Klaus Dodds

University of London · Royal Holloway, University of London

The full-scale invasion and partial occupation of Ukraine by Russian forces in February 2022 onwards is atragedy first and foremost for the people of Ukraine. The invasion illustrates the importance ofintersecting and diverse interdisciplinary perspectives on territory, politics and governance within andbeyond Ukraine and Russia. Our editorial init...

Rationale/objective: Several studies have examined attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines, giving prominence to hesitancy and conceptual models that seek to explain its prevalence, mostly in high-income contexts. An alternative conceptual approach that prioritises an understanding of vaccine concerns, the rationality of the questions people have, the...

The Cambridge History of the Polar Regions is a landmark collection drawing together the history of the Arctic and Antarctica from the earliest times to the present. Structured as a series of thematic chapters, an international team of scholars offer a range of perspectives from environmental history, the history of science and exploration, cultura...

This chapter considers the academic field of critical geopolitics and how it developed as a counter-reaction to realist-inspired classical geopolitics. Over the last 30 years, critical geopolitical scholarship has diversified, embracing new conceptual and empirical agendas ranging from feminist and indigenous epistemologies to assemblage theory and...

Over centuries, Western desires of Arctic space have consistently worked to render icy locales of the North legible to an audience further south. In non‐Indigenous reportage, the Arctic has been framed through a dominating lens that narrates it as a ‘natural region’ or cryosphere where elemental qualities such as cold, ice, snow and darkness reign...

Ice humanities is a pioneering collection of essays that tackles the existential crisis posed by the planet's diminishing ice reserves. By the end of this century, we will likely be facing a world where sea ice no longer reliably forms in large areas of the Arctic Ocean, where glaciers have not just retreated but disappeared, where ice sheets colla...

In this commentary, using the UK as our example, we focus on what we describe as the borderlands of the SPI and use two case studies to sketch out where we think there are further opportunities for geographers and others interested in advocating and engaging. As authors we bring to the topic different professional backgrounds and experiences at the...

Ben Gerlofs’ article on the transgressive qualities of humour reminds us that it humour is a deadly serious business. Getting it wrong can be costly, even fatal. Comedians and humourists have along with journalists and academics been targeted by regimes and individuals who don’t care for interventions that expose either the nonsensical nature of re...

Geographical writings on displacement have highlighted how processes of dispossession are instrumental in rupturing the connection between peoples and place or territory. These studies, however, tend to privilege horizontal and surface-level inquiries, thereby neglecting the ways in which the volumetric and subterranean matter to the analytical sit...

Arktyka domaga się uwagi. Ogrzewa się, topnieje i rozmraża, co stanowi śmiertelne zagrożenie dla społeczności, które ją nazywają domem. O wpływy na Arktyce rywalizują mocarstwa: USA, Chiny, Rosja. Arktyka to złożona przestrzeń. W publikacji omówione są najważniejsze problemy regionu w różnych aspektach – od geopolitycznego po środowiskowy. Autorzy...

Geopolityka pozwala zrozumieć sens aktualnych zdarzeń i zjawisk, w tym konfliktów, kryzysów, porozumień i projektów, zarówno w skali lokalnej, jak i międzynarodowej. W jaki sposób rozumienie geografii kształtuje politykę i ekonomię? Skąd bierze się populizm? Jak kino, Internet i media społecznościowe wpływają na mapy świata? Odpowiedzi na te pytani...

Scientific cooperation is a well-supported narrative and theme, but in reality, presents many challenges and counter-productive difficulties. Moreover, data sharing specifically represents one of the more critical cooperation requirements, as part of the “scientific method [which] allows for verification of results and extending research from prior...

‘The physical environment’ describes the Arctic as the polar opposite of the Antarctic continent as it is an ocean semi-enclosed by land. The rocks of the Arctic record key periods in Earth history. The Arctic environment has had an interesting path of evolution. Why is the Arctic cold today? The polar latitudes actually receive less solar energy t...

The Arctic: A Very Short Introduction provides an account of the Arctic, its physical environment, and its people. The Arctic is demanding global attention as it warms, melts, and thaws in a manner that threatens not just its 4 million inhabitants, but the whole planet. The reduction of the Arctic to its changing environment would ignore the comple...

‘Peoples of the Arctic’ focuses on the 4 million people that live north of the Arctic Circle, providing an important distinction between indigenous and settler residents, as over 1 million indigenous peoples live in the eight Arctic states. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first people in the Arctic arrived about 40,000 years ago as there...

‘Exploration and exploitation’ reviews the history of Arctic exploration and exploitation, which owes a great deal to early European encounters with the 'New World'. This topic includes the earliest Viking settlement of Greenland to a succession of European explorers and expeditions that were designed to search for the Northwest Passage. The Hudson...

