Culturalization as a governance logic: Reconciliation in Norway

Abstract

This article examines reconciliation in Norway, asking how the Norwegian state’s approach to reconciliation exemplifies what I call the logic of culturalization. I theorize culturalization as a settler-colonial logic of governance that neutralizes Sámi political claims to jurisdiction and decision-making by recasting them as matters of culture. Empirically, the article analyzes two parallel developments in Norway in 2023: the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report and the protests in Oslo following the Supreme Court’s Fosen decision, led by Sámi youth. The seemingly divergent processes – reconciliation on the one hand and the government response to Sámi-led demonstrations on the other – are not oppositional but mutually reinforcing expressions of the same settler-colonial governance logic, operating through the mechanisms of distraction, delay, and decoy. Specifically, I argue that decoy politics operates through three interrelated mechanisms: reframing legal and distributive claims as negotiable rather than binding, converting political legitimacy into symbolic inclusion and cultural recognition, and deferring substantive land and jurisdictional claims through procedural delay.

Keywords

logic of culturalization reconciliation the Sámi Norway Fosen Indigenous resistance Nordic settler colonialism Sámi rights decoy delay distraction

Introduction

In Norway, 2023 marked a fork in the road for the Sámi people. On the one hand, the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC; Sannhets- og forsoningskommisjonen, 2023) released its final report, commissioned to address the historical consequences of assimilation policies toward the Sámi, Kven, and the Forest Finns, as well as recommend measures for moving forward. On the other, Sámi youth were prosecuted for protesting the government’s continued refusal to implement the 2021 Supreme Court ruling that found a large-scale wind energy development to be in violation of Sámi human rights of the two South Sámi Fovsen Njaarke¹ siidas or reindeer herding districts. For more than two years, the government failed to act on the ruling, and when Sámi youth and their allies occupied ministries and streets in Oslo in 2023 to demand compliance, the state responded by criminalizing Indigenous activism.

This article considers the tension between the apparently contradictory processes through what I call the logic of culturalization. Culturalization refers to assimilatory mechanisms seeking to reduce Indigenous peoples, their societies, and their rights to mere culture and language rather than engaging with demands for political autonomy or land restitution.

I examine reconciliation in Norway through the parallel developments of the post-Fosen protests and the government’s culturalizing approach to Sámi rights. I ask how the Norwegian response to reconciliation reflects a broader logic of culturalization. My key argument is that culturalization operates as a governing logic rather than as an unintended policy failure. As a logic, it is a deliberate act of refusing to strengthen the status of the Sámi as an Indigenous people in practice.

I theorize culturalization as a governing logic that operates through decoy politics, distraction, and delay. Cultural recognition and consultative inclusion function as distractions that signal state responsiveness while deflecting Indigenous claims and attention away from land, consent, and political authority. These processes are decoys in which proliferating consultations and cultural engagements absorb political contestation without redistributing power. When Indigenous actors exceed these culturally bounded roles, settler backlash acts as a disciplining force, recoding political demands as unreasonable or threatening (Grossman, 2017; Mackey, 2005, 2016; O’Malley and Kidman, 2018; Proulx, 2018; Ryser, 1992; Spitzer, 2024; Wolkin and Nevins, 2018). Together, these dynamics stabilize settler sovereignty while presenting reconciliation as ongoing and progressive.²

The work of the Norwegian TRC has demonstrated the enduring effects of Norwegianization policies and the gap between formal recognition and lived experience. This trajectory, marked by somewhat progressive legal recognition alongside persistent structural constraints, forms the backdrop against which contemporary forms of Sámi dispossession and contestation over land, resources, and decision-making authority must be understood. Formally, Norway constitutionally recognizes the Sámi people’s Indigenous status, but the policy framing, including that of reconciliation, presents Sámi society and identity in cultural terms. This enables the state to avoid substantive commitments to Sámi political autonomy or land rights while appearing to engage in meaningful reconciliation.

I treat reconciliation not as an endpoint of harmony, but as a political space in which enduring conflicts must be continuously engaged rather than suppressed. According to this agonistic view, reconciliation requires creating and maintaining open political arenas where deep disagreements can be expressed non-violently, rather than pursuing consensus that closes down contestation (De Costa, 2017; Little, 2017; Maddison, 2017, 2022; Strömbom and Bramsen, 2022; Verdeja, 2017). A goal of harmonious coexistence risks entrenching structural inequities and allowing unresolved conflicts to resurface in more unforeseen or volatile forms.

For my analysis, I use Sámi media, official reports, and parliamentary debates to explore how reconciliation in Norway is being pursued in ways that limit Sámi political agency, criminalize land-based livelihoods, and redefine rights claims as cultural concerns. The article proceeds in four parts: I begin with theorizing the logic of culturalization as a governance mechanism, connecting culturalization with the politics delay, decoy, and distraction. In this section, I advance the existing analysis of culturalization by theorizing it as a deliberate ruling logic that relocates Indigenous claims from the terrain of political authority and material control to the safer domain of culture, identity, and recognition. Second, I provide a brief overview of the contemporary Sámi political and legal context. Third, I define reconciliation as a multi-level, ongoing process of conflict transformation: constitutional, institutional, and relational. Fourth, I examine the Fosen case and subsequent youth protests. In the final section, I discuss the post-TRC report implementation plan proposed by the Norwegian Parliament in late 2024 through the logic of culturalization.

