The new issue of the international peer-reviewed journal Barents Studies feature three very different articles that foreground three studies located in the Barents and Euro-Arctic regions. One of the overarching commonality among the articles is that they all use comparison in order to make cogent observations about historical and present-day communities in the Barents High North and Arctic. The journal features four young scholars of the Barents Region: Camilla Brattland, Morgan Ip, Maria Lvova, and Gerald Zojer.

Bjørnå and Mikalsen’s clearly written and richly
analysed “Working for development in the High North: Mayoral strategies
and leadership styles” gives readers a valuable, and somewhat surprising,
conclusion that mayors from diverse locales and economies in the Norwegian High
North employ the same strategy of emphasizing “their role as political/policy
entrepreneurs”.

Moi’s article “Imagining
Northern Norway: Visual configurations of the North in the art of Kaare Espolin
Johnson and Bjarne Holst” introduces us to how the beguiling art of these
two artists, compared and contrasted by Moi, and filtered through Benedict
Anderson’s seminal work on nationalism, Imagined Communities, created a Northern
identity for those living in Northern Norway.

In the third
refereed article in this issue, Nilsen and Jòhannesson gives us detailed case study
analyses of three energy megaproject developments in Northern Norway and Iceland in
their article “Assessment of the firm–region coupling in the Arctic: Local
content and innovative institutional regulations”, confirming that the
Barents Region and the Arctic are intricately connected to the global marketplace.

Barents Studies: Peoples, Economies and Politics is
published in electronic form. The journal is an open access publication and is free
of charge: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:ula-201709131308.

Barents Studies: Peoples, Economies and Politics is an
international journal that publishes double-blind peer-reviewed articles. The
project partners are the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland (Lead Partner,
Finland), the Luzin Institute for Economic Studies of the Kola Science Centre of the
Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia), and the Barents Institute at the University of
Troms (Norway).

More
information:

Aileen Aseron Espíritu,
Chief editor of Barents Studies
The Barents Institute, The University of
Tromsø The Arctic University of Norway
aileen.a.espiritu(at)uit.no

Research Professor Monica Tennberg, Editor of Barents
Studies
Arctic Centre, University of Lapland
monica.tennberg(at)ulapland.fi, +358 400 192 005

Link to
the online version: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:ula-201709131308

Previous issues of Barents Studies: www.barentsinfo.org/barentsstudies

LaY/AK/JW