Author Description

The basic objective of this book is to place the Northern Sea Route, as the largest scale economic endeavour of the North, into the broader picture of contemporary Arctic politics. The book's overall focus is on the issue-specific needs, properties and interactional patterns that currently exist between the two driving forces underlying regional politics: the urge to achieve an adequate level of environmental protection in order to sustain an eco-system of unique fragility, and the need to utilise regional environmental features for the sake of preserving national security. The book is thus a study of national security and international environmental cooperation, both alone and in a variety of conceptual combinations, including environmental security, sustainable security, extended security and cooperative security.