Theoretical framework: the governance logic of culturalization

Culturalization as mechanism of assimilation

I suggest that culturalization is an intentional settler-colonial strategy of dispossession. It operates as a governance logic that recognizes Indigenous peoples alongside ethnic minorities in need of cultural protection, not as distinct peoples with the right to govern their territories and decide their affairs (Kuokkanen, 2022). In liberal, state, and institutional framings, “culture” typically encompasses heritage, art, festivals, museums, and other domains that can be and are often celebrated and also commodified. This thin notion of culture contrasts with Indigenous understandings, in which culture is inseparable from land, governance, and social relations (Engle, 2010).

By engaging with the logic of culturalization in the context of reconciliation, I demonstrate how Indigenous claims can be reframed as matters of culture rather than as binding political and legal rights as part of reconciliation initiatives and discourses. In doing so, I extend existing scholarship that has addressed similar dynamics in other contexts. Taylor (1992) has emphasized the importance of recognition for the dignity of cultural communities and cautions against symbolic or instrumental forms of recognition that fail to engage substantively with political claims. Kymlicka (1995) distinguishes national minorities from immigrant and ethnic minorities, offering a normative justification for differentiated rights. Some scholars have critiqued Kymlicka’s framework of state-centrism that embeds Indigenous governance within settler-state structures, leaving colonial logics intact and potentially reinforcing existing power imbalances. Although Kymlicka’s work does not explicitly critique the reduction of political claims to culture, it can be co-opted or used selectively in ways that depoliticize Indigenous authority. Regardless, Kymlicka’s work remains influential for highlighting the ethical and political necessity of recognizing Indigenous rights within liberal democracies and continues to shape debates on reconciliation, multicultural justice, and the limits of liberal inclusion (Kuokkanen and Maddison, 2025). Explicitly critiquing culturalization, Tully (1995) has shown how the reduction of Indigenous political struggles to questions of identity or culture can obscure issues of self-determination and governance. By examining how culturalization operates in the Norwegian case, my analysis contributes to these debates by linking theoretical insights to the practical dynamics of reconciliation and Indigenous–state relations.

Other scholars have further critiqued the ways in which Indigenous recognition that is decoupled from material restitution risks reinforcing settler authority and consolidation into the state rather than transforming settler relations (Coulthard, 2014; Povinelli, 2002; Simpson, 2014). As a subtle mechanism of assimilation, culturalization foregrounds Indigenous peoples’ cultural identity and language while downplaying or disregarding their political and legal status as peoples and polities with inherent sovereignty (Grey and Kuokkanen, 2020; Kuokkanen, 2024). Culturalization places minimal demands on the state, fitting easily within liberal multicultural and neoliberal governance models, and enabling symbolic recognition while avoiding substantive political transformation.

The culturalization of the Sámi is most explicit in Finland where Sámi policy is legislated in terms of cultural autonomy rather than political self-determination (Kuokkanen, 2024). In this article, I extend the analysis of culturalization to Norway and the context of reconciliation. Although it could be argued that culturalization does not apply to Norway because the Sámi are formally recognized as equal to Norwegians,³ I suggest that Norway’s 1987 Sámi Act, centered on safeguarding Sámi language and culture, mirrors Finland’s approach. Examining culturalization in Norway shows how reconciliation frameworks can be shaped to preserve existing power structures, constrain transformative justice, and sidestep past and ongoing dispossession.

My critique of culturalization is not meant to diminish the importance of culture for Indigenous peoples generally or the Sámi specifically. There is no question of the major role culture and language play in shaping, maintaining, and advancing Indigenous societies and securing Indigenous futures. A critical look at culturalization, however, reveals how “culture” can serve settler colonialism, reinforcing domination while obscuring the denial of Indigenous political authority.

Culturalization as a governing logic

The culturalization of the Sámi within Norway’s TRC is structurally entrenched in its very mandate. By grouping the Sámi together with national ethnic minorities such as the Kven and Forest Finns, the inquiry erases the distinct political status of the Sámi as an Indigenous people with pre-existing sovereignty. This conflation works as a colonial strategy: it reduces dispossession and struggles over land, governance, and self-determination to minority issues, thereby neutralizing Indigenous claims that fundamentally challenge state authority.

Rather than a policy failure, culturalization is a governing logic to depoliticize Indigenous demands by reclassifying them as cultural interests compatible with continued settler control over land, resources, and decision-making. Culturalization produces a paradox of procedural expansion and substantive stasis. As a diagnostic concept, this paradox helps explain how reconciliation can become process-heavy while remaining power-light. Consultation processes are augmented, creating the appearance of deepening participation and responsiveness. Yet these procedural innovations rarely translate into shifts in underlying decision-making authority or material outcomes. Participation increases precisely as the scope of possible outcomes narrows, confining Indigenous involvement to processes that leave core questions of land, consent, and jurisdiction unchanged. In the logic of culturalization, participation functions less as a mechanism of influence than as a technology of containment, while restricting core decisions from Indigenous authority.

