As the ice melts, a single railway from Finland to the Arctic Ocean is becoming the new geopolitical fault line. The Arctic Railway Project.

Juho Kähkönen researcher in International Relations and International Law at the University of Lapland in Finland, and a fellow at the Belfer Center here at Harvard University, reveals what is the Arctic Railway Project is, the role of the indigenous Sámi communities are all fighting over one stretch of track — and how these steel rails could decide who controls the future of the High North.

In this new episode, we'll focus on the Arctic Council, the crucial cooperation forum for this region.

Our guest is Svein Vigeland Rottem, senior research fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway. He's an expert on security, governance, and the Arctic Council.

We'll analyze the importance of the Arctic Council, its leadership, the challenges it faces, the pause in its operations in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and why the region must maintain its geopolitical leadership and collaboration among the eight member states.

This episode is part of a full season dedicated to the Arctic.

In this five-episode season, we'll focus on the Arctic: a region of increasing strategic geopolitical competition, with enormous potential in terms of resources, shipping routes, and profound environmental changes.

In this first episode, we talk with Serafima Andreeva, a researcher at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway's leading research institute on Arctic international affairs.

Her work and research interests are primarily in governance and Arctic geopolitical dynamics, with a focus on analyzing geopolitical tensions.

In this episode, we'll discuss misconceptions about the Arctic and the realities shaping its future.

For this episode, we have as a co-host Andrey Todorov, a researcher and professor at the Netherlands Institute for the Law of the Sea and an expert in Arctic topics.