Research Training Group World Politics RTG 2225

The Arctic Council is coined by the variety of actors involved in its work. This dissertation project deals with the Arctic Council’s juxtaposition of indigenous and regional focus on the one side, and the opening towards global, non-Arctic actors on the other side, by examining how the Arctic Council navigates the engagement of observers. The underlying sociological neo-institutionalist perspective, explains observer engagement as one specific form of inter-organizational cooperation. This project investigates how these observers actually observe, so how they contribute, cooperate and exchange with the Arctic Council. With a comparison of different non-state observers, it also shows similarities and differences in their relations to the Arctic Council, and thus reveals factors that facilitate or complicate cooperation. By offering a theoretical conceptualization of what observing means, this project addresses whether observers are part of the organization or only of its external environment and how they might affect the organization that they are observing. Using concepts from sociological neo-institutionalism and on organizational boundaries, this dissertation contributes to Arctic Governance research and to an understanding of observers as a category in international relations research.