as areas of the earth's crust not covered by water (Park & Allaby, 2013). It seems incongruous that an international treaty dealing with the geographic subdivision of space needs to use the expression of ‘land territory’ (UN, 1958) as a way to differentiate land as territory from the other legal types of territory that emerged as a result of the expansion of land-based sovereignty. The inability of language to describe territoriality without the use of words derived from terra demonstrates our incapacity to understand sovereignty's complexities when it is not attached to land, but also that sovereignty was based in both physical and ontological realms.

While early arguments against the sovereign enclosures of maritime space were based on both man's inability to control the sea as well as a state's inability to be able to defend endless swathes of ocean, another more significant flaw presents itself in the issue of how a state legitimises its sovereignty and authority over territory. For so long sovereignty and territorial control were restricted to land by normative constraints that were based on technical infeasibility for defence, maritime exploration and sophisticated mapping of the seabed. Yet, as technical feasibility evolved, so did the normative arrangements for sovereignty connected to territory that cannot be defined as land. This pervasiveness of other types of sovereign non-landed territory produces a theoretical difficulty for legitimising this form of sovereignty, caused by thinking within the territorial trap of state sovereignty.

This theoretical difficulty is rooted in the origins of sovereignty and state authority over landed spaces. Social contract theory posits that sovereignty is the result of the relationship between the state and the citizen, so the authority of the state over territory is not rooted in land but is rather a social agreement (Hobbes, 1988; Locke, 1982). Through this relationship, the state acquires its legitimacy to rule not by force or power, but rather through the exchange of rights and responsibilities. In the exchange of loyalty and civil obedience for sovereignty, the state is to provide security to its citizens’ life, liberty and property. Extending this authority to empty space makes the notion of sovereignty ethically hollow and without legitimising force, and a form of what Krasner described as ‘organised hypocrisy’ (1999).

During imperial expansion, the idea of the social contract as the point of origin for sovereignty became problematic when assuming authority over new and far-flung lands. Although the volunteerism aspect of the social contract disappeared in this process, states justified the legitimacy of their extended authority through the adoption of responsibility through the notion of effective occupation. In this regard, states legitimised their sovereignty through the administration and governance of new territory. Yet the assumption of responsibility and the obligation of the state to fulfil certain functions in exchange for sovereignty is inherent in both of these contexts.

These examples of the exercise, application and justification of state authority over territory show that both territory and sovereignty are social constructions and subject to normative evolution. In this regard, it is useful to understand territory is not a fixed geographic determination and it used to describe space in all its real and ethereal forms (physical and metaphysical). Rather, territory is a political technology in ‘the multiple ways [it] is produced and reproduced, a process rather than an outcome’ (Elden, 2021, p. 175). As a result, territory is merely a tool for defining the domain of state authority and jurisdiction over people, capital and earth. In this regard, it is a space organised through particular logics beyond the simple binary of land versus not land and is instead about practices of power (Paasi, 1998), capitalist production (Steinberg, 2001) and the bundling of ‘rights analogous to “property”’ (Kratochwil, 1989, p. 252).

Territory is a spatial category that is indicative not of land but is both a physically volumetric and ontological space that falls within the sphere of interest, if not the sovereignty of a specific political entity. In governance, this plays out over several different contexts and scales – from the local police which may handle investigations related to everyday crimes but will also address crimes that happen in virtual spaces or, for example, drones flying too near restricted airspace, or search and rescue operations in mines below the ground's surface. For the state, this now seems to include, for example, jurisdiction over capital and resources held by their citizens in physical spaces external to land boundaries of the country, or perhaps in virtual spaces when including cryptocurrencies or electromagnetic spaces when licensing radio frequencies. While the three-dimensional responsibility seems more or less an obvious result within the physical territorial boundaries of a state where absolute sovereignty exists, it requires normative strength and an ontological sovereignty to exist, and survive in spaces beyond, be it physical, virtual or ontological.

The act of defining sovereignty over territory therefore becomes about practices of territoriality and resource control. It is the practice of defining spaces where states can exercise the rights of sovereignty, both absolute and relative. Nowhere is this more true than in the geographic space known as the Arctic, where the territorial containers of the littoral state spill over the land boundaries into the ocean spaces, expanding and radiating until their convergence at the North Pole. In this space, the variations in practices for sovereignty in different legal categories of territory are being performed in real-time with the effect of creating not a surface area of sovereignty, but rather a volume of spatial authority, or sovereignty cubed. Nowhere is this relationship between territorial sovereignty and ontological sovereignty within a territorial volume more evident than what can be observed in the geopolitics of the Arctic region.

