Klaus Dodds is Executive Dean and Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1994 and took up a position at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter he joined Royal Holloway. He has held a Visiting Erskine Fellowship at Gateway Antarctica, University of Canterbury (2002) and been a Visiting Fellow at St Cross College, University of Oxford (2010-11) and St Johns College, University of Oxford (2017-18). In 2005 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Geography and a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2017-2020) for a project concerned with the ‘Global Arctic’. He has published many books and articles concerned with the geopolitics and governance of the Polar Regions, as well as the cultural politics of ice and border geopolitics. These include The Scramble for the Poles (2016), Ice: Nature and Culture (2018) and Border Wars (2022). His latest book, co-written with Mia Bennett is provisionally titled Unfrozen: The Battle for the Future of the Arctic (Yale University Press 2025).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

A perennial challenge many researchers face is being able to track and trace research and debates let alone identify “exciting” themes and trends. One thing I have learnt from my academic career thus far is that serendipity matters. If you had asked me 30 years ago, “Would you expect to be interested in digital geopolitics or security?”, I would have thought “unlikely”. Nowadays, thanks to professional partnerships forged at Royal Holloway and elsewhere, I have had the pleasure of supervising a range of PhD students and consequently discovered more about their fields. Supervising students more generally is a great way of being exposed to things that can turn out to be exciting, intriguing, and thought-provoking.

As you might expect, given my long-standing interests, I follow closely the evolving literature on critical and popular geopolitics and enjoy reading papers and books that stretch the conceptual, empirical, and policy-relevant limits of that scholarship. For example, it is very satisfying to read how interest in humour and satire has expanded alongside interest in cartoons, comics and other forms of performative art. My earliest foray into Steve Bell’s If… cartoons in the mid-1990s was largely informed by my reading outside political geography, International Relations, and security studies. Fast-forward three decades, one could point to a suite of studies that interrogate how humour is put to work in formal, practical, and everyday political, diplomatic, and para-diplomatic contexts and pretexts.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Contexts and events matter. First, academic scholarship has its trends, cycles, and preoccupations with theory matters and how one engages with that in part depends on partnerships, opportunities, and disposition to transformation. As a geographer, I embrace with great affection interdisciplinary research and enjoy engagement with multi-disciplinary research teams. My publications over the last three decades reflect an academic eclecticism – working with others, experimenting with approaches, and tackling topics and issues that were comparatively new to me. An example would be writing about the political materiality of frozen soils or permafrost with an anthropologist.

Second, events matter. I have researched and written about a suite of things such as the war on terror, pandemics, and the Arctic (originally, I focused on the Antarctic in my earliest work), all of which have been enabled and enriched by partnerships in geography, law, health studies, computer science, physical and environmental sciences, anthropology, and IR/political science.

Finally, as I noted above, who and where you teach and supervise makes a difference. I have spent most of my academic career at Royal Holloway but deliberately seized opportunities to work elsewhere in other universities. More importantly in the UK Parliament, UK government departments, NATO, EU and other third-party organizations as a specialist adviser, a consultant, a project team member and so on. All of this has helped to ensure that my work as an educator and scholar has been subject to productive challenges. A good example was presenting a report I co-wrote on the EU and having to present it to MEPs live in the European Parliament in November 2023.

How has the discourse on Arctic affairs developed/changed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

Prior to 2022, notwithstanding the disruptive consequences of the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, there was a concerted desire on the part of the seven other Arctic states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the USA), and the intergovernmental forum, Arctic Council to emphasise that the Arctic was an exception to the norm of world politics. A circumpolar region of peace and shared interests in the form of environmental protection and sustainable development. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 threw all of that into the air. Shortly afterwards the ‘Arctic 7’ announced........

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