Chapter Seven
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argument of democratic peace, intergroup buffer areas are graded in terms
of the probability of conflict occurrence.
The following questions are answered: How do Arctic provinces group
according to their geopolitical attributes? Where are zones of consensus
and zones of conflict? Is the grouping stable in time? Does grouping
stability depend on temperature variation? Which areas have the highest
probability of an occurrence of structurally-implied intraregional
conflict? Answering these questions allows for the discovery of
geopolitical forces of clustering; assessing the relationship between
geography, geopolitics and conflict within the emerging geopolitical
configuration; and providing a neutral and compact analytical addition to
quantitative research on Arctic geopolitics and setting up an objective
ground for forecasting. We work with the following hypotheses:
H_1: The Arctic region is geopolitically homogeneous (i.e. no grouping is
observable);
H_2: Arctic provinces share the same probability of occurrence of
intraregional conflict.
The work is structured as follows: the next section introduces the
Arctic geopolitical region and briefly describes its territorial composition–
a sum of twenty-seven Arctic provinces. Then we describe how regional
attributes are related to each other and summarize the methodological
configuration of the study. The following section presents the dataset,
measurement procedures, and results of Arctic geopolitical grouping. Then
we identify and qualitatively assess the most probable areas of
intraregional conflict. The final section summarizes the findings and offers
directions for further research.
Defining the Region’s Borders
The Arctic region includes the northernmost parts of North America and
Eurasia, a series of archipelagos between them; and the relatively enclosed
waters of the smallest ocean. The location of the region’s northern border
is obvious: the North Pole; but the southern delimitation is problematic, as
geophysical and socio-historical borders do not coincide. There are many
competing definitions of the Arctic and empirical basis is seriously
limited. Establishing another definition is not the goal of this study, due to
the risk of being even less compatible with available data. Instead, we will
simply add an administrative dimension to the ArcticStat’s geographic