While international relations has increasingly begun to recognize the political salience of Indigenous peoples, the related field of security studies has not significantly incorporated Indigenous peoples either theoretically or empirically. This article helps to address this gap by comparing two Arctic Indigenous peoples – Inuit in Canada and Sámi in Norway – as ‘securitizing actors’ within their respective states. It examines how organizations representing Inuit and Sámi each articulate the meaning of security in the circumpolar Arctic region. It finds that Inuit representatives have framed environmental and social challenges as security issues, identifying a conception of Arctic security that emphasizes environmental protection, preservation of cultural identity, and maintenance of Indigenous political autonomy. While there are some similarities between the two, Sámi generally do not employ securitizing language to discuss environmental and social issues, rarely characterizing them as existential issues threatening their survival or wellbeing. Drawing on securitization theory, this article proposes three factors to explain why Inuit have sought to construct serious challenges in the Arctic as security issues while Sámi have not: ecological differences between the Canadian and Norwegian Arctic regions, and resulting differences in experience of environmental change; the relative degree of social inclusion of Inuit and Sámi within their non-Indigenous majority societies; and geography, particularly the proximity of Norway to Russia, which results in a more robust conception of national security that restricts space for alternative, non-state security discourses. This article thus links recent developments in security studies and international relations with key trends in Indigenous politics, environmental change, and the geopolitics of the Arctic region.
This paper compares four maps produced by the Canadian government and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the indigenous peoples’ organisation representing Inuit living in the four recognised Inuit regions (Inuit Nunangat) of Canada. Our analysis is based on publicly available maps, documents, and records and extends the rich existing literature examining the history of definitions of the Canadian north. Distinctly, our research aims to understand the different ways in which the Arctic has been articulated as a geographic, political, and social region during the Harper government (2006–2015) and the effects these articulations have had on northern policy and people. We find that the federal government maintained a flexible definition of the Canadian Arctic as a region when in pursuit of its own policy objectives. However, when it comes to incorporating areas outside the boundaries of Canada's three federal territories, particularly communities along their southern fringes, those boundaries are inflexible. The people who live in these areas, which the state considers to be outside the Canadian Arctic, are marginalised within Arctic public policy in terms of access to federal funds, determination of land use, and a sense of social belonging to the Canadian Arctic. Our goal in this paper is to demonstrate that national-level disputes over what constitutes ‘the Arctic’ can significantly impact the day-to-day lives of people who live within and just outside the region, however it is conceived.
This article examines the implications of human-caused climate change for security in Canada. The first section outlines the current state of climate change, the second discusses climate change impacts on human security in Canada, and the third outlines four other areas of Canada’s national interests threatened by climate change: economic threats; Arctic threats; humanitarian crises at home and abroad; and the threat of domestic conflict. In the conclusion, I argue that climate change has clearly not been successfully “securitized” in Canada, despite the material threats it poses to human and national security, and outline directions for future research.
The field of Security Studies traditionally focused on military threats to states' survival, however, since the end of the Cold War the concept of security has widened and individuals and communities have gradually become viewed as appropriate referent objects of security: Multifaceted challenges facing communities at the sub-state level are increasingly regarded as security threats, including their potential to cause instability for the larger society, thus affecting states’ security. In the Arctic region, a central challenge is that inhabitants are exposed to multiple non-traditional and non-military threats resulting from environmental, economic, and societal changes, which can be understood as threats to human security. We argue that a comprehensive approach to human security overlaps with the concept of societal security, and must therefore consider threats to collective identity and the essential conditions necessary for the maintenance and preservation of a distinct society. We see the human security framework as a suitable analytical tool to study the specific challenges that threaten the Arctic population, and in turn the well-being of Arctic societies. Therefore, we argue that utilising the concept of human security can promote societal security in the context of the Arctic, and in particular, its sub-regions, for example, the Barents region.
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