In Great Company!
In great company! While it's now 2022, I just came across a really cool discussion of my work in Barret Weber's fascinating 2013 doctoral thesis in sociology at the University of Alberta, The Politics of Development in Nunavut: Land Claims, Arctic Urbanization, and Geopolitics with me cited side-by-side with the legendary Arctic scholar Shelagh Grant, who's classic 1992 work, Sovereignty or Security? Government Policy in the Canadian North, 1936-1950, greatly inspired my community-based field research funded by the Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security (CIIPS), which lay the foundation for my Breaking the Ice (2008) and On Thin Ice (2009), which she so kindly cited in her 2010 magnum opus, Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America.
1) "These reflections of the Cold War have forced environmental concerns to the world stage given the 'extraordinary shortsighted nuclear waste management programs in Siberia.' Zellen opines that agreement over the extent of environmental degradation in the former Soviet Union has ironically helped to steady the situation in the Arctic: '[t]he enormity of the environmental threats to the physical environment of the Arctic has caused old Cold War divisions to quickly transform into a post-Cold War consensus.' For Russia, like Canada, the Arctic is not only a speculative, economic prospect, it is also a space of identification and a profound part of questions over national unity. Indeed it has domestic political implications." (p166)
2) "Indigenous movements have shown us what this sort of dissatisfaction can look like, and Zellen has argued that as a consequence there really is the possibility of the emergence of Inuit backlash, even “Inuit fundamentalism”. He writes, provocatively: 'It is clear that Inuit leaders have become less distinguishable from their non-Inuit colleagues as they assume power. But if the people they represent, and their values, remain largely traditional, there is potential for a backlash against them. When coupled with the poverty of the Arctic coastal communities, the alienation felt in post-land claims settlement areas – which widens the gulf between the rich and poor in the north by creating corporate elites subsidized by public funds and rounded by a sea of poverty and despair – and the social dislocation experienced by youth caught between the world of their elders and the world of the white man, the concept of Inuit fundamentalism is not so farfetched after all.' However far-fetched these conclusions might seem, challenges of this sort have helped to spawn movements to reconsider how to cognitively map the Arctic as an unbounded space. Ongoing and at times radical challenges to the exclusivity of the system of states have raised exciting political questions of “indigeneity” in Western democracies in which colonialism has simply been replaced by neocolonialism." (p171-72)
3) "As Shelagh Grant writes in the massive The Polar Imperative (2010): '[r]ecent representations have attempted to portray the realities of Inuit life, but the impression left in the minds of most southern Canadians is still one of ‘we and they.’ Grant here also alludes to the historical analysis she accomplished in an earlier book, Sovereignty or Security? Zellen engages this authoritative text and notes that Grant recognised a crucial methodological problem or blind spot in regards to understanding the contemporary situation of the Arctic: 'The dichotomy separating internal and external dimensions of Canada's Arctic sovereignty reflects the tendency of separate levels of analysis to reify when reality requires a synthesis and an understanding of how the levels interact.' The bottom line is that both theorizing about the Arctic and implementing policy in the Arctic have historically succumbed to the very same levels-of-analysis problem that casts its long shadow over the entire field of international relations theory. According to Grant, northern policy thus shifts from an external preoccupation to an internal one, or from a systemic to a subsystemic level and back again, in response to the dynamic flux of external and internal political realities. Grant's historical analysis of sovereignty and security in the north describes and explains this intersystemic seesaw of northern policy as Ottawa shifted from one to the other. Charles Emmerson came to a similar conclusion after his work in the Future History of the Arctic." (p177-78)
4) "Commentator Barry Zellen calls the contemporary Arctic a 'systemless system' because of its ongoing ambiguous boundaries. My work suggests that the Arctic will be defined in this ambiguous or virtual manner for some time to come, even given its increased importance in national affairs and world politics in recent years. In short, the Arctic has several “internal” divisions (thereby confirming Zellen’s notion that the Arctic is an incomplete political system), indeed we have to look at the question of what internal is. This is an ongoing story. The divisions that do exist have come under much scrutiny in recent years because of a politics of development; and I have tried to show that increased attention to a set of problems or contradictions can be a mixed blessing. There are interests seeking to exploit crisis – such as climate change – in the Arctic for corporate and stately gain. My perspective is that, overall, it has been for the better: Nunavut and the NLCA represents an opportunity for Inuit to take control over their lives in the context of unprecedented development pressures such as mining." (p219)
***
In great company, again! On October 1, 2017, I saw that my first book, Breaking the Ice, is still being recommended almost a decade after publication! It's very kindly listed as the second of six books recommended on Culture & Geography for U. Penn's 'Alumni Travel Reading Lists 2018: Alaska's Glaciers and the Inside Passage.'