Expanding physical sovereignty to ontological sovereignty in the Arctic

Sovereignty over land is the point where the conceptualisation of the state as a bordered power container (Giddens, 1987) begins, and indeed, all sovereignty over other spaces throughout the Arctic originates from its anchor to land. Of course, terrain – the mountains and valleys that make up the territory of the state when viewed from the ground is understood as three-dimensional. However, for centuries, sovereignty has been perceived as stretching over a two-dimensional space, in large part thanks to the depiction of vast areas condensing into the space of a map. This makes the plethora of maps produced on the Arctic with lines drawn between states ‘at ground level’ a problematic conception in their casual portrayal as state authority extending over ocean spaces.

The context where this difficulty emerges is in the discourse related to sovereignty over maritime spaces in the Arctic Ocean. There are excellent maps showing the potential divisions of the Arctic Ocean between maritime states based on existing provisions of international law, such as those produced by the international boundaries research unit Centre for Borders Research (IBRU, 2022). However, none of these maps show how these divisions are mapped in the actual configuration of their application to the material elements in these particular spaces, which can have the accidental effect of shaping public perceptions of the extent and density of sovereignty in the Arctic maritime. For example, the law of the sea provides for states littoral to the Arctic to extend their claims to the continental shelf up to a distance of 350 nautical miles. The two-dimensional representations of this fact in maps show that the claims of the Arctic states converge somewhere around the North Pole – and while this is true to one extent – it applies only to the material space of the subcontinental shelf and not to the entirety of the water column of the Arctic Ocean. A perspective from critical cartography would suggest that this leads to a flawed understanding for many observers of these maps about the spaces legally available for sovereignty claims, while at the same time lending perceived legitimacy to governance mechanisms levied by the Arctic states within these spaces.

This legitimacy of authority extends to multilateral governance arrangements made by the Arctic States over concerns that are subjectively outside of their jurisdiction. A good example of this included the 2018 Agreement to prevent unregulated fishing in the high seas of the Arctic, which applies to areas of ocean space beyond the legal limits for sovereignty and beyond the exclusive exploitation rights of the exclusive economic zone but is being governed through a multilateral agreement of the littoral Arctic states in coalition with some permanent participants and observers to the Arctic Council. As it happens, this agreement applies to a space where fishing is nearly impossible due to ice cover but discourages planned use of Arctic fisheries by non-Arctic states which could compromise stocks in adjacent territories which are subject to exclusive exploitation, or relative sovereignty, by the Arctic littoral states. However, in another context, it may be permissible as these same states were able to include a clause for special authorisation for environmental protection of ice-covered waters in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as an example of the shaping of normative operators found in ontological sovereignty.

If sovereignty can be claimed along a horizontal axis, then why can it not also be claimed along a vertical axis? The earliest legal arguments about the sovereignty of the sea space are that it was not possible since it could not be defended or controlled (Grotius, 1916). While technology has made the defence argument irrelevant, the sea is still not something that mankind can control. However, with technology also enabling a plethora of exploitation opportunities in the oceans from fishing to mining – the international community of states waved the restrictions on sovereignty in place of resource security in the Law of the Sea conventions. In the same period, airspace was also determined as a sovereign space and in the Arctic, airspace does not end with the land or territorial waters. Instead, it extends to the North Pole, adding vertical depth to sovereignty over a horizontal plane that goes far beyond the legal sovereign boundaries of the state.

While these practices and processes go far in changing the ontological understandings of sovereignty over space in its expansion to unorthodox spaces of sovereignty, this goes even further in the construction of ontological sovereignty in the Arctic. Into this landscape, we can draw attention to the rise of responsibility as a normative operator in international governance. This has been described as a space with ‘room for contestation in which rules, regulations and norms are being negotiated and where arguments and justifications are brought forward in responsibility claims…’ (Hansen-Magnusson & Vetterlein, 2022, p. 5). In the Arctic, we can see claims for responsibility for environmental protection, search and rescue or even responsible resource exploitation as legitimisers for Arctic state authority and jurisdiction over this space.

