Killing Reindeer: A Spatial Analysis of Nordic States and Nomadic Forms of Life in the Arctic

Abstract

AbstractTo conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than casting the spatial relationships between states and reindeer herders as “land use conflicts,” the article shifts the focus from competing activities to violence toward one form of life perpetrated by another. Tracing state efforts of bordering, rationalization of reindeer herding as an industry, infrastructure developments, and cultivation of selected predatory lines of flight, the article illuminates an indirect violence that is slowly eliminating nomadic forms of life. This loss highlights that in the sixth great extinction, the world is losing not only distinct biological species but also different forms of life within species. Ultimately, the striation activities of the biopolitical Nordic states, in their narrow focus on Western knowledge regimes, security, profit, and geopolitical positioning for an impending Arctic resource boom, enact a violent and destructive homogenization of what constitutes life.