‘Arctic futures’ discusses the future of the Arctic that starts in the Norwegian territory of Svalbard wherein the Global Seed Vault functions as an Arctic sanctuary for the genetic diversity of crops. The Svalbard archipelago is a hotspot of Arctic amplification as rapid warming has been keenly felt by the small community. However, the environment...

‘The Arctic world’ begins with the definition of the Arctic, which is understood as the land, sea, and ice lying north of the Arctic Circle set at a latitude of approximately 66.5° N. The Arctic tree line is a robust indicator of Arctic-ness as everything to the north is a landscape characterized by shrubs, dwarf trees, and lichen. Arctic warming o...

‘Arctic governance’ discusses how the Arctic, unlike many other parts of the world, has been spared military conflict, civil wars, and terrorism. Arctic governance involves an array of actors, legal regimes, institutional and social contexts, and strategic aspirations. In 1989, Finland approached the other seven Arctic states with a proposal for th...

‘The Arctic carbon vault’ describes the large share of Earth's organic carbon sequestered in the frozen ground and within the shelf sea sediments of the Arctic Ocean. The organic carbon stock of the permafrost is roughly equivalent to half of total global soil carbon. A cold Arctic with extensive permafrost is an effective long-term carbon sink as...

‘Arctic ecosystems’ highlights the treeless landscapes that fringe the Arctic Ocean, in which the diversity of plants is low, nutrient supply is limited, and soil depth is constrained by permafrost. The aim is to capture some of the key characteristics of the Arctic biome in the past and present. How do ecosystems function in the northern high lati...

The Antarctic region has been experiencing rapid change in recent decades due to human-induced factors. Most notably, climate heating is causing ice sheet melting, leading to sea level rise and disruption in global ocean heat circulation, with far-reaching consequences. At the same time, this region holds unique research potential that can help ad...

This is a table showing a spectrum of vaccine acceptance, from vaccine apathy to conspiracy. It is a work in progress to underpin methodological development of vaccine hesitancy understanding.

While the world continues to work toward an understanding and projections of climate change impacts, the Arctic increasingly becomes a critical component as a bellwether region. Scientific cooperation is a well-supported narrative and theme in general, but in reality, presents many challenges and counter-productive difficulties. Moreover, data shar...

This position paper aims to frame and supplement other papers in this special issue on subterranean geopolitics. We trace the research genealogy that brings together the subterranean with the geopolitical before accounting for the state-of-play in the subfield of subterranean geopolitics. Six research themes and foci that can connect to and enrich...

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I was a Ph.D. examiner of the author of this book, Alessandro Antonello, and that I thought it was a rich and provocative exemplar of environmental history. As a political geographer who has researched the contested geopolitics and governance of Antarctica for many years, I consider that the P...

COVID-19 is highlighting and exposing how public health and geopolitics intersect across spaces, scales, and settings. Existing literature focuses on the geopolitical determinants of health such as the allocation of foreign health-related assistance in postcolonial spaces and the relationship between population health and the health impacts of expl...

The geopolitics of pandemics and climate change intersect. Both are complex and urgent problems that demand collective action in the light of their global and trans-boundary scope. In this article we use a geopolitical framework to examine some of the tensions and contradictions in global governance and cooperation that are revealed by the pandemic...

In the reporting about COVID-19 diplomacy, Antarctica has functioned as the exceptional — the only continent, thus far, not to record a single case of COVID-19, although cases were reported on Antarctic tourism vessels in the northern Antarctic Peninsula. For six decades, Antarctic governance has been an experiment in global democracy and diplomacy...

The "golden age" of Scandinavian television has often been associated with Nordic Noir crime dramas, yet many of the acclaimed serials also engage with geopolitical themes such as migration, cross-border crime, military conflicts, and global terrorism. In this article, we examine the ways in which Nordic Noir contributes to discourses on such topic...

The Arctic has warmed by around 2°C since 1850, approximately double the global average. Even if the Paris Agreement successfully limits global warming to a further 0.5°C, the Arctic is expected to warm by at least another 1°C. The United Kingdom’s (UK) weather is linked to conditions in the European Arctic. For example, high atmospheric pressure...

Headlines • The Arctic has warmed by around 2°C since 1850, approximately double the global average. Even if the Paris Agreement successfully limits global warming to a further 0.5°C, the Arctic is expected to warm by at least another 1°C. • The United Kingdom’s (UK) weather is linked to conditions in the European Arctic. For example, high atmosphe...

This book presents a novel and systematic social theory of soil, and is representative of the rising interest in ‘the material’ in social sciences. Bringing together new modes of ‘critical description’ with speculative practices and methods of inquiry, it contributes to the exploration of current transformations in socioecologies, as well as in pol...

