Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies
Abstract:
On April 28, 2009, a delegation of Inuit leaders from Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Russia presented the Circumpolar Inuit Declaration on Arctic Sovereignty in Tromsø, Norway, where the Arctic Council was meeting. This historic declaration represented the Inuit response to their exclusion eleven months earlier at the May 2008 Ilulissat Summit of top foreign policymakers among the Arctic rim states, and reflects a formal, if not aggressively forceful, rejection of the modern state's latest effort to shape the destiny of Arctic without the participation of the Inuit.