SUMMARY:

The article tells the uneasy and unusual story of the territorial delimitation on the Kola Peninsula between the Russian Empire and Norway (then part of Sweden) in the nineteenth century. For over half a millennium, the region had no state borders, so part of the local Saami population was recognized officially as subjects of two (or even three) states. The authors reconstruct a complex political and cultural dynamics after the formal border demarcation in 1826 that involved three main parties: the Saami, an indigenous population that did not recognize political borders and the concept of territorial sovereignty; Norway (then part of Sweden), which developed along the normative scenario of the nation-state on its “historical territory”; and the Russian Empire, whose political elite in the past had been willing to accommodate any regime of rule as long as it secured the local population’s loyalty to the sovereign. It is in this multifaceted context that the notion of the “Far North” was defined and redefined over the next ninety years, under the influence of mutual projections and misunderstandings.