{"id":1422,"date":"2026-09-17T07:55:49","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T07:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/?p=1422"},"modified":"2026-09-17T07:55:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T07:55:49","slug":"reconnected-normativity-how-arctic-science-diplomacy-facilitates-contestation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/reconnected-normativity-how-arctic-science-diplomacy-facilitates-contestation\/","title":{"rendered":"Reconnected Normativity: How Arctic Science Diplomacy Facilitates Contestation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brett Lewis<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2019, an expedition like no other took place in the Arctic. The Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate<\/a> (MOSAiC) expedition planned for the German icebreaker Polarstern <\/em>to drift and become stuck in the Arctic ice for a year, allowing scientists unfettered access to the Arctic environment. Acting as a homebase for science in the field, Polarstern <\/em>enabled advanced research into every aspect of the Arctic environment: the atmosphere, ocean, ecosystem, and beyond. It was a unique opportunity for scientists to access the inaccessible.<\/p>\n

The expedition consisted of 20 countries working together to support and underpin international science. This meant collaborating across borders often through scientific organisations that orchestrate research activities and finding innovative ways to carry out a complex scientific operation. Chief among these organisations were the German research institute Alfred Wegener Institute<\/a> (AWI), the NGO The International Arctic Science Committee<\/a> (IASC), and working groups<\/a> of the Arctic Council, organisations that played crucial roles in organising scientific activity, guiding international cooperation, and communicating across the political-scientific divide.<\/p>\n

Science diplomacy is well understood as a diplomatic exercise supporting science to enable scientific activity across borders, or as supporting international relations by fostering closer relations through the interaction of different states. If reframed as sites of contestation, where normative ideas and governance can interact and the norms of international society can be challenged, these instances can act as interface points between normative ideas and governance. A new approach was therefore needed to investigate these points. In expeditions like MOSAiC, there are opportunities for normative actors (scientists) to interact with and engage the policy sphere (policy makers, bureaucrats). I wrote a paper that was published recently in International Politics<\/em><\/a> on what happens at these contact points, exploring what we can learn about global governance in these interactions.<\/p>\n

Connecting ideas in global governance<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

The paper works with two principal ideas: contestation and world society. The former has been developed by Antje Wiener<\/a> over the past couple decades; it is a theory that considers that norms of international relations are not static but subject to regular contestation. The rules of state conduct are not a constant in this interpretation, but change over time as states interpret, reinterpret, and negotiate new understandings in their social interactions with each other in international politics. Wiener proposes that governance relies on processes of contestation to function as it determines how states make sense of norms, suggesting that change in governance occurs through social processes.<\/p>\n

World society, on other hand, has largely remained underdeveloped as a concept. It has, however, been revived and reinvigorated mostly by Barry Buzan<\/a> since the turn of the millennium<\/a>. Broadly, this concept relates to culture and actors beyond the state in form of the normative origins of ideas in the world. Buzan revisited this concept in 2018<\/a> to reduce the ambiguity surrounding this concept, proposing a world society where normative ideas originate amongst people, are translated into political messaging via certain transnational actors who then propagate these messages via advocacy in global governance. In Buzan\u2019s rendition, world society gives us a structure of society that incorporates transnational and states actors as part of one system.<\/p>\n

In my article I develop the contesting world society <\/em>framework. <\/em>With this, I proposed a synthesis of these two ideas to create a new approach to studying the origins of normative ideas and how they take hold in governance. If we treat Buzan\u2019s world society as structure and contestation as the social processes, it becomes clearer how abstract normative ideas become embedded in governance. Transnational actors take normative ideas and advocate them amongst states in governance, engaging in contestation as a means to redefine what governance means. Events of science diplomacy can be examined as a contact point between normative ideas and political discourse, where transnational actors (such as AWI and IASC) can become active actors in redefining norms.<\/p>\n

The role of a contesting world society in Arctic science diplomacy<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Applying the contesting world society <\/em>framework to the MOSAiC expedition indicated a broad normative context in the scientists charged with championing the cause and the pivotal role that transnational actors played in communicating normative values into political messaging.<\/p>\n

First, there is a lot of normative context to consider in an expedition of this scale in the Arctic. The expedition cost 140 million Euros<\/a>, resources that could otherwise have been spent on public services. This is justifiable because climate science is widely regarded as a legitimate cause. Environmental stewardship is considered a norm<\/a> understood by broad collectives of people, and science that attempts to mitigate, adapt, and understand threats to the environment stands on this legitimacy. Therefore, the normative backdrop of the expedition is laden with science as a common good.<\/p>\n

Around the time of the expedition, geopolitical issues were also a backdrop that creates a different normative context. Although the expedition predates the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were and still are several latent issue areas that are threatening to destabilise Arctic politics. For instance, The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea allows coastal states to claim extended maritime zones<\/a> based on continental shelf boundaries. In the Arctic, this has enabled a form of \u2018ocean grabbing\u2019, where states extend jurisdiction over resource-rich areas under the guise of legal entitlement. There is also a potential resource competition in the Arctic concerning the considered vast amounts of resources estimated<\/a> in the region. Non-Arctic states are also increasingly interested in the region, threatening to impact the stability of the region<\/a>. An expedition that includes 20 countries (of which many would have to be non-Arctic states) thus was a statement of cooperation in the face of a crumbling Arctic exceptionalism, a fading narrative<\/a> that considers Arctic cooperation to be exceptionally stable in the face of extra regional instability.<\/p>\n

Through a review of media surrounding the expedition and academic dialogue, including webinars of the scientists involved in the expedition themselves, my paper determined that AWI, IASC, and Arctic Council Working Groups were the most visible political world society actors involved. These non-state actors performed multilateralism by facilitating the organisation of much of the expedition\u2019s infrastructure, promoting international collaboration and principles of joint logistics, shared access, and data collaboration. Countless other research organisations played a smaller but still significant roles in underpinning these activities by operating outside of national contexts. High-profile climate scientists also worked in political world society\u2019s remit, concentrating the voices of the most relevant collective identity present in the expedition, the many scientists and researchers that executed it.<\/p>\n

Reframing science diplomacy as sites of contestation opens up important questions about how the Arctic is governed. If ideas like environmental stewardship can take hold through scientific collaboration rather than strictly state negotiation, this changes who has influence over the region\u2019s future: not just Arctic states, but scientists, Indigenous organisations, and environmental NGOs. For example, through the Arctic Council working groups, scientific expertise has a prominent position in the leading intergovernmental organisation of the Arctic, the Arctic Council<\/a>. \u00a0The contesting world society <\/em>framework offers a new way to examine these dynamics, bringing together ideas on the social processes and conditions through which norms develop, and widening the focus beyond state sot this broader range of actors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Brett Lewis is a doctoral candidate at Cardiff University. His thesis explored how Svalbard facilitates access to the Arctic for non-Arctic states, using a world society framework to investigate how the people on the ground on Svalbard are relevant to international politics. His other research concerns how the Arctic can be understood as an international society based on environmental stewardship as a core institution.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Brett Lewis In 2019, an expedition like no other took place in the Arctic. The Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of the Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition planned for […]","protected":false},"author":1639,"featured_media":1423,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[310,308,309,311],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-the-library","tag-mosaic","tag-normativity","tag-polarstern","tag-science-diplomacy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paHdq5-mW","meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/568\/2026\/09\/Picture-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1639"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1424,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions\/1424"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}