Rethinking the territory of (critical) geopolitics through Arctic infrastructures

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Vesa Väätänen, Associate Research Fellow at the Arctic Center, University of Lapland
• Wednesday 22 October 2025, 15:00-16:30
• Scott Polar Research Institute, Seminar Room.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Ben Weissenbach.

In this talk I explore the answer to the question what would more-than-human critical geopolitics of Arctic infrastructures look like if we, by following Bruno Latour, adopted an agent-based conceptualization of territory. By situating my approach in relation to literature that has built upon critical geopolitics, as well as to the body of work that has sought to problematize the mainstream conceptualization of territory as a bounded political space I conceptualize territory as the assemblage of social and material relations that constitutes the conditions of possibility for the existence of any human or non-human, individual or collective agent in its ever-becoming current form. From such an agent-based perspective, territories are not mutually exclusive, but always necessarily folded into one another. Instead of separation and independence, we find connection and interdependence. This, I suggest, offers a fruitful starting-point to imagine infrastructure as coextensive with its territory that becomes continuously articulated through the processes of territorialisation, de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation. Consequently, I locate geopolitics in these processes through which territories are (dis)assembled, which leads me to argue that geopolitics happens when territories meet. Through these conceptual moves it is possible to maintain the popular understanding that geopolitics is about territory, but at the same time rework what this territory is made of and how geopolitics figures into its (un)making.

This talk is part of the The Living Cryosphere Lab series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• Department of Geography
• Scott Polar Research Institute, Seminar Room

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.