Researcher
Erdem Lamazhapov
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Summary
Erdem Lamazhapov is a PhD Research Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI). His main research interests lie in the fields of environmental, climate, and energy security in Northeast Asia and the Arctic, with a particular focus on Russia and China. Additional areas of interest include water resource management and security politics on the Korean Peninsula. His PhD project examines the implications of China’s geopolitical and geoeconomic turn to the Arctic for Norwegian security policy.
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Clear all filtersAlaska, not Greenland, should worry the United States in the Arctic
The Arctic Institute: Erdem Lamazhapov (FNI) and Andreas Østhagen (FNI) argue that the US is letting itself be distracted by Greenland. While China is planning to begin construction of yet another icebreaker this year and is conducting joint military exercises with Russia in the Arctic, the US Coast Guard has delayed the development of several icebreakers until around 2030, and chosen to focus on Greenland. The FNI researchers emphasise that China's emerging maritime power has changed the strategic significance of the North Pacific.
Critical Raw Materials: Interests of China and the European Union in the Arctic
In this Essay, we examine a potential avenue of future contestation in the Arctic – namely, the development of critical raw materials (CRMs) – with a particular focus on two actors with a growing interest in exploiting those materials in the Arctic region: China and the European Union (EU). CRMs increasingly play an essential role in the geopolitics of the global energy transition. In comes the Arctic region – a broad geographic area encompassing eight States that is rich in critical minerals, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and REEs. However, mining in the Arctic poses significant risks, particularly to the region’s fragile ecosystem, and would require significant investments, often also involving public-private partnerships. And yet, as demand for critical minerals grows, the Arctic’s role in the global supply chain will likely become more prominent, particularly from a Chinese and EU perspective. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a watershed in relations between the West and the Russian Federation, including in the Arctic region. Once hailed as an exceptional space of regional governance, cooperation and peaceful co-existence between the Arctic States, that notion lost meaning over the past two – almost three – years.