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Arctic Yearbook 2015
boundaries. Control of territory ultimately depends on state recognition and protest would show that
the protesting state does not recognize the claims as legitimate (Byers 2014: 125–26).
In sum, international law provides the states with rules and processes that allow them to transfer
information in an orderly fashion. The states can disrupt the process, but UNCLOS and CLCS are
both considered to be legitimate and unpartisan institutions and doing so thus comes at the loss of
reputation for states (Mercer 1996; Downs and Jones 2002; Brooks & Wohlforth 2005: 514–17). The
key question is if states’ interests in disturbing the process outweigh these political costs. One cannot
understand the delimitation process without considering why states have a geopolitical interest in a
peaceful settlement of the Arctic delimitation question.
Geopolitics makes states adhere to international law
Geopolitics link the geographical features of a specific area with economics and international and
domestic politics to understand state behavior within that area. Understanding the Arctic’s importance
entails understanding its material production value, its military and symbolic importance, and existing
domestic and international political dynamics.
At Ilulissat, the coastal states agreed to follow international law when dividing up Arctic territories
and to cooperate through regional institutions (Ilulissat Declaration 2008). Of course, declarations are
but mere words and it would count for little were it not for the fact that it rests on a foundation of
shared state interests. As the following sections will show, even when viewed from a purely Realpolitik
point of view, the states have much to gain from adhering to the UNCLOS set-up and this has so far
kept the process on track. Basically, the geopolitical logic behind this support consists of geoeconomic, grand-strategic, and domestic dynamics. In the following, each of these dynamics is
analyzed separately to show that the states have an incentive to divide the territory peacefully, but that
domestic politics may disrupt the process.
Arctic geo-economics
There is no established consensus about the meaning of the term “geo-economics” and definitions
include the economic effect of geopolitics, the geopolitical effects of economic phenomena, and the
geographical distribution of economic activity (Luttwak 1990; Dicken 1998; Baru 2012). In this piece,
I define the term narrowly as the subset of geopolitics concerned with the economic potential of
geographical features, including transport routes, minerals, energy resources, and animal stocks. That
is, geo-economics tells us how certain territories enable the production of wealth.
The geo-economics of the Arctic indicate that the UNCLOS process should be relatively
unproblematic, as the undistributed areas are unlikely to contain significant resources and even if they
do so, they will be very difficult to exploit. As mentioned above, the process does not give states rights
over some of the most important Arctic resources, such as fish stocks or sea lanes. Instead, a geoeconomical analysis should focus on resources found on the seabed or in the subsoil beneath, the
most important of which are oil and gas. Any analysis of the resources in the undistributed areas will
be based on estimates based on sparse data, but available analyses indicate that the vast majority of
Arctic hydrocarbons are located along the coasts, within the existing boundaries of the High North
Carving Up the Arctic