This thesis seeks to discuss the geopolitics and economic development of the Arctic from the perspective of its impacts on the territories and indigenous peoples of the region. To analyze the region, I start from the debate on the relationship between capitalism and the exploitation of nature and, in particular, the concept of commodity frontiers, to understand how nature is produced as an exploitable element within the capitalist metabolism mediated by value and aimed at capital accumulation. Commodity frontiers, in particular, are zones where techniques and policies are implemented by capitalist and territorialist agencies to appropriate historical natures and insert them into the global metabolism of capital. Starting from a historical-sociological approach, the history of the colonization of the Arctic is reconstructed in order to frame the geopolitics and economic development of the region in a socio-ecological framework, seeking to understand how recent elements of Arctic geopolitics are, in fact, manifestations of long-term trends in the region. Thus, we seek to understand how recent strategies for the Arctic seek to reorganize Sápmi, the territory of the Sámi of Finnish-Scandinavia and Inuit Nunaat, of the Inuit of North America, representing a new wave of colonialism in the region. To do this, we will analyze the colonization process of these two regions in order to understand the economic conformation and insertion of the Arctic into the global economy, as well as to understand the resource management regimes, the indigenous organizations involved in this process and their struggles for self-determination, including the North American land claim agreements and the establishment of the Sámi Parliaments in Sweden, Norway and Finland. Thus, faced with the geopolitical scenario of the 21st century and the effects of climate change, we seek to understand how economic development projects in the region and the geopolitical tensions that run through it reproduce and reinforce colonial structures of exploitation of the human and non-human natures of the Arctic at the service of the global metabolism of contemporary capitalism through its transformation into a global extractive frontier.