Politiikan tutkimuksen päivät 2025

Roundtable: Land, Discrimination and Sámi Rights in the context of geopolitical change and green colonialism

Roundtable chair: Laura Junka-Aikio, University of Lapland

Participants: Åsa Larson-Bild, (Saami Council, TBC) Mikkel Berg-Nordlie (Oslo Metropolitan University), Kukka Ranta (University of Lapland) and Annette Löf (Stockholm Environment Insititute)

Roundtable description:

In the Nordic countries, discrimination of the Sámi and violation of their Indigenous rights often takes place through seemingly non-violent and neutral laws, policies and regulations which fail to take into consideration, or address the historical, structural and material conditions of settler colonialism and their impact on the Sámi people. For the same reason, Sámi insistence on their rights as an Indigenous people gets easily dismissed as irrelevant, misplaced or even as greed for “special rights” that others are not entitled to. Examples of such attitudes and interpretations are common on different levels of governance as well as in public sphere, including social media platforms, where discussion on Sámi and Indigenous rights, and especially land rights, often provokes outright racism and hate speech, leading to further exclusion of the Sámi from the public sphere, and damage to their freedom of speech.

Recognizing the centrality of land – the race for land, need for land, rights to land and protection of land - this roundtable seeks to discuss the interplay of Nordic governance, discrimination and Sámi rights in the context of rapidly increasing land pressure and conflict. Ongoing geopolitical change (including militarization) and the so-called green transition/green colonialism are exacerbating colonial pressure on Sámi lands and livelihoods. Bringing together foremost scholars in these topics from Norway, Sweden and Finland, the aim of the roundtable is first, to build a better understanding of how and through what kind of legal and regulatory frameworks the growing corporate, state and military interest in the lands, territories and natural resources in Sápmi is advanced and legitimated in each of these countries. Second, we discuss their impact on the Sámi, i.e. what kind of discriminatory outcomes they produce; and finally, how the Sámi have resisted and what kind of challenges the resistance has to face, given the Nordic societies’ general lack of acknowledgement of the underlying colonial history and persistent structures of discrimination and disadvantage.

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The roundtable is organized in collaboration with the Swedish Research Council funded research project RADISAM (https://www.sei.org/projects/radisam/) and University of Lapland's new MA Degree Programme in Arctic World Politics (www.ulapland.fi/arcticworldpolitics)