THE RESECURITIZATION OF THE ARCTIC IN A CHANGING WORLD Juliano Cesar Shishido Góes 1 Abstract: The Arctic has received more attention in recent years since the Cold War period, especially in relation to its geopolitics due to climate issues, as global warming and the consequent reduction of the ice cover in the Arctic have allowed greater access to the region, as well as to the strategic factors therein. Some studies show that the Arctic will be seasonally free of ice by the middle of this century. In addition, the world has changed not only in relation to climate but also in international security issues with the greater ease of communication and movement. Therefore, these security issues should be addressed primarily by actors directly linked to the Arctic, since matters such as terrorism, drug trafficking and illegal immigration may arise with greater access to the region. However, the Arctic Council, which includes actors directly related to the Arctic, explicitly excludes military security issues as articulated in the Ottawa Declaration. Consequently, the objective of this paper is to analyze whether it is necessary to return to a securitization of the Arctic region so that these subjects are better approached if these events take place. Thus, in order to verify how the Arctic countries approach these issues, as well as the Academia and Think Tanks, a literature review was made on the subject, including the official policies of those countries. Keywords: Arctic. Securitization. Geopolitics. Globalization. Law of the Sea. INTRODUCTION The Arctic has received more attention in the last years due to climate change and its impact in the region. With global warming, the Arctic region is becoming more accessible and so are its natural resources and shipping routes, both for transportation of people and goods. As the Arctic ice cover melts and facilitates human access to the region, its geopolitics is going to change. This kind of attention was only observed during the Cold War period because the Arctic is the shortest distance between the then world superpowers, The United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and the region was where many of their nuclear submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles were allocated. With this in mind, it is difficult to specify whether the Arctic region will be once again a stage of confrontation or, on the contrary, will be the place of cooperation between the countries of the region. The region saw moments of cooperation some years after the end of 1 Graduando em Relações Internacionais pela Faculdade Damas da Instrução Cristã (FADIC). Pesquisador associado ao Grupo de Pesquisa em Estudos Estratégicos e Segurança Internacional (GEESI) da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB) e do Instituto de Estudos de Ásia (IEÁSIA) da Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE). E-mail: julianocsg@gmail.com.
the Cold War and in the early 2000 since the countries were acting together to better understand and engage in the Arctic, especially with the creation of the Arctic Council in 1996. Nevertheless, with the growing tensions between Russia and some western countries, chiefly with countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014 and the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War in 2015, this cooperative state has changed and the result is not yet seen. In addition, with the globalization and its consequent ease of communication and movement, other issues concerning international security may arise in the Arctic. As seen, the process of globalization facilitated the operation of criminal organizations like terrorists groups and the drug traffickers, as well as the movement of immigrants through the world. Moreover, with easy access through the Arctic due to global warming, this criminal groups and illegal immigrants can use this route to perpetrate their activities. For that reason, the best forum to discuss these issues and to better deal with them in the Arctic region is the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum for Arctic States and peoples, consisting of the eight Arctic States (Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States) and six international organizations representing Arctic Indigenous People. Nevertheless, the Ottawa Declaration (1996) explicitly excludes military security from its agenda. Thereby the focus is to assess if the Arctic Council should discuss those security issues arising from the globalization process despite the explicit prohibition in its instrument of constitution, since its members are the ones that could be directly affected by those matters and they are the ones who know the Arctic region better. Furthermore, the Arctic Council has been an important forum for those members to coordinate their actions in the region. Thus, this discussion can be done under the broader concept of security made by the Copenhagen School in its Securitization Theory from the perspective of a possible existential threat to the Arctic caused by those actors (terrorists groups, drug traffickers and illegal immigrants). Therefore, a literature review of those subjects was made both on the official policy of the Arctic countries and on the Academia and Think Tanks, as well as on the Arctic Council declarations and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Hence, besides this introduction, the paper is divided into four sections and a conclusion. The first section will provide an overview of the geopolitics of the Arctic, with its natural/energy resources and shipping routes, mostly with the impact of the global warming on the region. Then the second section will bring some aspects of the globalization, how its process has made communication and movement around the world easy and its consequence for criminal activities. The third section will address how the Law of the Sea and the Arctic Council declarations deal with issues concerning criminal activities and the fourth section will present the Securitization Theory from the Copenhagen School and how it can be applied to the Arctic. Lastly, the conclusions section will demonstrate the importance of the process of securitization of the Arctic due to possible criminal activities arising from the ease of access to the region in consequence of global warming. 1) GEOPOLITICS OF THE ARCTIC The Arctic has received greater attention in the last years because of the results of the global warming in the region, nonetheless this region has been the object of interest of humanity for much longer, since the first settlements in the Arctic happened more than 10,000 years ago. Moreover, different people had interest in the region, like the Vikings in their expansion period in the 9th and 10th centuries, explorers from the period of the Great Navigations in the search for alternative routes of navigation and modern explorers of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the American Robert Peary who was the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909. There are eight Arctic countries, but five of them are considered major actors in the region because they are bathed by the Arctic Ocean Canada, Denmark (Greenland), United States, Norway and Russia; whereas Finland, Iceland and Sweden also have direct interests in the region. Moreover, other countries as China, India and Japan have shown interest in the Arctic. It is important to note that those eight countries are members of the Arctic Council (an international forum created in 1996 to promote cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States) and the other three have status of observers in the council. The Arctic is also a strategic region because it has natural resources, such as oil, natural gas and fishes, and it has shorter maritime navigation routes than those normally used
by commercial ships. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS, 2008) estimated that the Arctic has approximately 13% of the non-discovered oil reserves in the world and 30% of those of natural gas. In relation to the commercial fishes, the Arctic Ocean has important reserves of fishes and this activity is important for some of the Arctic countries. Regarding the navigation routes of the region, there are three possible ones: the Transpolar Passage (TPP), the Northwest Passage (NWP) and the Northeast Passage (NEP), which includes the Northern Sea Route (NSR). These routes can reduce both the time and costs in relation to routes normally used today, since they are about 40% shorter. Therefore, the global temperature increase and the consequent melting of ice coverage in the Arctic will allow a better exploitation of these assets. 2) GLOBALIZATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCE FOR CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES 3) LAW OF THE SEA AND THE ARCTIC COUNCIL DECLARATIONS 4) (RE)SECURITIZATION OF THE ARCTIC The reduction of the Arctic ice cover intensifies the strategic bias of the region; nonetheless, the Arctic received military attention for over one century. The Cold War period shows that interest in the Arctic, since it was the shortest path between the then world superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. This region was home for submarines, ballistic missiles, military bases and soldiers. After the end of the Cold War, some of these assets were removed from the region and the Arctic lost its prominence. CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES
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