The logic of culturalization operates through multiple strategies: temporal deferral, decoy, and distraction. Through temporal deferral, cultural recognition is framed as meaningful progress in the present, whereas claims and demands related to land, sovereignty, and jurisdiction are displaced into the future; promised through further dialogue, committees, or incremental reform. The temporal sequencing allows reconciliation to appear ongoing and responsive without confronting its most disruptive implications. By deferring structural change, culturalization normalizes existing power relations while keeping transformative claims permanently on the horizon.

As a deliberate governing strategy, decoy politics involves the proposal or introduction of new policies, processes, or institutions that signal the state is serious about addressing the issue that is seen as threatening (Collie and Alcantara 2025; Dimitrov, 2020; Saguin, 2025). It emerges when societal demands for fundamental change cannot simply be ignored. Overtly, it gives the appearance of responsiveness; that the state is willing to be responsive and actively engage in meaningful change. Yet covertly, decoy politics subtly reinforce the status quo. Thus, new policies, processes, or institutions are effectively obstacles designed to slow down and prevent meaningful collective action. Decoy politics is a way of managing legitimacy as it allows the state to give the impression of addressing claims (Collie and Alcantara, 2025).

In the Norwegian Sámi policy discourse, culture has become the preferred object of reconciliation because it is legible to the state, divisible into policy instruments, and compatible with existing jurisdictional arrangements.⁴ Sámi culture becomes the decoy that defers the claims of Sámi self-determination. Under the culturalization logic, culture functions as a governable substitute – a decoy – for political authority. Rather than operating merely as a symbolic domain, culture is rendered administratively legible: it can be funded, consulted on, and managed through policy instruments. Such governability makes culture an attractive site for reconciliation, as it allows the state to demonstrate responsiveness without altering jurisdictional authority or property relations. Claims to land, consent, or political decision-making resist this form of administrative incorporation, rendering them far more difficult to accommodate. Culturalization thus redirects reconciliation into a domain where inclusion is possible without redistribution, sharpening its role as a decoy politics, which operates through three mutually reinforcing mechanisms of reframing, symbolic inclusion, and delay.

Rather than outright silencing of Sámi claims, culturalization also operates through selective amplification. Claims articulated as cultural, such as language, heritage, and education, are scaled up, institutionalized, and publicly affirmed, whereas claims that would redistribute authority over land, consent, or jurisdiction are held constant or excluded. Through this process, Sámi presence is intensified in politically safe domains, while more disruptive demands are muted or displaced – or criminalized. This logic helps explain how reconciliation can appear expansive and inclusive without altering the foundations of settler governance, moving beyond a simple repression narrative toward an account of managed inclusion.

Finally, culturalization operates through a politics of distraction that channels Indigenous peoples’ attention, time, and resources toward activities or reforms that appear progressive, yet divert focus from deeper structural change.

Distraction is not passivity; it is active governance through endless process and participation without influence to domesticate dissent and redirect attention from unresolved struggles over authority and land. Also, by multiplying sites of engagement without transferring authority, culturalization can fragment Indigenous resistance and transform political conflict into administrative processes.

Sámi political agency

The position of Sámi society in Norway has been shaped by a long trajectory from state-led assimilation to partial constitutional recognition and institutional accommodation. Norway today provides one of the more developed legal frameworks for Indigenous rights in the Nordic region. The Sámi are recognized as an Indigenous people, and the constitutional recognition has been operationalized through legislative and institutional reforms, most notably the Sámi Act (1987) and the establishment of the Sámediggi (Sámi Parliament) in 1989 as an elected representative body. Other milestones include the Finnmark Act (2005), which transferred large areas of land in Finnmark, the northernmost county, to a new co-management body with equal Sámi representation, and the gradual incorporation of consultation obligations between state authorities and Sámi institutions, most recently strengthened through statutory consultation legislation adopted in 2021. These developments are often presented as evidence of a reconciliation-oriented approach grounded in Sámi participation, dialogue, and cultural protection (e.g., Josefsen and Saglie, 2024).

At the same time, reconciliation in Norway has largely proceeded within limits set by state sovereignty and sectoral governance regimes. Sámi political influence has been institutionalized primarily through advisory and consultative mechanisms rather than shared decision-making authority over land and resources. The Sámediggi operates at the intersection of limited Indigenous self-government and the Norwegian administrative system, engaging with ministries, directorates, and municipalities on issues ranging from land use and development to language and education. Other key arenas of interaction include licensing and regulatory bodies, the courts, and sectoral agencies responsible for energy, mining, and infrastructure, where Sámi rights are weighed against national development priorities and private economic interests.