Sovereignty over Arctic territories is owned by eight Arctic states. Some parts of this land are the natural homeland of Arctic Indigenous peoples who have been assumed and incorporated into the governance systems of these states, peoples who have experienced the processes of ontological sovereignty to the detriment of their cultures for centuries. Emerging from the territorial space of terra firma, the space ordinarily visualised as a two-dimensional, horizontal landscape, is in fact a vertical and three-dimensional space that includes all categories of all types of space in the region with complete saturation of sovereignty density. While appreciably, this would be a very difficult map to produce in paper form, although, with today's technologies, it would be possible to demonstrate the different types of spaces and categories of sovereignty and jurisdiction in digital formats. However, it is the choice and preference of these states to continue controlling the narrative which does not draw attention to the limitations of de jure sovereignty with prioritisation of de facto sovereignty and of ontological sovereignty in the region. It is time that the relationship between sovereignty and territory be recognised as a scalar volume and that Arctic state authority and the processes of legitimising this authority be recognised as an ontological sovereignty.

Ontological space and ontological sovereignty

Within the disciplinary realm of International Relations and geopolitics, ontological sovereignty is about the legitimising of norms around the authority space, territory and the resources found within. As an ontological reality, it has no materiality to evidence its existence beyond the circumstances of its outcomes. Instead, its manifestation is found in several characteristics. This includes the opportunity to introduce or prevent rules from entering international discourse, the shaping of discourse(s) around a specific set of normative relations, establishing normative relations that enable outcomes within and beyond international legal codes and potentially, for those normative relations to convert into norms for the international system.

Thinking about ontological space is a useful model for thinking about ontological sovereignty, but this article argues that in fact, there is a dialectical and co-constitutive dynamic between space and territorial sovereignty and ontological space and ontological sovereignty. For example, in the same way that physical space is the medium for material forms, ontological space provides the medium to be filled with normative operators. Instead of the built space or the mountains and other features found in the natural environment, in ontological space, we find the various normative operators that are constructed through exchange, repetition and practice and how those normative operators in turn position, shape and constrain particular ways of thinking about and interacting within a geographic spatial domain.

The standard definition of territory as an area of land has become redundant in geopolitical analysis due to the advances in the discourse on territory in political theory, social theory and critical geography. Conceptualising territory as land once had a concrete rationale emerging from pivotal legal debates in the seventeenth century regarding the territorial limits of jurisdiction in determining the extent of state authority under the concept of Westphalian sovereignty. These were the debates framed around the contestation between enclosed, state-controlled maritime spaces for the security of the nation and its fisheries – or the freedom of the seas, and navigation and shipping transits. When the latter became the dominant rule to protect the interests of expanding global commerce, the sovereign authority of states in maritime spaces was limited to a narrow band of territorial sea. This had the effect of constraining and containing state sovereignty to a terrestrial area and therefore limited the legal conceptualisation of territory to a narrow land-based category.

In today's world, state authority over citizens, capital or other interests frequently extends beyond the limits of landed borders. In addition to normative evolution on the limits of state sovereignty dissolving restrictions to land, this makes the conception of the state as a bordered power container increasingly problematic. This restricted conceptualisation has been described as a ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994), where there is a flawed logic in understanding sovereignty as affixed to a clearly defined territory. The spatial expanse of the Arctic is a fitting example of where the notion of the state as a neatly delineated absolute spatial power container fails. This is both because of changes in legal categories of territory over which states exercise gradients of sovereignty, as well as the types of responsibilities assumed in exchange for this expanded sovereignty in these spaces.

Future sovereignty of the Arctic

With sovereignty as an evolving concept bundled together with the projection of legitimacy for authority and resource exploitation rights over a multi-dimensional geographic container, there remains an opportunity to consider other factors that can influence the existing norms of legitimacy in sovereignty discourses across the expanses of the Arctic region. In the first instance, this would seem only applicable to the horizontal spaces aligned with legal–political delimitations, but may also ebb into the vertical dimensions, or in fact, only the cognitive infrastructures of ontological sovereignty. This includes changes within Arctic governance fora, transformations of environmental and associated legal conditions and finally, what would be needed to take into account Indigenous forms of sovereignty into ontological understandings of Arctic sovereignty in a system which currently undermines forms of sovereignty beyond the state (Wood-Donnelly, 2023b).

While Arctic governance is absolutely not predicated on the Arctic Council, the organisation serves as a symbolic mechanism shaping external perspectives of the health of governance in the region. The structure of the Council itself creates the necessary international recognition prerequisite for the legitimacy of sovereignty by requiring observer states to the proceedings to ‘recognize Arctic States’ sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the Arctic’ (Arctic Council, 2023). In the aftermath of the pause in operations of the Council and its scientific working groups in response to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, senior Arctic officials have been unified in their emphasis on the anticipated longevity of the organisation when speaking at Arctic conferences. This tension between a diplomatic rift over issues external to the Arctic and positivity about the future of the Arctic Council reveals its significance in creating an ontological divide between states in and with legitimate authority in the Arctic – even when about international commons, from those outside of the Arctic who should leave governance primarily to the Arctic eight.

