The Transformation of the Arctic Council and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council amid the International Crisis of 2022

The international political crisis of 2022 has become one of the most important phenomena within the existing system of international relations (IR) and has had an impact on virtually all international processes, including those in the Arctic region. The Arctic occupies a key position in contemporary international relations, as it is the region where the border between Russia and NATO countries, including the United States, lies. The impact of the crisis on the Arctic subsystem of IR is understudied. Much of the research focuses on reconstructing the events within the processes that took place in the region. Nevertheless, researchers have found that international regimes that are more institutionally rigid have shown greater resilience under crisis conditions. In turn, the Arctic Council and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council, international regimes with a similar institutional structure, differed in their dynamics amid the 2022 crisis. While the Barents Euro-Arctic Council has completely stopped cooperating with Russia, the Arctic Council has seen a recovery trend after a period of ‘freezing’. In order to identify the reasons that determined the observed differences in the dynamics of transformation of these institutions, the paper used the theoretical approach of simple and broader effects of international regimes. The number of positive simple and broader effects of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council was found to be significantly lower than those of the Arctic Council. In the context of simple effects, the reasons for the disparity are: coverage of issue areas according to the participants’ vantage points in terms of participants and geography, along with funding, while in terms of extended effects: the degree of ideologization of an institution and opportunities for political engagement at a relatively high level. A key limitation of the methodology used relates to the fact that, by looking at regimes in a functional logic, other factors are not taken into account. Nevertheless, the differences in the transformation of the Arctic Council and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council as a result of the crisis may also be related to the differences in the Russia-Norway and Russia-Finland relationships.