The governance of the Arctic as a frontier for international environmental and climate cooperation, resource politics and security governance holds the promise to provide important insights into some of the 21st century’s most enduring and pressing global challenges. This article reviews the state of the art of Arctic governance research (AGR) to assess the potential and limitations of a regional studies community for making sense of Northern politics and contributing to the broader discipline of international relations (IR) research. A bibliometric analysis of 398 articles published in 10 outlets between 2008 and 2019 reveals that AGR faces at least four limitations that undermine understanding and explaining the processes and outcomes of regional politics and inhibit generalisable observations applicable to questions of global governance: academic immaturity, methodological monoculturalism, state-centrism and analytical parochialism. The lack particularly of theoretically driven and comparative research is indicative of a deeper crisis in AGR which, if unaddressed, could further solidify the community’s unjustified reputation as quixotic in orientation and negligible in its contributions to IR research.

中文翻译：

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北极治理研究是否陷入危机？病理诊断

北极治理作为国际环境和气候合作、资源政治和安全治理的前沿，有望为 21 世纪一些最持久和紧迫的全球挑战提供重要见解。本文回顾了北极治理研究 (AGR) 的最新进展，以评估区域研究社区在理解北方政治和促进更广泛的国际关系 (IR) 研究方面的潜力和局限性。对 2008 年至 2019 年间在 10 个网点发表的 398 篇文章的文献计量分析表明，AGR 至少面临四个限制，这些限制破坏了对区域政治进程和结果的理解和解释，并抑制了适用于全球治理问题的普遍观察：学术不成熟、方法论单一文化主义、国家中心主义和分析狭隘主义。特别缺乏理论驱动和比较研究表明 AGR 存在更深层次的危机，如果不加以解决，可能会进一步巩固该社区不合理的声誉，即方向不切实际，对 IR 研究的贡献微不足道。