move/scenop

MOVE - Moved by the State: the reality of modern day human migration in the northern Polar Regions

SCENOP - Social Change and the Environment in Nordic Prehistory: Evidence from Finland and northern Canada

ESF EUROCORES projects (BOREAS programme)


The village of Thule in Greenland was displaced a hundred kilometers to the north in 1953, to make room for US military installations during the Cold War. Ever since, hunting has remained very traditional, but now the hunting way of life is threatened by the disappearance of the sea ice. Photo: Yvon Csonka.

There is a rapidly growing group of researchers in the field of social sciences that are increasingly interested in how the environment has continued to and will continue to influence migration of indigenous communities, particularly in an upcoming century of climate change and sea-level rise. The MOVE and SCENOP projects fall into that emerging category.

The MOVE project has one central theme: migration and resettlement as survival strategies for the people of the circumpolar North. It analyses how seasonality and climate change, together with social and economic factors, drive the changes of existing movement patterns and consequently create new kinds of settlements and force people to radically change their forms of subsistence.

The MOVE research team is particularly concerned with how both environmentally induced migration and economic migration will be managed and what policies and procedures will be written to help displacees succeed in new environments. In analysing these mostly state-sponsored resettlement policies, the researchers are focused on how traditional cultures are responding to that non-local relocation effort.


Chukotka, 2005. Photo: Virginie Vaté.

“The results [of MOVE] will become increasingly relevant in the ongoing negotiations between states and communities about relocation in the face of increasing social and climatic change”, said Yvon Csonka, President of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association and Principal Investigator of the MOVE project.

The MOVE project also shows that the discourse is not simply one of human adaptation to climate change, a politically willed social and economic change. Another important research question of the project is whether we can bring closer to each other the economic and social factors of migration and those imposed by local climate changes. The scientists hope that their results could inform the policy decisions to make future relocations less traumatic and more easily overcome.



The SCENOP project seeks to uncover the ways local communities responded to the rapid environmental change in the prehistory. In two geographically and culturally separated but environmentally comparable settlements (Northern Finnland and James Bay in Quebec, Canada), the project research team composed of archaeologists, anthropologists and geographers identifies regularities and differences in human adaptive strategies to cope with environmental changes.


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