Speaker: Sanjay Chaturvedi, a Fellow at India China Institute, The New School, and a Professor of Political Science at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India.

Description: In steadily proliferating popular, academic and official narratives of anthropogenic global warming, the Circumpolar Arctic, marked by the imagery of ‘diminishing ice’, ‘opening sea routes’ and ‘dwindling’ number of polar bears, has come to geopolitically embody somewhat abstract category of ‘climate change’. As geopolitical tectonic plates continue to shift in the post-cold war international system, and new alliances/alignments come to the fore, Asia’s rise (especially with regard to China and India) is likely to impact the theory and practices of Arctic governance in hitherto unanticipated ways. Both China and India – appropriately called “planetary powers” by some (in view of the global ecological impact and fallout of their fast-growing economies) – look able and determined to act as mapmakers and world orderers in their own right The very fact that the material and
the symbolic rise of Asia is tempered with the uncertainties associated with the era of climate change and scarcities (goods, resources and a clean environment) might further complicate the geopolitical discourse of Arctic “exceptionalism” and question at the same time increasingly untenable inside/outside geographies of cooperation centered on the Circumpolar Arctic.