Polar Stars: Toward an Epistemological Understanding of Security Constellations and the Arctic Case

Abstract

The reemergence of great power competition, seen most significantly in the tension over Taiwan between the People’s Republic of China and the United States and in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has sparked interest in the Arctic literature on whether and how great power competition might be emerging in the region. State-centric frameworks have emerged as the primary analytical frameworks within this burgeoning literature. While they offer important insights, the dynamics of security in the region make state-based appraisals limited. Because the Arctic region is a frontier, normative structures upon which state-centric paradigms are predicated—such as state sovereignty—hold less sway than in more traditional arenas of great power competition. As a result, a range of subnational and supranational actors and organizations play a more significant role in terms of security processes and outcomes. Thus, a more comprehensive model of security analysis is needed to understand the drivers of security in the Artic region. To that end, in this article, I analyze the main securitizing moves in the Arctic region, arguing that they incorporate different levels of analysis and present broad degrees of comprehensiveness. I turn to security constellation theory, hitherto a relatively underdeveloped approach that nonetheless offers the potential to accommodate the multifaceted security dynamics of the region.