Indigenous Power in the New World Order: How Arctic Communities Shape State Strategy

Across the Arctic, the most decisive strategic contests are not only between rival states but within states themselves: between national projects that promise security and prosperity, and northern communities whose rights and institutions determine what can actually be built. Airfields, ports, roads, mines, and communications sites may look like engineering feats from afar, yet on the ground they are legitimacy projects, dependent on authority that is shared, negotiated, and sometimes withheld. As Arctic competition intensifies, the question that quietly governs outcomes is not simply where a state wants to go, but who must agree for it to stay.

Indigenous Power in the New World Order explains how Indigenous political power operates as a strategic factor in Arctic state behaviour. Aksel Brevik shows how land claims agreements and governance structures translate into concrete leverage over infrastructure siting, permitting, monitoring, and operational rules. Through comparative analysis of consent dynamics and co-governance institutions, the book clarifies why procedural consultation often fails, how communities convert rights into bargaining power, and how states respond when consent is contested. It also examines co-management regimes as a form of governance infrastructure: institutions that can stabilise development and security presence when they are properly mandated, resourced, and trusted.

Written for students, analysts, policy audiences, and general readers of geopolitics, the book offers a durable framework for understanding Arctic strategy through strategic legitimacy and local decision authority. Readers will come away able to assess when a project is likely to endure, why some agreements produce long-term governability while others unravel, and how partnership models can align national aims with local security and cultural continuity. The result is a clearer view of the Arctic not as an empty chessboard, but as a politically dense region where the future is negotiated - and where power is often closer to home than strategy documents admit.

Aksel Brevik writes about how states make strategy in places where authority is shared, contested, and lived at close range. His work is shaped by an interest in the Arctic as a region where geopolitical language often runs ahead of institutional reality, and where the practical power to permit, monitor, and refuse is frequently closer to the ground than external observers expect. He approaches Indigenous politics not as a niche specialism but as a central feature of modern governance: a field where legitimacy is built through procedures, relationships, and the credible allocation of decision rights.Brevik's perspective is grounded in a patient, institutional way of reading politics. He is attentive to the difference between formal structures and the informal norms that make them function, and to the ways communities translate rights into operational leverage through planning, expertise, and coalition-building. A recurring thread in his writing is the idea that endurance matters more than announcements: the most consequential political outcomes are those that hold under stress, across election cycles, market swings, and moments of crisis.He brings an editorial sensibility to complex material, aiming to give readers a framework that is both analytically rigorous and usable. Rather than treating the Arctic as a distant frontier, he treats it as a lived political space where history remains present in institutions, and where the future is negotiated in meeting rooms as much as it is imagined in strategy documents.