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Paper short abstract

This paper traces Soviet introductions of pink salmon and Kamchatka crab in the Barents Sea and their ongoing effects in Sápmi, showing how invasive species mediate conflicts between Indigenous knowledge, industrial fisheries, and authoritarian governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the history and present of two invasive species in the Barents Sea: pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and Kamchatka crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus). It traces a Soviet experiment in environmental engineering and explores its ongoing consequences in Sápmi. Drawing on archival sources, the paper shows that the introduction of these species was part of Soviet strategies to intensify fisheries and extend state control over Arctic ecosystems, linked to a broader project of colonizing (osvoenie) Indigenous multispecies landscapes. These interventions generated tensions between state-directed industrialization and local knowledge and practices. Today, these legacies produce overlapping conflicts. Internationally, Norway–Russia relations over fisheries and environmental policy are shaped by global markets, climate change, and the militarization of the Arctic amid Russia’s war against Ukraine. Locally, Sámi small-scale fishers face conflicts over rights, livelihoods, and knowledge systems, navigating state science, industrial fisheries, and Indigenous environmental knowledge under Norwegian regulations. Pink salmon and Kamchatka crab act as agents in a multispecies ethnography of political tensions, highlighting contradictions, generating political and technoscientific interventions, and fostering resistance. By situating these species within Soviet environmental history and contemporary Scandinavian governance, the paper shows how authoritarian and technocratic approaches shape relations among species and between social practices and knowledge systems. It contributes to understanding how authoritarian structures influence multispecies relations and how politics emerges, is experienced, and contested at the intersection of geopolitical strategy, industrial capitalism, and Indigenous resistance.