Criminalizing Sámi reindeer herding and erasing local Sámi governance

The past few years have witnessed growing public Sámi acknowledgment and discussion of the Sámi people’s precarious legal security (e.g., Keskitalo and Muotka, 2021). This has been fueled by both policy and court decisions that have been detrimental to the Sámi as an Indigenous people and supported by a large body of research on the impacts of land use, planning, extractive industries, and, most recently, the energy transition in the Sámi territory spanning across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula, Russia.⁵

The Fosen wind case was framed as a paradigmatic question of Sámi legal security in Norway by the Sámediggi president Silje Karine Muotka in her 2022 New Year’s speech. She continued that this insecurity is also evident in the criminalization of Sámi livelihoods grounded in traditional knowledge.⁶ A key example of criminalizing Sámi livelihoods is the long-running case of Jovsset Ánte Sara, a young Sámi reindeer herder who in 2012 was ordered to reduce his reindeer herd below a viable level for subsistence (Keskitalo, 2018). Despite support from Sámi institutions, Norway’s Supreme Court upheld state-imposed limits (HR-2017-2428-A), a decision widely criticized in Sápmi for disregarding Indigenous knowledge and traditional Sámi reindeer herding practices.⁷ In 2024, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee found that the verdict violated International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Article 27, but Norway’s 2025 response offered only vague plans to amend reindeer husbandry law rather than an explicit remedy for the violations (Kemi, 2025). Punitive enforcement against Sámi reindeer herders reflects state paternalism, effectively criminalizing traditional livelihoods (Johnsen et al., 2015; Keskitalo, 2018; Olsen and Anti, 2024).

Two recent Supreme Court cases involving the Sámi municipalities of Unjárga (Nesseby) and Kárášjohka (Karasjok)⁸ further illustrate the state failure to recognize Sámi land ownership or resource governance. In the Unjárga case (HR-2018-456-P), the Unjárga Sámi Association was denied the right to govern and manage their hunting and fishing, even though the rights themselves were undisputed. Strikingly, the court placed minimal emphasis on assessing Sámi cultural practices and land use, despite having previously emphasized the importance of such considerations in the 2001 Selbu verdict (Ravna, 2021).

Similarly, the 2024 Kárášjohka ruling reaffirmed state property claims over Sámi land, overlooking previous findings by the Finnmark Commission and the Uncultivated Land Tribunal that recognized collective Sámi ownership over the territory within the municipality. The Supreme Court’s majority grounded its decision in longstanding colonial legal doctrines dating back to 1751 and dismissed ILO (International Labour Organization) Convention No. 169 as insufficient for altering property rights outcomes (Ravna, 2024).

Limits of reconciliation in Norway: a multi-level analysis

A central mandate of the Norwegian TRC was to foster reconciliation between the majority population and the Sámi, Kven, and Forest Finnish peoples. The TRC was also charged with promoting greater equality between majority and minority groups, while enhancing public knowledge and understanding of Sámi, Kven, and Forest Finnish histories and experiences (Sannhets- og forsoningskommisjonen, 2023).

Scholarship on the Norwegian TRC focuses mainly on its formation and mandate. The TRC was initiated in response to the Sámediggi’s proposal, and its establishment resulted from negotiations among Sámi activists, politicians, and various interest groups, and drew on international models such as the Canadian TRC (Skaar, 2023). Debates over the commission’s naming and framing reflected broader questions about Norway’s willingness to align itself with countries historically associated with severe human rights violations, revealing tensions in defining the scope and purpose of truth-seeking in a Nordic context (Johnsen, 2021).

Research on public engagement shows a chasm between the TRC’s mandate to foster a shared understanding of the past and the actual outreach and involvement of Sámi, Kven, and Forest Finn communities. This shows tensions between coordination among policy actors and the production of both personal (“micro-truth”) and structural (“macro-truth”) narratives (Broderstad and Josefsen, 2023). Some scholars have framed, in my view incorrectly, their inquiry by portraying Norway’s Sámi as having moved from marginalization to political empowerment (Skaar, 2023). Others emphasize the complexity of reconciliation in contexts where ongoing land and resource conflicts complicate interactions between the majority and Sámi societies, raising questions about whether reconciliation should be framed as state-to-population or majority-to-minority processes (Sønneland and Lingaas, 2023). Scholarship on the governance of TRC data highlights ethical and practical challenges in archiving and reusing collected stories, particularly regarding Indigenous participation, ownership, and control (Broderstad and Josefsen, 2024).

An even smaller body of scholarship has analyzed the Norwegian TRC in the context of comparative, “non-transitional” TRCs in western liberal democracies, with Canada’s TRC often serving as the archetype (Skaar and Spitzer, 2024; Sønneland and Lingaas, 2023). Media analyses of such commissions reveal persistent structural biases in reporting that can overshadow Indigenous voices, suggesting that legitimacy and impact are shaped not only by institutional design but also by the broader public discourse (Skogerbø et al., 2025).

Understanding Norway’s handling of Sámi rights in the context of reconciliation requires a multi-level perspective that captures constitutional, institutional, and relational dimensions. A multi-level analysis reveals how the state’s actions maintain settler-colonial power by containing Sámi claims while sidestepping fundamental political, territorial, and economic issues. At the constitutional level, the landmark 2021 Supreme Court ruling in the Fosen case affirmed that Norway’s licensing of the Fosen Vind wind industry complex violated Sámi rights as protected under both international human rights law and the Norwegian Constitution. The court recognized that the project destroyed essential winter grazing lands for the Fovsen Njaarke reindeer herding districts, thus threatening the cultural survival of south Sámi reindeer herding. Yet the fundamental constitutional relationship between the Norwegian state and the Sámi people remains unchanged, leaving unresolved questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and political authority. Although an unexpected victory for Sámi rights, the decision can also be considered a part of the legal continuum discussed in the previous section in its avoidance of engaging with structural injustices at the heart of Indigenous–state relations.

