arctic silk road

Arctic Silk Road

Arctic Silk Road is a research project funded by the Research Council of Norway ($1.3 million). It follows the imagination of global infrastructures across time and space. We focus on experiences of planning and anticipating constructions along the “Polar Silk Road” from China to the Circumpolar North in Sápmi, Russia, Canada and other connected sites. Furthermore, we examine comparative cases of large-scale infrastructural networks historical and emerging.

Roads, railways and airports facilitate new forms of mobility for people, goods, and ideas, but also the expansion of settlement, extraction, and administration. Their planning and anticipation has the potential for equal transformation. Through time, unrealized transborder infrastructural corridors--from British railways in East Africa to German roads in Fenno-Scandinavia--have shaped labor migrations and colonial imaginaries, and been acted upon by the people whose lands they were planned to cross. How does the anticipation of large-scale infrastructural development impact the people along these routes? More importantly, how can anticipation shape outcomes? What can be mobilized in this anticipatory space to strengthen ties to land and community? 

This project springs from recent controversy over an “Arctic Ocean Corridor” in Sámi transborder lands, Sápmi. As China's Arctic White Paper promises a “Polar Silk Road”—a shipping and global infrastructural network emerging with melting sea ice between Asia and Europe—international preparations have fostered local uncertainty, collective mobilization, and competing interests along envisioned routes. This is weaving new relations between economic and cultural interests in Sámi areas and northern industrial centers, state governments, and international organizations. At the same time, it has raised memories of past infrastructural development to bear on the present--the effects of state incursions and borders on Indigenous lifeways and relationships to the environment.

In order to inform action in relation to future development stimulated by geopolitics and climate change, the project involves comparative ethnographic, historical, and archaeological study of infrastructure across space and time. What can be learned about the social, environmental, and material relations of large-scale infrastructural endeavors, built and non-built, around the world, across Sápmi, and historically? Through collaboration with Sámi artisans and cultural institutions, we contribute to ongoing discussion of infrastructural impacts in Sápmi and globally.

In addition to the project leader (Natalia Magnani), the project includes members at Uit The Arctic University of Norway, Giellagas Institute (Oulu University), Sámi Allaskuvla, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Maine.

See more details and associated podcast on the project website.