A land between solid and fluid: Situating permafrost within more-than-human geopolitics

This article aims to situate permafrost, a type of soil characterized by temperature and relationality rather than pure composition, within debates around the role of materiality in geopolitics. While permafrost's materiality is quite like ice, it differs in terms of having a more complex and non-linear relationship to temperature and a higher level of local variability. Because permafrost has only very rarely been considered in debates around territory and geopolitics, we first review the broader literature on permafrost and how it is discussed and understood in engineering and the natural sciences, identifying its crucial relational dimensions and its ontology of tipping points. We then deploy these insights to analyse the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in China to illustrate how permafrost is more than inert matter and poses geopolitical risks to the state even when it is successfully stabilized. We argue that permafrost becomes geopolitical through its unpredictability, which results from its highly local composition and thresholds for melting.