At the institutional level, the state’s governance of land, resources, and energy policy vis-à-vis the Sámi entrenches the closure of transforming the political space for reconciliation. The Norwegian government’s response to the Fosen ruling – including both the delayed enforcement and the rapid approval of new wind energy projects justified by national interest (Ellingsen, 2024) – frames the dispute as a matter to be resolved within existing economic and regulatory frameworks, rather than as an issue of Sámi jurisdiction and rights.

Norway’s controversial “advance entry” policy, which allows construction permits before legal disputes are resolved, highlights the systemic mechanisms enabling corporate and state interests to override Sámi land rights and governance. This tendency is illustrated by the government’s relegation of the “lessons learned” from Fosen to an opaque budget document, thereby limiting their visibility and political salience (Kemi, 2024b). The settler-colonial status quo is maintained through systemic patterns evident in other contested wind energy projects, where state- and corporate-led dialogues serve to obscure conflict and dismiss discourses about Sámi ecological knowledge and land relationships (Fjellheim, 2023).

Nearly 18 months after the TRC’s final report was released, the Norwegian Parliament finally began its consideration in November 2024. Parliamentary recommendations based on the TRC’s final report focus on language, education, and heritage, reflecting a deliberate effort to confine reconciliation to cultural matters. Implementation was tasked among several ministries, with the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development coordinating across government. A parliamentary committee proposed 17 recommendations, most of which focused on language (8) and culture (2), alongside measures such as issuing an apology, amending the place names and cultural heritage legislation, improving data management, creating a research and competence center, establishing monitoring mechanisms, and revising the state budget. The recommendations were silent on land use conflicts, reindeer herding, Sámi land and resource rights, or reparations, all of which were at the heart of the Fosen case and subsequent youth demonstrations. Several members of the Sámediggi expressed their disappointment and frustration. Executive Council member Runar Myrnes Balto, for example, criticized the proposal’s neglect of economic and territorial concerns, as well as questions of trust in the state, and instead prioritizing culture, language, and education (Kemi, 2024a).

Delayed compliance, distraction, and decoy politics: the Fosen wind industry case

The Supreme Court’s unexpected 2021 ruling in favor of Sámi reindeer herders in the Fosen wind turbine case stands in stark contrast to other recent court decisions, discussed above. Yet, although the Supreme Court found that the wind energy complex violated the human rights of Fovsen Njaarke Sámi reindeer herders, the Norwegian government emphasized procedural ambiguity to justify inaction, and instead proposed further impact assessments (Buli, 2023).

In February 2023, Sámi youth activists and their supporters staged a protest in the lobby of the Ministry of Oil and Energy in Oslo, to draw attention to the government’s delay and unwillingness to enact on the Supreme Court decision. Police forcibly removed 18 protesters, who were subsequently fined for refusing to vacate. The fines evolved into criminal charges for non-payment, leading to the first court proceedings in 2024. The charges resulted in acquittals, first at Oslo District Court and later at the Borgarting Court of Appeals (Anti, 2024b).⁹

During the trials, the youth articulated a profound sense of injustice, noting how the state’s response displaced accountability from itself onto the defenders of Indigenous rights. As Mihkkal Hætta, one of the charged Sámi youth, expressed it: “It is odd that we are here [in court], and not the state, the one who has violated human rights” (Anti, 2024b; original emphasis). This reversal of roles reflects a settler-colonial logic that criminalizes Indigenous self-determination while shielding state actors from scrutiny. The criminalization of Sámi youth activism highlights the dissonance between reconciliation rhetoric and the lived realities of Sámi resistance, undermining the trust and dialogue essential for relational transformation.

Prominent Sámi activist and musician Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen, also charged, linked the protests to the broader unresolved issues of Sámi land dispossession and the inadequacy of governmental agreements that fail to address structural human rights violations. She demanded a full re-examination of the Fosen case and systemic reforms to prevent “advance entry” permitting of development projects before judicial review. Hætta Isaksen concluded: “We’re also waiting for the day when Fosen Sámi get their land back.”¹⁰

Shortly after the second lower court ruling in early 2025, the state prosecution announced that the decision would be appealed to the Supreme Court. The editorial in Ávvir, the only Sámi-language newspaper, called for an end to the state’s persecution of Sámi youth who had only exercised their constitutional rights to freedom of expression and peaceful protest. The editorial criticized the fact that although the police, who removed the protesters from the Ministry’s lobby, had not intended to press charges, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) intervened, mandating an investigation and eventual prosecution. The editorial called the DPP a “state servant” representing the oppressive assimilation policies of the past, concluding that Norway, through this case, had effectively tarnished its reputation both domestically and internationally.¹¹ The Supreme Court acquitted all charges in June 2025.

What makes the state harassment striking is that the police had praised the protesters for their cooperation when removing them and later requested the annulment of their fines instead of pressing charges (Kemi, 2023). Echoing the Ávvir editorial, Hætta Isaksen noted that the 13 young Sámi had already endured collective punishment through widespread hate speech, verbal attacks, and public abuse simply for expressing their views and calling for government action.¹² The protracted legal process and associated public harassment demonstrate how state and societal forces collude to enforce colonial power structures through both formal and informal means.