This paper develops further interrogation into ‘icy geopolitics’ and what it might tell us about how we treat substances like ice as geopolitical matter. It brings together various literatures that speak to ice as a substance and substantial matter. Second, ice is represented and experienced in a multitude of ways, from oral cultures of indigenous...

Ealing Studios’ Scott of the Antarctic (1948) was designed to inspire post-war British and Commonwealth audiences that imperial heroes still had something to offer. While critics were courteous, box office receipts for the film were modest. In North America the film performed poorly. More significantly, the film’s genesis coincided with a new Cold...

This essay serves as an introduction to the special issue recognising the 60th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. It provides the geopolitical and scientific context informing the creation of the negotiations for a new treaty between October and December 1959. Thereafter, it identifies some of the challenges facing the contemporary Antarctic Trea...

This essay serves as an introduction to the special issue recognising the 60th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. It provides the geopolitical and scientific context informing the creation of the negotiations for a new treaty between October-December 1959. Thereafter it identifies some of the challenges facing the contemporary Antarctic Treaty Sy...

The view from the south is, more than ever, dominated by ominous signs of change. Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are intrinsic to the Earth system, and their evolution is intertwined with and influences the course of the Anthropocene. In turn, changes in the Antarctic affect and presage humanity's future. Growing understanding is countering popu...

The view from the south is, more than ever, dominated by ominous signs of change. Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are intrinsic to the Earth system, and their evolution is intertwined with and influences the course of the Anthropocene. In turn, changes in the Antarctic affect and presage humanity's future. Growing understanding is countering popu...

‘Identities’ discusses identity politics, because geopolitics is at its heart about imagining and articulating differences between selves and others. What binds the two together is emotion and affect: the powerful forces of feeling that shape how we feel about others. Emotion and affect can also be manipulated; media reporting can inflame, politica...

‘What is geopolitics?’ explains that geopolitics involves three qualities. First, it is concerned with questions of influence and power over space and territory. Second, it uses geographical frames to make sense of world affairs. Third, geopolitics is future-oriented. It offers insights into the likely behaviour of states because their interests ar...

The notion of geopolitics has not always been well received. It has been accused of being intellectually fraudulent, ideologically suspect, and tainted with associations with Nazism and fascism. ‘Intellectual poison?’ charts a brief history of geopolitics from before World War II to the present day, looking at its origins, development, and receptio...

The term ‘geopolitical architecture’ is used to describe the ways in which states and non-state organizations access, manage, and regulate the intersection of territories and flows, and in so doing establish borders between inside/outside, citizen/alien, and domestic/international. Historically, there has been a series of such geopolitical architec...

‘Popular geopolitics’ considers the interconnection between popular culture and geopolitics. It focuses on the sensorial nature of popular geopolitics—the power and politics of images and sound. Social media in particular reminds us that images and stories can amplify and exaggerate the controversial and emotive qualities of geopolitics. Film and t...

From great power politics and speculation about resource scrambles, to everyday encounters and objects such as smart phones, geopolitics affects citizens, corporations, international bodies, social movements, and governments. Geopolitics is far more than simply the impact of geographical features such as rivers, mountains, and climate on political...

Geopolitics is often imagined through objects, but it is also exercised with objects. Objects can shape geopolitical relations and illuminate state authority. So, flags can be powerful and hyper-visible expressions of state security, while at other times they are barely noticed in everyday life. Objects play a key role in securitizing, regularizing...

The 2018 Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean (Agreement) is a notable intervention in living resources management. The Agreement seeks to anticipate future fisheries management and serves as a reminder as how international legal frameworks such as UNCLOS ‘regionalise’ seas and oceans. But thus far analys...

Climate change and its effects on Arctic societies, wildlife, and environments has been a recurring theme of this book. And for good reason. In many parts of the Arctic, these effects are inescapable, and, given that Arctic temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else on...

The Arctic has undergone profound human and natural change over millennia. When we record that the Arctic is home to some 4 million people, it is a mere fraction of a world population currently approaching 8 billion people. Apart from the Antarctic, the Arctic remains...

Humans and non-humans make their homes in many Arctic places. Cultures, societies, and ecologies have formed in relation to northern surroundings over millennia, over centuries, or mere decades. Environmental biologists warn of a new generation of invasive species entering northern terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments,...

Every week, stories about the Arctic, usually addressing the state of sea ice extent and thickness, diminishing glaciers, rapidly thawing permafrost, acidification of the Arctic Ocean, the resource potential of the region, the opening of new shipping routes, and possible geopolitical tensions, appear in the...