Beyond this critical and ontological signalling mechanism, the real teeth of Arctic governance are primarily embedded in domestic policy provisions or in international legal mechanisms, especially maritime conventions (e.g., UNCLOS, safety of life at sea, Polar Code) and multilateral agreements between the Arctic states and others, such as the agreement to prevent unregulated high seas fisheries in the central Arctic Ocean (European Union, 2018). Where domestic provisions extend beyond ordinary territorial arrangements, they are embedded within special provisions in international law to enable their legitimisation, this includes Art. 234 of UNCLOS which gives states extra-territorial authority in ice-covered waters when leveraged in defence of environmental protection (UNCLOS, 1982) and the Polar Code which gives the option for states to prohibit passage through polar waters without the appropriate permissions related to the safety provisions of the convention. These legal exceptions support the ontological sovereignty of the Arctic states over maritime spaces.

More than any legal regime, though also in tandem with the law, the climate and environmental conditions of the high north are its strongest protection. Ice in its various forms (e.g., sea ice, or ice build-up on ships) serves as a natural defence against types of exploitation or use with any of the stability usually required for economic efficiency. This is also notable in Antarctica, where claims to sovereignty are suspended, given the non-viability of resource exploitation conditioned against market efficiency and technical feasibility. This makes arrangements, such as the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean an easy political win – with its initial duration in force a mere 16 years, coinciding with the estimated future horizon for real exploitability potential.

Conclusion

It is said that ‘space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic’ (Lefebvre, 2009, p. 31). If there is a space (physical, virtual, electromagnetic or ontological), that can be identified, accessed and utilised, then it is a space that will be subjected to political and social machinations and strategic manoeuvres. In a comment on geography and ontology, Smith suggested ‘National borders are leaking so profusely that they are barely recognizable, and geographical obstacles of all kinds are crumbling at radioactive rates of decay’ (2001, p. 22). Although we find that spaces of all kinds are incorporated into the domain, or territory of states over time through various conceptions of sovereignty, it is ontological sovereignty that provides the most radical transformation of thinking about space. This is especially relevant for space in the Arctic.

Although it is possible to trace the evolution and construction of sovereignty in the Arctic since the ‘time immemorial’ that is often expressed in histories of the Arctic, the practices of ontological sovereignty across Arctic space require a different sort of thinking. It requires moving beyond the boundaries of a strictly legal sovereignty embodied in international norms and legal frameworks. Instead, one needs to consider space and territory, not just as physical entities, but also as conceptual entities existing only in the recognition and repetition of the normative operators that determine relations and decision-making within this space.

Until the middle of the twentieth century, significant areas of physical space in the Arctic fell outside of the boundaries of absolute sovereignty. However, through evolutions in international legal frameworks, this sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction has expanded in all directions and through other forms of governance, such as those linked with state responsibility for environmental protection or search and rescue, this space has undergone an ontological occupation. However, there is not one specific mechanism to evidence this reality, but a plethora of processes such as ceremonies of possession, performances of effective occupation or repetition and control of discourses and normative operators. Lefebvre says ‘if space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents … it is precisely because this space has already been occupied and planned, already the focus of past strategies, of which we cannot always find traces’ (2009, p. 170). In the Arctic, however, we find many traces of this, it is the impetus that is less clear.

The exercise of territorial sovereignty in the Arctic can be seen across its land, in the air and at sea, fully saturating the volume of Arctic space, ad coelum, from the sky above to hell below. While this once began as sovereignty over peoples residing in specific territories, gradually this authority has expanded northward, upwards and downwards across space. This evolution has been in response to the changing materiality of space and its resources in the context of global economic development and technological innovation. As a territorial volumetric space, the Arctic is neatly divided between the littoral states, converging at the North Pole, but as an ontological space, the Arctic states are united in their interest in maintaining their control over norms, discourses and exploitation within this space through ontological sovereignty. This form of sovereignty is the primary force shaping the geopolitical logics of the region – found first in processes that permitted imperialism, followed by processes that created expansions of sovereignty into the sky and sea, and now finally, as a process that fails to protect the environment of the region or the rights of Indigenous persons who have original sovereignty in the spaces of the Arctic. As a socially constructed space, it is essential to understand the power logics and normative operators that will this geopolitical region into existence, taking pause to reflect on the acceptance and legitimisation of these projections and practices in the spatial and ontological forms of Arctic sovereignty.