On the other hand, the broad support for the Sámi youth – from Norwegian lawyers’ associations, political parties, international figures, and Sámi institutions – attests to the recognition that the Fosen case transcends isolated legal disputes. It symbolizes the broader struggle against systemic injustice and the failure of reconciliation in Norway. The intergenerational impact of colonial violence and state neglect was encapsulated by Sámi elder Laila Somby Sandvik’s reflection: “It is unacceptable that our youth must bear the consequences of the authorities’ actions” (Anti, 2024a).

Discussion

Theorizing culturalization as a settler-colonial logic of governance enables an examination of how Indigenous political claims are domesticated through their reclassification as cultural interests, rendered compatible with the continued exercise of settler authority over land, resources, and decision-making. As a governing logic, culturalization operates through techniques of delay, decoy, and distraction. Viewed through this lens, the ostensibly contradictory trajectories of the Fosen case and Norway’s reconciliation initiatives – where the former entails the deferral of justice for Sámi reindeer herders and the criminalization of Sámi youth engaged in peaceful protest, whereas the latter purports to repair Sámi–state relations and build trust – emerge as mutually reinforcing expressions of the same underlying governance logic.

In Fosen, the strategies of decoy and delay were actively employed. Decoy and delay do not merely reflect administrative shortcomings but constitute an active mode of settler-colonial governance, one that stabilizes state authority by converting political contestation into managed participation and prolonged proceduralism. Following widespread protests, the Norwegian government emphasized enhanced consultation procedures and further negotiations, framed as responsive and conciliatory. Through decoy politics, spaces are created in which Indigenous participation is made visible yet remains politically circumscribed. This visibility produces an appearance of responsiveness and moral legitimacy, while obscuring the persistence of unilateral state decision-making and the material continuation of dispossession.

Decoy politics operates through three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: first, by reframing distributive and legal claims as matters for negotiation rather than as binding rights; second, by translating symbolic inclusion into political capital that can be mobilized to legitimize decisions taken in spite of Indigenous opposition; and third, by displacing and deferring contentious land and jurisdictional claims through prolonged proceduralism. Together, these mechanisms transform political conflict into administratively manageable processes, while leaving the underlying relations of settler control intact.

Delay, in turn, functions as a temporal technology of governance. Temporal deferral is most evident in the government’s prolonged inaction, which persisted for more than 500 days following the Supreme Court’s decision. By deferring substantive remedies and foregrounding process over outcome, the state effectively suspends the realization of Sámi rights while allowing extractive activities to proceed and continue. Time itself becomes a mechanism of control, redistributing the costs of uncertainty, legal ambiguity, and exhaustion onto Sámi communities. Delay politics is further sustained through protracted consultations, commissions, and policy processes that defer rights-based claims, absorb them into procedural routines, and render them non-decisive, even as development and extractive projects advance on Indigenous territories.

In addition to examining the government’s handling of Fosen through the settler-colonial strategies of delay and decoy, I argue that it also ought to be understood as part of a broader continuum in which Sámi claims are persistently reframed through culture rather than recognized as matters of law, jurisdiction, and political authority. The government’s emphasis on consultation, dialogue, and mitigation measures demonstrates how Sámi rights were framed as negotiable cultural interests to be balanced, rather than as enforceable constraints on state authority.

Also, by foregrounding trust-building, symbolic recognition, and presumably improved Sámi–state relations, the government positioned the Fosen conflict within a moral narrative of cultural practices and historical grievance. Such an emphasis displaces attention from the present exercise of state power over land and resources and recasts the issue as one of relational repair rather than jurisdictional accountability. Cultural recognition thus becomes a substitute for political remedy.

Finally, the handling of Fosen situates Sámi claims within a continuum of culture mobilized as a regulatory category. Sámi rights are acknowledged discursively, yet neutralized politically, as cultural considerations to be managed alongside national development goals. This continuum allows the state to appear responsive and reconciliatory while preserving its unilateral authority over land, resources, and decision-making – thereby reproducing settler-colonial relations under the guise of cultural inclusion.

I suggest that Fosen is discursively and institutionally linked to governmental reconciliation initiatives. Most notably, the government explicitly framed negotiations with the affected Fovsen Njaarke reindeer herding districts as a process of “reconciliation.” As noted by Sámi commentators, this is deeply problematic, considering how the affected Sámi communities were compelled to enter negotiations with actors responsible for the very human rights violations at issue (cited in Gaup, 2024). In this way, reconciliation is mobilized not as a post-violation process premised on accountability and redress, but as a governance strategy that relocates legal responsibility into a forward-looking dialogue, effectively shifting the burden of resolution onto those whose rights have already been breached.