Looking at how awesome all six of the recommended books are in this category, it's a huge honor to be standing on the podium with a silver medal! Among the 3 categories of books recommended (Fiction, Nonfiction, and Culture & Geography), there are some amazing writers with whom it's a huge privilege to be included - including John Krakauer (Into the Wild), Willie Hensley (50 Miles from Tomorrow), and Brian Garfield (The Thousand Mile War).
See more at: http://guides.library.upenn.edu/Alumni_Travel_2018
Thank you, U. Penn Alumni Travel, it's a great honor!!
***
In September 2017, I discovered that in his chapter ("Saltwater Geopolitics in North America") in the newly published volume, Widening the Scope of Environmental Policies in North America: Toward Blue Approaches (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), Ed Atkins cites my 2009 work on Arctic geopolitics, Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom right alongside such luminaries as Carter-era diplomat and National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski; Obama-era Secretary of State (and almost-President), Hillary Clinton; the legendary Arctic expert and kind-hearted advocate of Inuit rights, Terry Fenge; the Hegelian End-of-Historian and G.W. Bush-era member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department and long-time RANDite, Francis Fukuyama; former Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper; pioneering Canadian peace researcher and environmental security theorist, Tad Homer-Dixon; the legendary and prolific strategic thinkers and writers, Robert D. Kaplan and Michael T. Klare; the pivotal and pioneering theorist of geopolitics, Halford J. Mackinder; the equally pivotal and pioneering naval strategist, theorist and admiral, Alfred T. Mahan; the widely-acclaimed offensive-realist theorist, John D. Mearsheimer; and the soft-power apostle and one-time Harvard University Nuclear Study (HUNS) Group member (and innovator of the "crystal ball effect" of nuclear weapons), Joseph Nye!
In such august company, the only words that come to mind are, as the late John Belushi once said, "Holy shit!" It's always such a great privilege (and greater surprise) to find out who I'm sitting near in the footnote and endnote sections of various books, chapters and articles - almost always by people I've never met but who I nonetheless want to personally thank: Thank you professor Atkins!
***
Back on March 8, 2017, I found myself cited in Telos’ online journal, Teloscope – right after Sir Thomas Hobbes himself, three quotes before Kissinger, and seven before Carl Schmitt. Another surprising discovery of being cited between such great luminaries and some of my favorite realists of all time! It was in Andrew M. Wender’s article, “Asymmetry and the Reimagining of Political Theology” in Teloscope. As he writes:
"A more encompassing historical and geographic, and for that matter, metaphysical perspective might suggest that, in fact, ours is a fundamentally 'asymmetric world,' wherein struggle over such intimate forms of human identity as those that Barry Scott Zellen terms 'tribal' and 'ethereal' is much the norm. As Zellen asserts: '... modern states are neither eternal nor unchanging. They are dynamic and evolving. ... Indeed, across much of the world, there may truly be no state system at all, despite its prominence in the minds of theorists dating back so many centuries -- but instead, in its lofty place, is an ethereal but nonetheless lasting interconnection that varies greatly by region, shadows cast upon the wall of mind deep inside Plato's cave -- mere glimpses of an overarching order, amidst a kaleidoscopic amalgam of organic and synthetic parts, each doing what they do best, surviving in a maddeningly complex world -- for as long as they can.' A vital question, therefore, is how the political might be understood as animated and inspired by the theological, in ways that are justly reflective of the asymmetrical contours and contestations of human difference; this, as supposed to the artificial superimposition of violent, ostensibly symmetrical order."
