Arctic Yearbook 2015 | Page 315

315 Arctic Yearbook 2015 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