Resisting the Empire of Force in the Arctic Region: Old Imaginings and Present Challenges

Discourses about the Arctic and the North are deeply rooted in Western literary history and culture. To the ancient Greeks the “ecumene” was the inhabited and civilized world. Canadian scholar Daniel Chartier writes in What is the Imagined North? Ethical Principles (2018) that the Arctic and Far North were considered as the end of the “European ecumene”. In several publications, the renowned legal scholar, James Boyd White, has raised attention to the role of language and narratives in legal texts and interpretation. In Living Speech. Resisting the Empire of Force, published in 2006, he writes about law, language and literature. This article deals with ongoing political and academic discourses about the region in the light of travel writings and literature from the past.