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As such, the paper argues that when assessing Arctic governance – not least in a time when many
worry about spill-over effects from international conflicts elsewhere – it is insufficient to examine
merely material or strategic factors of seemingly dehumanised, ‘rational’ states. Rather, the current
Arctic regime of governance, founded on UNCLOS and the AC, has come to hold underappreciated
normative power through discursive processes of reification and internalisation among those
performing the practices of Arctic statehood. This demonstrates the potential potency of governance
regimes when their normative bases are adopted as inherent features of perceptions within the state
itself of its own role in the world: its state identity. For this to happen, however, this relational selfperception of status