Diplomacy and the Arctic Council Danita Catherine Burke, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019, pp. 216.

In an era of increasing attention to issues related to the Arctic, Danita Catherine Burke has provided an interesting study of the functioning of the Arctic Council. It illustrates the complexity of polar politics and its role in the international system. The book proposes a novel theorization of the dynamics of politics and diplomacy in the most important multilateral structure of Arctic governance. This theorization is grounded in the hypothesis of club diplomacy. Similar in many ways to regime theory, club diplomacy suggests that state parties will come together to create a “club” that provides for a forum for cooperation, within which there will be a “pecking order” (or hierarchy) that determines what issues are examined and what is done about them. Burke argues that much of the success of the Arctic Council can be explained by examining how it functions as such a club.

To test this hypothesis, Burke relies primarily on 36 anonymous interviews from active and retired state and Indigenous representatives to the Arctic Council. She uses these interviews to isolate six issue areas, which she discusses in separate chapters. The first involves the funding of the Arctic Council and the challenges that it has faced operating without a dedicated budget for much of its existence. She then examines the lack of institutional memory and the challenges that has created. Third, and most important to her examination, she addresses the role of national politics in the functioning of the club and how that has disrupted cooperation. Fourth, she studies the role of language and how the use of English as the primary language affects the relations with Russia. The fifth issue area is the involvement and treatment of observers on the council. Finally, Burke focuses on the relationship between the Arctic Council and individual member states that have coastal interests on the Arctic Ocean.

While the interview data presented in the book yields some important observations, Burke's study would have benefited from a broader information base—such as better use of the existing documents of the Arctic Council, as well as the academic literature on the subject. Burke's heavy reliance on interviews means she gets some things wrong. In the second half of the book, for example, she repeatedly notes that the Northern Indigenous Peoples organizations that are given the title Permanent Participants are not allowed to participate in consensus decision making (see, for example, page 166). This is not accurate. Permanent Participants are involved both in the shaping of the agenda and in all council discussions. While it is true that only the state parties can make a formal decision, all decisions must be consensual, and Permanent Participants are fully engaged in all consensually made decisions. Burke thus misses the opportunity to show how the only international body that has allowed Indigenous representation in its “pecking order” actually operates.

The book also misses key literature on the Arctic Council and polar politics in general. Even though Oran Young endorses the book on the back cover, the book does not engage with his work on Arctic region regime formation. It does not use any of Franklyn Griffiths’ materials (even though he was one of the founders of the idea of the Arctic Council), all of Michael Byers’ works on the development of the Arctic international legal and political order are ignored, Jessica Shadian's book on the Permanent Participants is excluded, and all of Whitney Lackenbauer's work on the observers is left out. Even my work on the creation of the Arctic Council is not included. The book thus omits much existing literature—and in particular North American studies of the creation and functioning of the Arctic Council. Burke does include documents from the Arctic Council in her analysis, but the overwhelming majority are from 2013 to 2015 and therefore focus on only a brief period.

These omissions seriously limit the book's account of the creation and maintenance of the Arctic Council. The Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS)—the direct precursor of the Artic Council—is not even mentioned in the first half of the book. Yet much of the organization of the Arctic Council flowed directly from the AEPS. The story of how Finland and Canada worked together would have clearly supported her hypothesis on how lesser powers can cooperate to achieve results that greater powers do not favour. The manner in which the United States attempted to slow the development of this body and the manner in which the Indigenous Organizations moved from observer to Permanent Participant status could all yield important insights about how a pecking order affected the creation and functioning of first the AEPS and then the Arctic Council. But this part of the story is totally missing from the book. Burke also misses the diplomatic efforts by Canada to turn the AEPS into a more formal body that would consider all issues, not just environmentally focused ones. Once again, the negotiations between Canada and the United States should have been a critical element of the book but are not included. The focus on 2013–2015 leaves the reader with a sense that the only important developments take place during that time, which is not correct.

One of the most important findings of the book concerns how national politics interact with the effort to develop a collaborative club. A major subtheme is that Canada's opposition to Russian intervention in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, which emerged from the domestic dynamics of Canadian politics, critically wounded the prospects for cooperation on the Arctic Council. It is clear that Burke sees this one act as a major—or to use her term, “harsh”—mistake. Her exclusive focus on this example, however, means that she disregards other instances of national policy influencing the functioning of the Arctic Council. For instance, American national policy on climate change led it to oppose the conclusions of the Arctic Council's 2004 report on climate change—the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA)—even though the report was very influential in shaping the international narrative on climate change. The ongoing refusal of the European Union to back down from its ban on seal products in the face of the opposition of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (one of the Permanent Participants) is another example. In light of these cases, Canada's boycott of meetings with Russia seems less significant and isolated. Again, the omission of key evidence amounts to a lost opportunity to develop a stronger argument about how national politics affects the functioning council.

In short, this is a book with a very interesting thesis, but it does not achieve its objective. The Arctic Council is indeed a fascinating case study of how different agents (state parties, Indigenous bodies and nongovernment organizations) can organize themselves and function in an innovative and generally cooperative manner. However, the study lacks the necessary historical documentation and related literature to fully explain how such diplomacy actually works.