Maren Ostergaard
In the North, fish are on the move while borders remain fixed. As warming seas redraw where and when valuable stocks can be caught, the Arctic is becoming a frontier not of discovery but of governance: a place where quota bargains age quickly, where enforcement must work at extreme distance, and where minor incidents at sea can harden into diplomatic disputes. The Fisheries Frontier explains why this is happening and how to analyse it without defaulting to either alarmism or complacency.Maren Ostergaard follows the chain that links ecology to conflict: stock migration upends allocation formulas; quota politics turns scientific uncertainty into a struggle over legitimacy; and maritime surveillance reveals as much about what cannot be proven as what can. The book shows how 'grey' fleets exploit seams between jurisdictions, how monitoring technologies create new verification battles, and why enforcement is an information pipeline as much as a matter of patrol vessels. It also brings ports and markets into the picture, explaining how port state measures and traceability rules can sometimes shift incentives more effectively than distant interdiction.Written for students, general readers, and policy and security audiences, the book offers a durable framework for evaluating risk in contested fisheries. Readers will come away understanding Arctic disputes as structured problems of capacity, incentives, and visibility - and recognising what stable governance looks like when the resource itself refuses to stay in place.