A deeper analysis reveals two interrelated processes. First, reconciliation itself is culturalized, as the parliamentary reconciliation recommendations largely bypass substantive political, territorial, and governance rights. Sámi claims are depoliticized, enabling the Norwegian state to present itself as responsive while continuing to privilege its sovereign control over land, resources, and governance in Sápmi. Second, reconciliation itself operates through the core strategies of the culturalizing logic – distraction and decoy. As a policy objective, reconciliation redirects attention, time, and resources away from questions of jurisdiction and authority over land and governance. Political energy is instead absorbed into negotiations over cultural, linguistic, and educational initiatives, thereby displacing more contentious claims that would challenge the foundations of settler state power.¹³

By centering reconciliation on culture, the state is able to shift negotiations into a domain where consensus is attainable, effectively bracketing structurally conflictual issues as exceptional, premature, or deferred. This process not only facilitates political buy-in from non-Indigenous actors but also enables the state to accumulate moral and symbolic capital as public and political discourse around Sámi culture is relatively strong. In this way, the logic of culturalization serves the purpose of stabilizing the existing power relations under the guise of accommodation or inclusion.

Moreover, reconciliation itself comes to function as a form of decoy politics: a deliberate channeling strategy through which the state seeks to neutralize challenges to its legitimacy by appearing to address critical concerns, while its underlying objective remains the preservation of the status quo. Through these strategies, the logic of culturalization generates a form of conditional reconciliation, in which recognition is extended only insofar as Indigenous claims remain compatible with existing settler authority. Under this logic, cultural rights are robustly supported, yet claims that challenge territorial authority, land control, or development prerogatives are constrained or ignored. This conditionality allows states to present reconciliation as progressive and inclusive while preserving core structures of jurisdiction and property.

With regard to the multi-level analysis of reconciliation, we can see how Norway’s reconciliation process is deeply fractured. Constitutionally, cultural rights are affirmed without altering foundational political relations. Institutionally, economic continuity and “national interest” particularly vis-à-vis decarbonization are prioritized over Indigenous self-determination or forging alternative, more balanced political frameworks and more equitable, consent-based negotiation –

for instance, between the Sámi and Norwegian parliaments. There is a jarring disconnect when the government publicly foregrounds reconciliation, while it simultaneously continues to fast-track industry and infrastructure projects in Sámi territories under the rubric of the energy transition. Such dynamics should not be understood as procedural failures or shortcomings of different government actors not streamlining their Sámi policy. I argue that they constitute a deliberate strategy through which reconciliation discourse can be mobilized to legitimize, and in some cases intensify, ongoing processes of dispossession.

Relationally, reconciliation efforts are centered on individual psychological healing, public education campaigns, or cultural celebrations. These efforts are relational because they shape social relationships through interactions, recognition, and shared meaning-making between communities, institutions, and the state. As a common mode of depoliticization, reconciliation is framed primarily as a matter of personal or societal awareness, placing pressure on marginalized groups to accommodate ongoing injustice (Lu, 2017: 16, 183).

Taken together, settler-colonial structures are sustained and, through the logic of culturalization, reconciliation becomes another iteration of assimilation and extraction, where Sámi participation is symbolically acknowledged yet systematically excluded from decisions about land and resource governance. By foregrounding culture and procedural inclusion while postponing redistributive or jurisdictional reforms, the Norwegian state mitigates potential settler backlash, preserves political legitimacy, and accumulates moral credit that can be leveraged in subsequent policy decisions.

This is reflected more broadly in the way in which Sámi political institutions are formally incorporated into state governance yet limited to a consultative function that forecloses Sámi jurisdictional authority. Participation is managed through state-sanctioned procedures that prioritize process over outcome, rendering inclusion a technique of depoliticization rather than a mechanism of redistribution. Within this framework, reconciliation discourse operates as a technology of governance: it reframes structural conflicts over land, law, and authority as matters of on-going dialogue and process. Sámi political claims are translated into procedural concerns, Sámi jurisdiction is rendered non-existent, and rights-based demands are neutralized through their absorption into open-ended consultative processes that defer, rather than resolve, questions of settler-colonial power. This reflects settler-colonial domestication that focuses on the management of Indigenous identity while deflecting attention away from questions of self-determination (Strakosch, 2019).

The logic of culturalization is a useful analytical framework beyond Norway. It enables an analysis of the ways in which state-led reconciliation initiatives reproduce colonial power by displacing Indigenous claims from domains of jurisdiction and material authority into the cultural sphere, rendering structural inequities politically peripheral while legitimizing state authority. Such a framework is especially timely in the Nordic region, where the European Union’s (EU’s) energy transition and policies such as the Critical Raw Materials Act accelerate extractive pressures in the European north, directly affecting Sámi territories. Analyzing TRCs through this lens exposes how reconciliation discourses intersect with resource governance and transnational and national climate policies, making clear that energy transition is inseparable not only from Indigenous rights and jurisdiction but also questions of reconciliation.

Challenging the Nordic self-image of exceptionalism, the case analyzed in this article reveals deep continuity with global settler-colonial practices. In particular, it points to the importance of shared sovereignty frameworks, co-jurisdiction, and Indigenous-led environmental stewardship as essential components of any credible reconciliation process. Norway’s fast-tracked development in Sámi territories mirrors patterns elsewhere – hydroelectric projects, pipeline construction, and rare-earth mining in other settler-colonial liberal democracies such as Canada, Australia and the United States – where the national interest in renewable or strategic resources takes precedence over Indigenous sovereignty.

