Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how reindeer, dust, noise, and roads participate in bordering the Swedish–Finnish iron frontier. By analysing two mining cases, it shows how legal rulings differently interpret more-than-human entanglements, producing uneven outcomes for Sámi herding and cross-border ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

How do more-than-human entanglements shape the iron borderlands of Sápmi? This paper investigates the shifting borderscape of the Swedish–Finnish frontier through two interlinked mining projects—Kaunisvaara in Sweden and Hannukainen in Finland—both situated within the transnational Indigenous territory of Sápmi. Here, borders are not only geopolitical lines but relational and contested zones, involving mining concessions, reindeer grazing territories, ecological corridors, and state infrastructures. Reindeer, dust, runoff, noise, and roads emerge as border agents—material participants in the making and disruption of territorial claims and extractive regimes.

Through close analysis of two contrasting court rulings, the paper examines how these more-than-human dynamics shape legal interpretations of harm. In 2025, Finland’s Supreme Administrative Court annulled the Hannukainen zoning plan, citing uncertainties around blasting, dust, and seasonal variability. In contrast, Sweden’s Environmental Court approved Kaunis Iron’s expansion, despite objections from Gabna sameby and others, and without addressing cumulative or cross-border effects on reindeer migration and transnational waters.

Rather than reducing these rulings to national difference, the paper situates them within a fragmented but entangled legal-ecological borderscape, documenting how different legal regimes selectively recognise or dismiss Sámi rights and ecological relations as part of broader bordering processes. Drawing on emerging work on border ecologies and fugitive landscapes, the paper foregrounds more-than-human border agencies—from roads and embankments to dust and reindeer—and shows how extractive frontiers are not only imposed, but also contested and unsettled through multispecies movement, infrastructural disruption, and claims to territorial continuity, relational care, and ecological resistance.