Securitizing the Arctic : Divergent Security Logics in Norwegian, Russian, and American Arctic Discourse

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how Norway, Russia, and the United States securitize Arctic energy resources and emerging trade routes in official state discourse, and what explains the divergence in their securitization strategies. Despite facing broadly shared material conditions: retreating sea ice, opening shipping routes, and increasingly accessible energy reserves, the three states construct Arctic security in fundamentally different ways. The study applies securitization theory as developed by Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde (1997), extended through Balzacq's (2011) institutional approach and Stritzel's (2014) localisation argument, and operationalises it through qualitative discourse analysis of a corpus of 22 official policy documents produced between 2013 and 2026. The analysis finds that Russian securitization is structurally integrated and presidentially anchored, treating sovereignty over the Northern Sea Route, energy reserves, and military presence as a single indivisible national interest justified through a logic of defensive escalation. Norwegian securitization is distributive and people-centred, maintaining a cooperative rhetorical frame alongside unprecedented military investment, producing a productive tension between stated preference and actual policy trajectory. American securitization is trajectory-defined and dual-adversarial, remarkable less for its current content than for the speed and completeness of its transformation from environmental stewardship to zero-sum strategic competition over roughly a decade. The study concludes that divergence in Arctic securitization is explained by three factors: strategic position, institutional structure, and audience orientation, rather than by differences in material conditions. The relationship between securitization and militarization is found to be non-linear and case-dependent. Desecuritization is identified as an active political resource across all three cases, preserving discursive space for de-escalation even as military commitments expand. The findings contribute to comparative securitization theory and Arctic security studies by providing an explanatory account of cross-national variation that goes beyond single-case description.