The Arctic grey zone as a peace laboratory: Preparedness over grand bargains

In the High North, the most effective means to achieve peace work do not look like treaties or summits. They look like committed teachers working with high school students on preparedness at multiple levels. Drawing on anecdotal encounters with high school students in Finnmark and with community life in Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay, Canada), this intervention argues that Arctic peace is best advanced through a dense mesh of preparedness architectures—especially those formed through school preparedness training. Rather than waiting for big-power bargains, we should fund these knowledge micro-infrastructures for liveable peace, and support the communities that nurture them.

Finnmark, a high school, and sparks in their eyes

On a blue-white morning in Finnmark, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Marcela Douglas and I, Ana Luisa Sanchez Laws, stood in a high school classroom in Finnmark. We were “almost fit for fight”, though in hindsight, clueless about what was coming. Preparedness week had sent us—three from the university—north to talk to students about geopolitics, propaganda, and AI. As my colleagues traced the big lines (both conceptually and on the map), the room grew tense: perhaps some students knew their parents could be out on fishing boats, air ambulances, or border roads. Yet when we flipped to disinformation and cold-weather kits, the mood detonated into jokes. As a response to the crisis scenario presented by my colleagues, clever, wicked solutions emerged—“Loot the co-op and hide in Finland!”—and laughter was targeted at everything and everyone, including us. Underneath, though, these teenagers had the kind of competence that doesn’t announce itself. They knew how to dress for −30 degrees Celsius, how to warm a cabin without poisoning themselves with carbon dioxide, and what to take with them on a snowmobile if it became necessary to leave. These high school students were restless and irreverent, but mentally prepared: “liveable” in all senses (that is, preserving the will to live, laugh, love) was their equivalent of everyday peace—the small practices, humour, and civility that keep us going in the interstices of big politics. This is what peace looks like in the High North. It sounds like a joke that defuses fear and ends with a list of classmates you really trust.

The problem: how peacebuilding misses the Arctic grey zone

Arctic governance has long been a model of pragmatic cooperation. Yet the institutions that symbolize that story—the Arctic Council, big multilateral gatherings—have been strained or paralyzed by wider geopolitical fractures. Meanwhile, the character of conflict has shifted toward sub-threshold, ambiguous, multi-domain pressure: GNSS (satellite navigation) jamming emanating from the Kola peninsula in Russia; “research” vessels loitering near cables and pipelines; AIS spoofing of ship locations; close intercepts; lawfare around the Svalbard Treaty and fisheries; cyber probes against ports and telecoms. In this grey-zone reality, a mishap can escalate faster than diplomats can draft a statement.

This sits awkwardly with mainstream peacebuilding toolkits. We over-value summits, accords, and elite dialogue, and under-value local knowledge. We talk about “the liberal order” and “militarization,” but fund too few school programs. The human voices in that Finnmark high school sensed this mismatch. They wanted workable answers to “What do I do when social media goes down?”—not another high-level lecture by us.

Conceptual move: peace as micro-infrastructure, built polycentrically and practiced every day

I propose a shift from peace as agreement to peace as human inventiveness. By “micro-peace inventiveness” I mean the creativity, wit and knowledge that reduce the probability and severity of misreads in crowded, sensor-rich, politically sensitive spaces. Think of routine deconfliction briefings with local communities. Peace in the High North should be made to be liveable—regardless of the weather (the proverbial “it’s not the cold, it’s the clothes” attitude).

Two bodies of work inform this move. First, Mac Ginty’s “Everyday Peace,” (the title of his 2025 book) which highlights low-level practices like avoidance, civility, pragmatism, humour, and ritualized cooperation as the mortar that holds conflict-affected societies together. Everyday peace is not sentimental; it is how people keep each other safe when high politics is unreliable. Second, Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance (see her book Governing the Commons): when authority is dispersed among partially overlapping centres—coast guards, municipalities, indigenous councils, port authorities, navies, insurers—collective action can still succeed if rules are locally legitimate, transparently monitored, and adjusted through learning. In the High North, polycentric design is not romantic localism; it is how you actually keep people safe when the “centre” (grand bargains) is unreliable. Trust is part of the glue. In the High North, this is sometimes expressed by the degree of tolerance to bad jokes— but humour aside, also by the care implied in the communal acknowledgement of the gravity of the situation. Such care is seen in the resources invested to prepare everyone, including the younger generation.

Ikaluktutiak: contradictions and practices that keep you alive

In Ikaluktutiak—Cambridge Bay, Canada—the contradictions are almost legible from the air. A mining company’s camps and supply roads frame a town where the College is full of women training to be social workers and teachers. In a classroom, posters about Inuit history share a wall with notices about trauma support and a big sign that reads PEACE. The residential school legacy is not a footnote here; it sits at the table. People are funny. Cordial. Quick to tease, quicker to help. They read outsiders—a visitor with a notebook, a contractor with a clipboard—without letting on. At the edge of town, a fox guards the entrance to our campsite, and families set off on their ATVs to check a fishing net before work.

If the High North is a peace laboratory, this is the lesson you miss from the grand bargain point of view: resilience is not a slogan; it’s a practice. It’s a joke at the right time. It’s a college that teaches social work and respects Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit—Inuit ways of knowing—so the next time a crisis hits, the person raising their hand to help knows both the map and the family. It is a polycentric web: hunters, elders, drum dancers, and teachers who remember who fell ill last year. Peace needs to be liveable and expressed in the everyday practice of people and communities.

Everyday peace in the High North means early, trusted, two-way communication: military exercise schedules shared with villages months in advance; compensatory grants when fishing grounds are temporarily closed; joint environmental response drills where indigenous and coastal communities lead, and younger and older citizens becoming aware of the whole infrastructure—the human inventiveness—that supports this communication. The mechanism is respect, predictability, and clear communication; the outcome is fewer crises and less resentment.

“Isn’t this securitizing the Arctic?” Only if we treat preparedness as an end. The point here is to reduce the likelihood that security actors stumble into crises and to keep the space for non-security life open. For this, community wisdom (in the sense of phronesis—practical knowledge) is key. 

Conclusion: keep peace liveable

The last thing those hich school students did before we packed up was to re-think their “looting and hiding in Finland” plan. Some of them decided that it was better to pack warm clothes, talk to parents and friends, help their neighbours, and not spread stupid rumours on social media (this, in fact, was endorsed by most). They laughed, but deep inside, they knew what could come, and they were mentally prepared. That is everyday peace in the Arctic grey zone: liveable, with a spark in their eyes.

If the High North is a peace laboratory, the experiment we need is not a new grand treaty. It is a dense mesh of preparedness architectures that keep accidents rare and misreads quickly corrigible, built by the human inventiveness of the people who must speak to each other every day, and who need each other for survival. If you fund preparedness knowledge and make it available to all schools, you will have built a peace worth having in a region where the cold can kill you, but humour can keep you warm.