Thank you, professor Wender!
***
It was some time earlier, back in October 2015, that I found myself last in such lofty company! Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters, in their 2014 Ashgate volume Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean, write this enticing paragraph on page 31 that starts out with this most amazing trinity (of "Gorbachev, Palin, Zellen...") that sure caught my attention -- and earned my gratitude!
As they write:
“Gorbachev, Palin, Zellen, and Borgerson all deploy the physical imagery of an inland sea to construct the Arctic as a region, like the Mediterranean, that combines unity with division in Giaccaria and Minea's (2011 348) ‘paradoxical interplay … that alternate[s] narratives of homogeneity and continuity with those of heterogeneity and discontinuity. However, the flexibility of the mediterranean image – in which the fluidity of the sea both erases and magnifies difference – and the intensity of the ‘paradoxical interplay’ that results allows individuals to use the image to support very different political diagnoses. For Gorbachev and Palin, the paradoxical qualities of the mediterranean Arctic are used to highlight its potential as a space of peace wherein differences may be overcome through commerce and exchange. For Zellen and Borgerson, these same qualities are used to highlight its potential as a space of conflict wherein encounters between naturally separated nations are likely to breed distrust and acrimony. This theme of the Arctic as a Mediterranean-like meeting place where the West brushes up against its ‘others’ was echoed in an interview that we conducted with a U.S. State Department official who effectively combined the Zellen/Borgerson position (as a divided space, the Arctic is a natural space of discord) with the Gorbachev/Palin position (that maritime space of division is also a space of connection, and thus it provides an environment in which this discord may be overcome).”
Thank you, professors Anderson and Peters. While my position on the Arctic is more subtle and less ideologically rigid than Borgerson's, who came to the study of the Arctic late (like so many now-a-days), recognizing the Arctic as a space every bit as conducive of connection as it is of division, perhaps moreso than other regions in the world, it is nonetheless an honor to be placed with Gorbachev, whose Arctic vision was transformative (and inspired by the Inuit whose perseverence would transform the way the world perceived the Arctic, and how state and non-state actors could redefine sovereignty as a collaborative undertaking), and Palin, who is often criticized by the left but whose meteoric rise to global prominence demonstrated the power of made-in-the-North ideas and passion!
It's always exciting to find out who's reading my stuff, responding to it, and citing it. A fascinating interconnection of ideas across the ages.
1) "These reflections of the Cold War have forced environmental concerns to the world stage given the 'extraordinary shortsighted nuclear waste management programs in Siberia.' Zellen opines that agreement over the extent of environmental degradation in the former Soviet Union has ironically helped to steady the situation in the Arctic: '[t]he enormity of the environmental threats to the physical environment of the Arctic has caused old Cold War divisions to quickly transform into a post-Cold War consensus.' For Russia, like Canada, the Arctic is not only a speculative, economic prospect, it is also a space of identification and a profound part of questions over national unity. Indeed it has domestic political implications." (p166)
2) "Indigenous movements have shown us what this sort of dissatisfaction can look like, and Zellen has argued that as a consequence there really is the possibility of the emergence of Inuit backlash, even “Inuit fundamentalism”. He writes, provocatively: 'It is clear that Inuit leaders have become less distinguishable from their non-Inuit colleagues as they assume power. But if the people they represent, and their values, remain largely traditional, there is potential for a backlash against them. When coupled with the poverty of the Arctic coastal communities, the alienation felt in post-land claims settlement areas – which widens the gulf between the rich and poor in the north by creating corporate elites subsidized by public funds and rounded by a sea of poverty and despair – and the social dislocation experienced by youth caught between the world of their elders and the world of the white man, the concept of Inuit fundamentalism is not so farfetched after all.' However far-fetched these conclusions might seem, challenges of this sort have helped to spawn movements to reconsider how to cognitively map the Arctic as an unbounded space. Ongoing and at times radical challenges to the exclusivity of the system of states have raised exciting political questions of “indigeneity” in Western democracies in which colonialism has simply been replaced by neocolonialism." (p171-72)
