Professional Affiliation

Professor, London School of Economics and Political Sciences

Expert Bio

Kristina Spohr is Professor of International History at the London of Economics and Political Sciences. In 2018—2020, she was the inaugural Helmut Schmidt Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS-Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC, a unique position made possible through the generosity of the German Foreign Ministry and the DAAD. She is a specialist in German foreign affairs since 1945 & the global Cold War and interested in questions of contemporary World Order, War & Peace and the practice of Applied History. She is author and editor of a dozen books, most recently, Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 (WilliamCollins, 2019/ Yale UP, 2020), with its German edition Wendezeit: Die Neuordnung der Welt nach 1989 (DVA, 2019) having been awarded the prize “Das politikwissenschaftliche Buch” 2020 in Germany. She is now writing a global history of the Arctic.

Expertise

• Cold War
• Global Governance
• History
• Security and Defense

Wilson Center Project

Arctic - The Last Battleground

Project Summary

The Arctic will be the twenty-first century’s great arena of geopolitical tension. Perhaps even of conflict – for reasons of both power politics and climate change. In this sense the Arctic can be said to be the last battleground. To help us comprehend the real significance of the region, my project takes us back to the long-running but poorlyunderstood competition over the Arctic, from the age of imperial expansion to the era of ideological struggle and nuclear face-off. The aim is to examine how over time the region was successively mapped and then claimed, controlled, and militarised. It will show how in endless confrontations with the harsh environment, the race to explore became a rush to secure resources of which the native inhabitants of the circumpolar region were mostly the hapless victims. But it will also reveal surprising moments of international co-operation and the increasingly effective assertion of indigenous rights.

Major Publications

• Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989 (2020)
• The Arctic and World Order (2020)
• Open Door: NATO and Euro-Atlantic Security after the Cold War (2019)
• The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (2016)