Category: Publication

The newly published Arctic Yearbook 2017 contains an article “Calotte Academy 2017
Perceptions of the Arctic: Rich or Scarce, Mass-scale or Traditional, Conflict or Cooperation?” written by Jussi Huotari and Salla Kalliojärvi. The article tells of the work of the travelling symposium, Callote Academy 2017.

The 26th Calotte Academy took place in early June 2017. The travelling symposium had its sessions in familiar places: in Inari, Finland, in Kirkenes, Norway and in Apatity, Russia. This year, part of the caravan continued their way to Umeå, Sweden where final sessions of the Calotte Academy 2017 were organized back-to-back with the International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences (ICASS).
This year’s academy consisted of twelve full working days, eleven sessions, more than 30
presentations, two excursions, five border crossings and plenty of questions, comments and
discussions during and outside the sessions. This would not have been possible without the
committed participants, who were ready to allocate their time, were open-minded and willing to share their expertise. More than 30 participants representing thirteen different
nationalities formed the group, with approximately half of the group participating for the first time. The multi-national and multidisciplinary background of the group, as well as different levels of experience in Arctic studies, fit very well with the main theme of this year’s academy.

Full text of the article is available here.

Winland Project published a new research summary titled “Energian, ruoan ja veden kytkökset – kokonaisturvallisuuden ja resilienssin perusta” (Energy, food and water connections – the foundation for overall safety and resilience).

The summary provides the examples of the ongoing research, describes the possible images of the future of Finland and suggests preliminary measures of how to achieve overall security in the three spheres mentioned above.

Get the full report here.

Sakari Höysniemi published a new blog post on the Winland project blog. The post titled “Arjen energiaturvallisuutta liikenteessä” (Energy Safety in Everyday Traffic) can be read here.

Routledge published a new book edited by Natalie Koch “Critical Geographies of Sport : Space, Power and Sport in Global Perspective”. The volume contains a chapter by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, titled “Sports fields and corporate governmentality: Gazprom’s all-Russian gas program as energopower”.

The chapter scrutinizes Russia’s state controlled gas company Gazprom’s relationship with the population by looking at the construction of sports facilities tied to the all-Russian gas program. Discursive and coercive governmentality come together in the energopower practiced by Gazprom: via amalgamation of energy and sports the “presence” of the state is made concrete through both gas pipelines and spatially-extensive sport facilities. Gazprom’s program advances the Great Power ambitions of Putin’s regime in the name of social “responsibility”, yet the sports-orientated social program aims ultimately to responsibilization of individuals to take care of both the wellbeing of the self and the nation, its economy and military might. Its unique form of corporate governmentality is the matrimony of the energy superpower ideal and military Great Power identity that are constructed with the help of sports metaphors, values, and infrastructures.

Get the chapter here.

A new article by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen was published “Russia’s Nuclear Power and Finland’s Foreign Policy” in the latest issue of Russian Analytical Digest.

It is a widely shared wisdom that energy is a central component in Russia’s foreign policy. The public discussion in Finland of the Fennovoima nuclear power plant, built now by Rosatom, shifted after the onset of the Ukrainian conflict. The insistence by some Finnish political and economic actors that the Russian nuclear power deal has nothing to do with foreign and security policies is worrying, as the measures taken both by the Finnish and Russian actors clearly demonstrate that the nuclear business, in particular, is highly political.

Read the full issue and the article (pp. 2-5) here.

 

A new paper by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen was published at Winland website – “Poliittinen riski ja geopolitiikka Suomen ja Venäjän energiakaupassa – tapaus Fennovoima” (Political risk and geopolitics of Finnish and Russian energy trade – the case of Fennovoima). The paper examines the nature of political risk in energy trade between Finland and Russia through decision-making process in Fennovoima – Rosatom nuclear power project. Read the article here.

Veli-Pekka’s article “Energy as Power—Gazprom, Gas Infrastructure, and Geo-governmentality in Putin’s Russia” was published in the new issue of Slavic Review.

This study unfolds the normalizing narrative that is constructed via the Gazifikatsiia Rossii promotional video released by Gazprom. The analysis reveals that the practiced geo-governmentality of gazifikatsiia derives its power from geographical imaginaries of Russia. This bipartite energopower and geo-governmentality receives its essence from the positive and negative materialities of hydrocarbons, the ability to do both “good” and “bad”, which unfolds the way the non-human is embedded in the construction of the social. This construction lumps together the material-nationalistic energy imagination, such as Russia as an energy Superpower, with universal goals such as economic growth and modernization, but also with values such as conservative gender roles. The rationalities and practices of gazifikatsiia geo-governmentality function in and combine several scales: the subject is tied to territories and the nation via gas, the subject is made responsible for the biosecurity of the population, and the global is harnessed in legitimizing the reliance on gas.

Read the article here.

Cultural Anthropology website published a new article “Russia’s Arctic Natural Gas and the Definition of Sustainability” by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen.

Sustainability as a corporate governance objective entered the Russian energy sector in the early 2000s. Major state-owned companies began publishing corporate social responsibility and sustainability reports. Instead of examining these documents, though, I want to understand how sustainability is defined in advertisements directed at the broader public at home and abroad. I argue that the narrative of these advertisements better reflects how both companies and viewers understand sustainability. Advertisements, as a central component in branding that can represent how corporations actually think (see Moeran 2005), are a productive site for unmasking how Russian energy, political elites, and beliefs about commerce and responsibility are brought together.

The article is available online.

Baltic Rim Economies Review published in June a special issue on the future of the Arctic. Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen contributed an article “Russia’s Arctic paradoxes” to it. In the article, Professor Tynkkynen discusses the global, the national and the grass-root level paradoxes that Russia faces in the Arctic.

The article and the full volume are available here.

An open access scientific journal, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene published a new co-authored by Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen article “Arctic air pollution: Challenges and opportunities for the next decade”.

The Arctic is a sentinel of global change. This region is influenced by multiple physical and socio-economic drivers and feedbacks, impacting both the natural and human environment. Air pollution is one such driver that impacts Arctic climate change, ecosystems and health but significant uncertainties still surround quantification of these effects. Arctic air pollution includes harmful trace gases (e.g. tropospheric ozone) and particles (e.g. black carbon, sulphate) and toxic substances (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) that can be transported to the Arctic from emission sources located far outside the region, or emitted within the Arctic from activities including shipping, power production, and other industrial activities. This paper qualitatively summarizes the complex science issues motivating the creation of a new international initiative, PACES (air Pollution in the Arctic: Climate, Environment and Societies). Approaches for coordinated, international and interdisciplinary research on this topic are described with the goal to improve predictive capability via new understanding about sources, processes, feedbacks and impacts of Arctic air pollution. Overarching research actions are outlined, in which we describe our recommendations for 1) the development of trans-disciplinary approaches combining social and economic research with investigation of the chemical and physical aspects of Arctic air pollution; 2) increasing the quality and quantity of observations in the Arctic using long-term monitoring and intensive field studies, both at the surface and throughout the troposphere; and 3) developing improved predictive capability across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

The article is available at the journal website.