3) "As Shelagh Grant writes in the massive The Polar Imperative (2010): '[r]ecent representations have attempted to portray the realities of Inuit life, but the impression left in the minds of most southern Canadians is still one of ‘we and they.’ Grant here also alludes to the historical analysis she accomplished in an earlier book, Sovereignty or Security? Zellen engages this authoritative text and notes that Grant recognised a crucial methodological problem or blind spot in regards to understanding the contemporary situation of the Arctic: 'The dichotomy separating internal and external dimensions of Canada's Arctic sovereignty reflects the tendency of separate levels of analysis to reify when reality requires a synthesis and an understanding of how the levels interact.' The bottom line is that both theorizing about the Arctic and implementing policy in the Arctic have historically succumbed to the very same levels-of-analysis problem that casts its long shadow over the entire field of international relations theory. According to Grant, northern policy thus shifts from an external preoccupation to an internal one, or from a systemic to a subsystemic level and back again, in response to the dynamic flux of external and internal political realities. Grant's historical analysis of sovereignty and security in the north describes and explains this intersystemic seesaw of northern policy as Ottawa shifted from one to the other. Charles Emmerson came to a similar conclusion after his work in the Future History of the Arctic." (p177-78)
4) "Commentator Barry Zellen calls the contemporary Arctic a 'systemless system' because of its ongoing ambiguous boundaries. My work suggests that the Arctic will be defined in this ambiguous or virtual manner for some time to come, even given its increased importance in national affairs and world politics in recent years. In short, the Arctic has several “internal” divisions (thereby confirming Zellen’s notion that the Arctic is an incomplete political system), indeed we have to look at the question of what internal is. This is an ongoing story. The divisions that do exist have come under much scrutiny in recent years because of a politics of development; and I have tried to show that increased attention to a set of problems or contradictions can be a mixed blessing. There are interests seeking to exploit crisis – such as climate change – in the Arctic for corporate and stately gain. My perspective is that, overall, it has been for the better: Nunavut and the NLCA represents an opportunity for Inuit to take control over their lives in the context of unprecedented development pressures such as mining." (p219)
***
In great company, again! On October 1, 2017, I saw that my first book, Breaking the Ice, is still being recommended almost a decade after publication! It's very kindly listed as the second of six books recommended on Culture & Geography for U. Penn's 'Alumni Travel Reading Lists 2018: Alaska's Glaciers and the Inside Passage.'
Looking at how awesome all six of the recommended books are in this category, it's a huge honor to be standing on the podium with a silver medal! Among the 3 categories of books recommended (Fiction, Nonfiction, and Culture & Geography), there are some amazing writers with whom it's a huge privilege to be included - including John Krakauer (Into the Wild), Willie Hensley (50 Miles from Tomorrow), and Brian Garfield (The Thousand Mile War).
See more at: http://guides.library.upenn.edu/Alumni_Travel_2018
Thank you, U. Penn Alumni Travel, it's a great honor!!
***
In September 2017, I discovered that in his chapter ("Saltwater Geopolitics in North America") in the newly published volume, Widening the Scope of Environmental Policies in North America: Toward Blue Approaches (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), Ed Atkins cites my 2009 work on Arctic geopolitics, Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom right alongside such luminaries as Carter-era diplomat and National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski; Obama-era Secretary of State (and almost-President), Hillary Clinton; the legendary Arctic expert and kind-hearted advocate of Inuit rights, Terry Fenge; the Hegelian End-of-Historian and G.W. Bush-era member of the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. State Department and long-time RANDite, Francis Fukuyama; former Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper; pioneering Canadian peace researcher and environmental security theorist, Tad Homer-Dixon; the legendary and prolific strategic thinkers and writers, Robert D. Kaplan and Michael T. Klare; the pivotal and pioneering theorist of geopolitics, Halford J. Mackinder; the equally pivotal and pioneering naval strategist, theorist and admiral, Alfred T. Mahan; the widely-acclaimed offensive-realist theorist, John D. Mearsheimer; and the soft-power apostle and one-time Harvard University Nuclear Study (HUNS) Group member (and innovator of the "crystal ball effect" of nuclear weapons), Joseph Nye!
