External international shocks’ impact on regional governance: Ukrainian crisis spill-over in the Arctic.

Arctic regionalism, as well as its role in a globalized world has been a major point of interest of the Northern political scientists for over three decades now. Its scholars can be roughly divided into two camps: for some the Arctic is an exceptional space of peaceful cooperation “detached from global political dynamics” (Käpylä & Mikkola, 2015), others claim that as any other region is influenced by the global politics and can be vulnerable to a (for example Ukrainian) conflict spill-over (Rahbek-Clemmensen, 2016). But eventually many agree – the Arctic is a unique region with its particular forms of cooperation and governance. Following the Ukrainian crisis many of the high-level dialogues and programs between Russia and the Western countries were suspended. Nevertheless, in the high North, their cooperation via the regional councils and other multilateral mechanisms has continued. Is that due to the high-level of complex interdependence achieved in the region (Byers, 2017, 2019), certain “preconditions” for a “high geopolitical stability” (Heininen, 2018), or whether the regional cooperation works precisely because the Arctic regime was “deliberately negotiated in a way that promotes cooperation” (Exner-Pirot and Murray, 2017). The paper explores theoretical and conceptual perspectives on the influence of the external international shocks, such as Ukrainian crisis, on the Arctic governance, seeks to understand how the region was built to be resilient to the conflict, and ultimately, suggesting that the Arctic is indeed a part of the globalized world, explores the relation between regionalism and the world politics.