This article contributes to political science scholarship on Indigenous politics, settler colonialism, and governance by theorizing culturalization as a distinct mode of settler governance that redirects conflicts over jurisdiction and redistribution into managed processes of recognition and consensus, thereby stabilizing state authority. It advances the literature on decoy politics by linking it to delay politics as an active governing strategy, showing how consultations, committees, and reconciliation processes defer and neutralize rights-based claims while enabling parallel decision-making in land and resource governance. Finally, it offers a transferable analytical framework for examining similar dynamics in other settler-colonial contexts where reconciliation, participation, and energy transition agendas coexist with intensified extractive governance.

The analytical dynamics identified in this article extend beyond the Norwegian context and speak to broader patterns in settler-colonial governance vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples. The findings suggest that culturalization functions as a containment strategy across contexts: by reconstruing Indigenous–state relations into the cultural domain, states create arenas in which consensus is more readily achievable whereas structurally conflictual claims over land, jurisdiction, and authority are bracketed or deferred. Cultural recognition and reconciliation initiatives focusing on language and culture become a mechanism for managing dissent rather than resolving underlying political disputes.

The analysis also highlights the persistence of recognition without redistribution as a dominant governance logic. Formal recognition of Indigenous identity, heritage, and cultural practices can coexist, and indeed frequently does, with the continued concentration of control over territory, resources, and decision-making in state institutions. Recognition operates here not as a step toward material or jurisdictional redress, but as a substitute for it.

Third, the article calls attention to a recurrent pattern of process-heavy, power-light Indigenous participation. In this case, Sámi participation is operationalized through dense procedural structures – consultations, dialogues, commissions, and frameworks – that multiply sites and provide a veneer of engagement while leaving core decision-making authority unchanged and beyond the reach of Sámi institutions. Participation is expanded, yet its political consequences are carefully delimited, producing inclusion without influence.

Finally, these dynamics give rise to a broader configuration of symbolic inclusion alongside material exclusion. Indigenous actors are increasingly visible within state narratives of reconciliation and sustainability, even as development, extraction, and infrastructure projects continue to advance on Indigenous lands with limited regard for consent or jurisdiction. This disjuncture suggests that reconciliation regimes may serve less to transform relations of power than to re-legitimate them under contemporary normative registers, including reconciliation, participation, and the energy transition.

Methodologically, the dynamics considered in this article can be operationalized comparatively through a focus on three interrelated dimensions: (a) the logic of culturalization as a deliberate state strategy versus redistribution of material or jurisdictional authority; (b) the procedural density of participation relative to the substantive influence it affords Indigenous actors; and (c) the temporal and symbolic structuring of claims, including instances of deferral, delay, or procedural absorption. Cross-case analysis can systematically assess how states deploy reconciliation, consultation, and cultural frameworks to stabilize authority while managing conflict, allowing for comparison across settler-colonial or postcolonial contexts with varying institutional, legal, and policy configurations.

Conclusion

This article has theorized and applied the logic of culturalization as a settler governing strategy and examined its operation in the Norwegian context where simultaneously occurring recent legal and political processes appear to pull in two different directions. The article shows that rather than oppositional processes, the aftermath of the Fosen verdict and governmental reconciliation initiatives are both part of the same governing logic of culturalization. They are informed by the logic while mutually reinforcing it.

Culturalization involves processes through which Indigenous rights are constructed and defined narrowly in terms of cultural identity, language, and heritage. It is a logic that renders the Sámi as a cultural minority, undermining their status as a polity and distinct people with inherent self-determination and land rights. Through this governing logic, the settler-colonial relations are normalized within the nation-state through legal and institutional structures that treat Sámi claims as cultural or regional issues rather than as challenges to settler-colonial governance.

The article examined the functioning of the logic of culturalization through politics of delay, decoy, and distraction politics where cultural recognition substitutes for political agency and authority; in which demanding engagement and participation structures diffuse conflict and, even more importantly, absorb Indigenous political energy. Through these strategies, attention is diverted from deeper structural inequalities, justice is depoliticized, and struggles over sovereignty are foreclosed under the guise of government-formulated approaches to reconciliation.

Situating Norway’s reconciliation agenda within the colonial logic of culturalization, the article shows how the government’s discourse of reconciliation has narrowed Sámi rights to cultural recognition while deferring or suppressing substantive rights claims. A key objective of the article has been to demonstrate that reducing questions of self-determination, land, and governance to matters of culture and language is not simply a procedural shortcoming but a deliberate strategy to undermine Sámi political status as an Indigenous people.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-ips-10.1177_01925121261427412 – Supplemental material for Culturalization as a governance logic: Reconciliation in Norway

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ips-10.1177_01925121261427412 for Culturalization as a governance logic: Reconciliation in Norway by Rauna Kuokkanen in International Political Science Review

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on the manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval and informed consent statements

There are no human participants in this article and informed consent is not required.

ORCID iD

Rauna Kuokkanen

Data availability statement

Data (newspaper articles and reports) used for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article are all available in open domain.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biography

Rauna Kuokkanen is a research professor of Arctic Indigenous politics at the University of Lapland and adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. She is the author of triply awarded Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender (2019, Oxford University Press) and Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes and the Logic of the Gift (2007, University of British Columbia Press). Her current research focuses on comparative and Arctic Indigenous politics and participation, Indigenous feminist theory, governance, law and Nordic settler colonialism.

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