In such august company, the only words that come to mind are, as the late John Belushi once said, "Holy shit!" It's always such a great privilege (and greater surprise) to find out who I'm sitting near in the footnote and endnote sections of various books, chapters and articles - almost always by people I've never met but who I nonetheless want to personally thank: Thank you professor Atkins!
***
Back on March 8, 2017, I found myself cited in Telos’ online journal, Teloscope – right after Sir Thomas Hobbes himself, three quotes before Kissinger, and seven before Carl Schmitt. Another surprising discovery of being cited between such great luminaries and some of my favorite realists of all time! It was in Andrew M. Wender’s article, “Asymmetry and the Reimagining of Political Theology” in Teloscope. As he writes:
"A more encompassing historical and geographic, and for that matter, metaphysical perspective might suggest that, in fact, ours is a fundamentally 'asymmetric world,' wherein struggle over such intimate forms of human identity as those that Barry Scott Zellen terms 'tribal' and 'ethereal' is much the norm. As Zellen asserts: '... modern states are neither eternal nor unchanging. They are dynamic and evolving. ... Indeed, across much of the world, there may truly be no state system at all, despite its prominence in the minds of theorists dating back so many centuries -- but instead, in its lofty place, is an ethereal but nonetheless lasting interconnection that varies greatly by region, shadows cast upon the wall of mind deep inside Plato's cave -- mere glimpses of an overarching order, amidst a kaleidoscopic amalgam of organic and synthetic parts, each doing what they do best, surviving in a maddeningly complex world -- for as long as they can.' A vital question, therefore, is how the political might be understood as animated and inspired by the theological, in ways that are justly reflective of the asymmetrical contours and contestations of human difference; this, as supposed to the artificial superimposition of violent, ostensibly symmetrical order."
Thank you, professor Wender!
***
It was some time earlier, back in October 2015, that I found myself last in such lofty company! Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters, in their 2014 Ashgate volume Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean, write this enticing paragraph on page 31 that starts out with this most amazing trinity (of "Gorbachev, Palin, Zellen...") that sure caught my attention -- and earned my gratitude!
As they write:
“Gorbachev, Palin, Zellen, and Borgerson all deploy the physical imagery of an inland sea to construct the Arctic as a region, like the Mediterranean, that combines unity with division in Giaccaria and Minea's (2011 348) ‘paradoxical interplay … that alternate[s] narratives of homogeneity and continuity with those of heterogeneity and discontinuity. However, the flexibility of the mediterranean image – in which the fluidity of the sea both erases and magnifies difference – and the intensity of the ‘paradoxical interplay’ that results allows individuals to use the image to support very different political diagnoses. For Gorbachev and Palin, the paradoxical qualities of the mediterranean Arctic are used to highlight its potential as a space of peace wherein differences may be overcome through commerce and exchange. For Zellen and Borgerson, these same qualities are used to highlight its potential as a space of conflict wherein encounters between naturally separated nations are likely to breed distrust and acrimony. This theme of the Arctic as a Mediterranean-like meeting place where the West brushes up against its ‘others’ was echoed in an interview that we conducted with a U.S. State Department official who effectively combined the Zellen/Borgerson position (as a divided space, the Arctic is a natural space of discord) with the Gorbachev/Palin position (that maritime space of division is also a space of connection, and thus it provides an environment in which this discord may be overcome).”
Thank you, professors Anderson and Peters. While my position on the Arctic is more subtle and less ideologically rigid than Borgerson's, who came to the study of the Arctic late (like so many now-a-days), recognizing the Arctic as a space every bit as conducive of connection as it is of division, perhaps moreso than other regions in the world, it is nonetheless an honor to be placed with Gorbachev, whose Arctic vision was transformative (and inspired by the Inuit whose perseverence would transform the way the world perceived the Arctic, and how state and non-state actors could redefine sovereignty as a collaborative undertaking), and Palin, who is often criticized by the left but whose meteoric rise to global prominence demonstrated the power of made-in-the-North ideas and passion!
It's always exciting to find out who's reading my stuff, responding to it, and citing it. A fascinating interconnection of ideas across the ages.