The case of Svalbard is illustrative of Norway s performativity to ascertain its sovereignty in the Arctic in face of Russia, both bilaterally and in two multilateral instances of world politics: NATO and UNCLOS. The insularity and distance of the archipelago from mainland Norway coupled with the peculiarity of its juridical status situate those islands in a vulnerable crossroads between Russia s speculations over NATO s responses in a crisis (Wither, 2018, p. 28) besides contestations over the status of Svalbard s extraterritorial waters, on the one hand, and Norway s performativity of sovereignty, on the other hand. The factual deconstruction of this sovereignty resorts to the presentation of the following conundrums: the maritime disputes entailed in the legal uncertainty for the area surrounding the archipelago, the evolution of a local democratic course in Svalbard, and the deactivation of Norwegian mining operations. All conundrums seem to relate with one another, and the overarching imbroglio of Norway s contested claims of a contiguous continental shelf around the archipelago conditions the paradoxical equation comprising Norway s double-edged self between an oil and gas supplier and a friend of the environment. The deterioration of Norway s bridge-building stance between the West and Russia via NATO in face of a mounting security dilemma causes extra strain on Norway s performativity of sovereignty. By assessing how those events relate to Norway s performativity of sovereignty, the present research aims at tracing subjectivities and insights of discursive narratives that construct representations, departing from the assumption that there are instabilities of the Norwegian performativity of sovereignty from the standpoint of its security and environment practises in relation with Svalbard. It seeks to problematise these instabilities as well as to situate this analysis based on the conceptual history of the contextualised constitution of meaning of a key political vocabulary in Norway for these contexts, which is sovereignty. It builds on extant literature that scrutinises the very concept of sovereignty as contingent upon context and purpose. The present study therefore bases itself on the argument according to which Norway s performances of statehood are important to assert its sovereignty in view of its paradoxical policies and practices. Norway s performativity of sovereignty gains extra relevance in face of those conundrums insofar as they depend on a political - and not sheerly technical - settlement. In that sense, by combining the literature on performativity with post-structuralism, it is possible to evince narratives and discursive practices not only in the co-constitution among discourse, foreign policy and identity, but ultimately the mechanisms through which sovereignty is validated via performativity and the ways this performativity is imbued with discursive practices also co-constituting identity and foreign policy.