We created the University of the Arctic in the early days of peace and cooperation in the Arctic, in the first decade after the end of the Cold War.
By Lars Kullerud, President, UArctic
Since the early concept notes of 1997, the idea of UArctic has been to promote international collaboration in academia and promote the full integration of Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives in knowledge creation and sharing. In other words, since its inception, UArctic has been a strong value-based structure that speaks up for openness, international collaboration, respect, and inclusiveness.
UArctic’s ultimate vision is that of “a strong, engaged, informed, and dynamic North, creating better lives and environments for all northerners.” Equally importantly, UArctic is its members. All UArctic activities are implemented by and at our member institutions through international collaboration. Our strategy has been to avoid becoming an organization for its own purposes, and rather remain a strong tool for our members to work together.
UArctic has become the ultimate collaboration tool for Arctic knowledge creation and sharing. We are now increasing our focus on transforming this to concrete relevance, to be used in and for the North to serve its populations as well as the world. The newly launched UArctic activity clusters are a selection of time-critical major challenges where the collective competency and capacity of the UArctic network really can make a difference. The UArctic Board has now agreed to focus on four specific challenges. In the future, the set of selected topics will change, while UArctic’s values, mission, and the fundamental principles of how UArctic operates remain the same.
In fact, it is with pride that we can say that our values, motto, mission, and operating principles have remained the same (with some small differences in wording) for decades. The stability of what UArctic is, why UArctic exists, and how UArctic operates depicts this network.
UArctic represents a rock-solid and predictable fundament in an otherwise changing and unpredictable world. Let’s keep UArctic that way.
Lars Kullerud
UArctic President (once trained as a geologist)
