After the Council

When trust collapses, the Arctic does not become ungoverned - it becomes governed differently. In a region where distance and weather punish delay, states and operators still have to co-ordinate search and rescue, manage shipping risks, and respond to environmental emergencies. Yet the political venues that once bundled these tasks into a recognisable system can lose legitimacy, freeze, or fragment, leaving essential functions to be rebuilt through narrower and more brittle arrangements.

After the Council offers a clear framework for analysing this shift. Igor Danilets treats Arctic governance as a set of functions that can be substituted: replaced by bilateral bargaining, minilateral clubs, or narrowly scoped technical agreements designed to survive political chill. Across concrete domains - search and rescue co-ordination, environmental monitoring, shipping standards, and scientific data exchange - the book shows what substitution can achieve and where it fails. It also explains why verification and compliance monitoring become harder precisely when they are most needed, and how gaps in routine coordination can turn ordinary incidents into strategic signals.

Written for students, policy audiences, and serious general readers, the book's central contribution is a way to think about minimum co-operation without romanticising co-operation itself. Readers will come away able to evaluate which forms of risk reduction mechanisms are realistic under mistrust, how to spot the most dangerous governance blind spots, and why escalation prevention in the Arctic often depends less on grand bargains than on credible procedures, shared metrics, and communication habits that still function on the worst day.