Barents Encyclopedia is published

300 authors, 415 articles, nearly 1,200 pages in two volumes. The Barents Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive collections of facts about the collaboration across national borders in the northernmost part of Europe.

Initiated during the International Polar Year in 2007, it took nearly ten years to compile, write, edit and print the masterpiece of knowledge from – and about – the Barents Region.

The Barents Encyclopedia is an outcome of an international academic project with editors and writers from all four member countries of the region; Russia, Sweden, Finland and Norway.

All 300 authors are academics and experts living and working in the Barents Region. Editor-in-Chief of the Encylopedia is Mats-Olov Olsson with the Centre for Regional Science at the University of Umeå, Sweden.

Pax, the publisher of the two volumes, says one major objective of the Encyclopedia is to connect the past with the present development of the region, thereby filling a gap in the recording of European history and, hopefully promoting the world’s interest in an area of the globe with such spectacular nature and such a rich variety of ethnic groups and cultures.

“It will, hopefully, facilitate and stimulate interactions among citizens in the region in their various capacities as businessmen, administrators, professionals, and tourists,” the publisher writes.

The 415 articles covers history, culture and economy, interlinked across the borders in the 13 member regions of the Barents cooperation. Focusing on socio-economic, geographic, cultural and political prerequisites for a continued and intensified transborder interaction among the citizens inhabiting the European north.

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The Barents Observer has contributed to the Encyclopedia with both fact-writings and photos from the different remote corners of the Barents Region.