It is common to point to the Arctic Circle (66°N) as indicative of the start of the Arctic and “true north.” If you land at Rovaniemi airport in Finnish Lapland, you are told you have arrived at the home of Santa Claus. The town lies...

The Arctic, if defined by land and sea (and ice) lying north of the Arctic Circle, is home to 4 million people. The majority of residents are found in the Russian North, and overwhelmingly non-indigenous. Development policy and population movement in the 1930s onward in...

While awareness of the effects of climate change on the Arctic is growing and provoking anxiety over ecosystem thresholds and tipping points, circumpolar places are also increasingly presented to global audiences as dynamic, emerging, global regions that are “open for business.” Depending on whom you...

The term “global Arctic” has gained traction in recent years as a shorthand term for a region in transition. We have spoken at length about climate change and resource speculation and their cumulative effects are part of this accounting for change. Another aspect of all...

As the threat of global climate change becomes a reality, many look to the Arctic Ocean to predict coming environmental phenomena. There, the consequences of Earth's warming trend are most immediately observable in the multi-year and perennial ice that has begun to melt, which threatens ice-dependent microorganisms and, eventually, will disrupt all...

Recent scholarship in political geography and allied disciplines such as Anthropology and Architecture has used registers such as the elemental and volumetric to explore the calculative, material, technical, and atmospheric interventions in, on, through and beneath the earth’s surface. In this special issue, our contributors engage in a ‘subterrane...

Following the UK defence secretary’s announcement in September 2018 that the Ministry of Defence is to devise a Defence Arctic Strategy, Duncan Depledge, Klaus Dodds and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe look back on how UK defence has engaged with the Arctic over the past two decades and draw attention to the shift in focus from climate change to hard securit...

This chapter contends that the 2007 Russian flag-planting incident in the North Pole has ushered in a form of triumphant geopolitics insofar as it enabled the renewing of the imaginative and material grip of the five Arctic coastal states (Russia, United States, Canada, Denmark and Norway, A5) on the maritime Arctic. Triumphant geopolitics, in our...

Following the UK defence secretary’s announcement in September 2018 that the Ministry of Defence is to devise a Defence Arctic Strategy, Duncan Depledge, Klaus Dodds and Caroline Kennedy-Pipe look back on how UK defence has engaged with the Arctic over the past two decades and draw attention to the shift in focus from climate change to hard securit...

Using the Second Cold War (ca. 1974–1987) as a primary focus, this chapter contends that the “Bond formula” is neither formulaic nor institutionally ritualized as the term implies. It becomes more atmospheric, elemental, and resourceful. Three factors enable this shift. First, the emergence of blockbuster films and new techniques of production and...

Released in October 2012, on the 50 th anniversary of Dr No (1962) in Queen Elizabeth II's 60 th year as the British head of state, the Sam Mendes-directed production Skyfall was a critical and commercial success. It was positioned as the third element of a trilogy of films involving Daniel Craig as Bond and garnered positive reviews from critics a...

Skyfall (2012) is unusual, in a strictly geographical sense, because much of the action takes place in the United Kingdom. While London-based MI6 has borne the brunt of attack and mayhem before, Skyfall is far more introspective as Bond races to both save M and restore himself. Bond’s resurrection and resilience occupies centre stage in an analysis...

This introduction highlights the four areas of inquiry addressed by contributors featured in this special issue of Journal of Popular Film and Television, “James Bond in the Daniel Craig Era”: agencies, moods, places, and structures. It also acknowledges the place of the Daniel Craig era in relation to other serial film franchises like the Jason Bo...

In April 2013, Iceland launched a new international assembly for the Arctic, to be known as the ‘Arctic Circle’. This chapter traces the emergence of the Arctic Circle assembly, and introduces the idea that less institutionalised forums such as these serve an important function in the Arctic governance system as a ‘bazaar’ for the exchange of globa...

This chapter addresses the ‘Asian city’ as elemental to the geographies of James Bond. It explores the differing depictions of Asian cities and urban landscapes noting two fundamental distinctions. First, a division is drawn between the developed and cosmopolitan cities of East Asia (like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai) with the lesser developed ur...

This chapter expands on the discussion of Bond’s bodily geopolitics by examining how his relationship with American agents is crucial to mission success. His long-standing relationship with CIA counter-part Felix Leiter is clearly significant, but so is his ability to master American sites and technology as well as women and, particularly, American...

This chapter explores the shifting representations and embodied encounters with the Soviet Union/Russia. Given the Bond film’s initiation in the 1960s, the cartographies of the Cold War play an important role notwithstanding the transnational organization SPECTRE. Bond encounters Soviet agents, technology, objects, practices, and sites and spaces t...