Subnational diplomacy has become an increasingly important part of foreign policy and international relations. This observation concerns a state of affairs that is not necessarily obvious or given. First, by definition, subnational governments usually conduct subnational activities and address problems that affect their constituencies. Second, in many countries subnational governments undertake such an agenda without an actual legal framework authorizing such initiatives. However, with an intensified global interdependency, policy areas such as environmental protection, human rights, immigration, and trade, just to name a few, require action both at the international and territorialized levels, as many of them transcend political administrative boundaries.
As a result, in the early 21st century it is possible to determine various forms of international relations conducted by subnational leaders. This activity involves direct interactions undertaken by subnational leaders and bureaucrats with other actors across borders (private, non-governmental, and governmental—national or subnational), participation in transnational networks, and/or participation in international policymaking. Because subnational governments are closer to the people and can test experimental or groundbreaking policies with less risk, oftentimes they can become pioneers of measures that can be rolled out or replicated elsewhere in the international domain. Such policy leadership is just one element of subnational engagement in the diplomatic arena whereby subnational governments move across jurisdictional levels, breaking the fixed scales in which they would traditionally operate.
In the past years, scholars investigating the external relations undertaken by subnational governments have dedicated great effort to understanding the motivations for regions to go into the international arena. What these studies lack, however, is an understanding of what the implications are of subnational governments’ engagement in international relations.
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Subnational Leaders and Diplomacy
Joana Setzer and Karen Anderton
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The Arctic in International Relations
Andreas Østhagen
The Arctic has risen on the international agenda, both for the eight Arctic states and for other actors external to the region. Security and geopolitical dynamics have developed and changed in the north. Nevertheless, one-liner predictions of a resource race or an imminent conflict do not capture the nuances of Arctic politics. When it comes to territorial or border disputes, none remains in the Arctic. The last territorial dispute—over Hans Island—was settled in 2022. When it comes to maritime boundary disputes, only one remains—namely, between Canada and the United States. Along these parameters, the Arctic is in fact remarkably defined and stable, in contrast to other maritime domains surrounded by states. There are still disputes in which states disagree over the interpretation of international law or how to manage the change in resource activity brought forth by climate change. Looking at the international relations of the Arctic, it also makes sense to separate three sets of political dynamics: regional (intra-Arctic) relations, global relations with an Arctic impact or relevance or both, and subregional security relations. Examining security relations as a subset of Arctic International Relations makes it particularly apparent that these primarily revolve around the Barents Sea or North Atlantic maritime domain and the Bering Sea or North Pacific maritime domain, linking to, but not encompassing all of, the Arctic.
