Independent research on critical mineral supply chains, Arctic governance, and the structural leverage great powers build through infrastructure, resource access, and technology standards.
The Global Competition of the High North and Its Consequences
Critical Minerals and China's Strategy of Concealed Control
Arctic Ledger is an independent research journal covering critical minerals, supply chain security, Arctic and maritime governance, and great power competition. We publish original analysis from researchers, graduate students, and practitioners working across these fields, with contributors drawn from institutions worldwide. Arctic Ledger accepts no state or corporate funding. Read our editorial standards →
Volume I, No. 3, "The Arctic," gathers eleven essays on the global competition over the High North — from Europe's energy dependencies and the Northern Sea Route's propaganda value to submarine warfare, orbital assets, subsea cables, and the Inuit communities largely left out of the politics conducted in their own homeland. Read the full issue as a PDF, or see below for what's inside.
Europe's decoupling from Russian energy has quietly shifted its dependencies north, and its Arctic defense planning has not caught up.
Read in the PDF →Moscow and Beijing share an incentive to overstate how functional the Northern Sea Route and Polar Silk Road already are.
Read in the PDF →As the Polar Silk Road matures, the Malacca Strait's chokepoint monopoly over Chinese trade begins to erode.
Read in the PDF →Russia's courtship of non-polar BRICS partners in the Arctic reads less as expansion than as anxiety over overreliance on China.
Read in the PDF →A framework for reading hard power as leverage built through economic expansion, applied to Russia and China's Arctic ambitions.
Read in the PDF →Nuclear submarines, undersea cables, and mineral deposits converge beneath Arctic ice as an underexamined layer of great-power competition.
Read in the PDF →Outnumbered in icebreakers, the US pivots to autonomous and AI-enabled systems to project capability it doesn't yet have in steel.
Read in the PDF →Dense satellite traffic and GNSS reliance make the Arctic a second frontier for the competition already playing out on the ice below it.
Read in the PDF →Cables carrying 99 percent of the world's data traffic make the Arctic seafloor a question of sovereignty, not merely connectivity.
Read in the PDF →China, Russia, and the United States each read the same melting ice as a different kind of opening.
Read in the PDF →Great powers have built legitimacy through Arctic presence for a century, with Inuit communities largely excluded from the politics conducted in their own homeland.
Read in the PDF →Looking for Volume I, No. 2 — "Ore, Ownership, and Opacity"? Read it here →
Arctic Ledger draws its contributors from across the globe — researchers and writers based on nearly every continent, spanning doctoral and master's candidates, working professionals, and on-the-ground field researchers. That range gives the journal a genuinely wide base of expertise: technology policy, mineral economics, regional security studies, infrastructure engineering, and area-specific language and fieldwork experience all feed into what we publish.
For submissions, institutional partnerships, and editorial inquiries. Arctic Ledger welcomes manuscript submissions from researchers, graduate students, and practitioners working on critical minerals, Arctic governance, supply chain security, and great power competition. Co-authorship and cross-institutional collaboration are welcomed.
Submissions are reviewed on a rolling basis.