Regional Security Complex Theory: A Critical Approach to the Arctic

Regional security complex theory (RSCT) is a critical approach to International Relations, which saw one of its first applications to Arctic policy as early as 2008, when the Norwegian defense analyst Kristian Atland used it to evaluate Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1987 Murmansk Speech. In his paper, Atland argues that, through his speech, Gorbachev endeavored to de-securitize the Arctic in order to remove one possible vector of attack against the USSR (Dean 2022, 16). However, classification of the Arctic as a region in RSCT has a fraught history. Some scholars question whether the Arctic can function as a security region, noting that national interests of Arctic states on the global stage are often conflated with their region-specific interests in the Far North (Østhagen 2021).  

The Arctic is both insulated and interconnected. Up until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Arctic was a space where cooperative behavior was able to flourish, even among geopolitical foes during times of heightened tension (Taub 2024). Between the end of the Cold War and Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, the region underwent a period of deliberately engineered depoliticization. Østhagen critiques the assumptions underlying the treatment of the Arctic as a coherent security region, arguing instead that the Arctic is formed through the discursive and political processes that reinforce its identity as a geopolitical unit. Without adopting an explicitly post-structuralist framework, his analysis emphasizes how the Arctic is socially constructed through competing narratives and strategic interests (Østhagen 2021, 66). However, because of the decades-long process of depoliticization — actuated through the liberal institutionalism that characterized the 1990s and 2000s — there is no autochthonous security language for conceptualizing the Arctic as a region characterized, in some measure, by hard security concerns (Østhagen 2021).  

The mechanism that transforms policy items into a prioritized security issue is described by RSCT theorists as the “speech act”; it is carried out by the “securitizing actor” and justifies responsive measures that may subvert ordinary political processes and norms (Buzan, Wæver, and Wilde 1998). This is a process that may result in the suspension of civil and political rights; increased surveillance; use of emergency powers and/or extralegal measures; and expansion of police and military power.  As Wæver and his colleagues make clear – extraordinary measures are not only permissible under these conditions but often expected. For neoclassical realism, objective threats exist but are highly prone to distortion by domestic factors and the decision-making capabilities and perceptions of the Foreign Policy Executive (FPE) (Ripsman, Taliaferro, and Lobell 2016). Despite the systematic efforts made by scholars of neoclassical realism to incorporate ‘intervening variables’ and complicate the monolithic, ‘black box’ conception of the state, RSCT offers a more dynamic, critical analysis through its focus on discursive spaces. 

Focusing on the “construction” of a region through discourse makes it possible to eschew a narrow focus on state capacity and employ the sectoral typology of RSCT, which offers a classification of security into military, political, economic, societal, and environmental sectors. Importantly, it also allows for explicit considerations of human security – a noteworthy development in the post-Cold War era that shifts the referent object of security from the state to the individual, broadening the scope of what is considered a threat. It also aligns with oft-observed dynamics in the Arctic, namely the ways in which issues surrounding sovereignty can be effectively addressed through means other than political, economic, or military pressure, further differentiating RSCT from realist theory. For instance, political scientist Scott Watson argues that by centering environmental concerns, Canada was able to strengthen its sovereignty claims to the Arctic during the Cold War. (Dean 2022, 17). In this view, securitization and de-securitization across numerous policy areas can be likened to a set of tools for achieving national security objectives in ways that realism might not accommodate.

Second generation securitization scholars acknowledge that, between the initiating speech act produced by the securitizing actor and its reception by its audience, there is a discursive process of interpretation (Dean 2022; Wæver, de Wilde, and Buzan 1998). This is an “intersubjective” process where the security issue emerges through dialogue, a view that lends itself particularly well to treatment in the media environment, especially when one acknowledges the important role of the oft-neglected “functional actor” in security studies, a stakeholder that helps “prepare the intersubjective terrain between audiences and potential securitizing actors” (Dean 2022, 90). Media outlets do not directly wield political power; however, they are a classic example of functional actors, influencing the context in which the securitizing dynamic takes place. 

What RSCT offers is a broader, more robust framework for evaluating the relationship between external security dynamics and state response in a discursively constructed region. RSCT presents a sectoral typology of threat, which can be used to observe the changing distribution of threat types over time. By contrast, traditional realist theories tend to rely on a narrow, tripartite separation of state power — economic, military, and political, each comprising an agglomeration of ‘real’ capabilities; this does not lend itself to a focus on media discourse as a site of meaning construction and threat assessment. Neoclassical realism complicates the relationship between threat perception and state response; however, it tends to focus on the efficacy of state institutions and processes in recognizing and addressing objective threats rather than on the ecosystem of substantive threat types.  

In the remote, sparsely populated, but strategically important spaces of the Far North, Arctic countries exist in an environment of prevailing uncertainty; amid the broader demands of international power dynamics, they seek to leverage the tools of diverse legitimating procedures — international forums and law, assertions of national sovereignty, and the recentering of propitious issues — in order to address security threats. This state-centric perspective, while consistent with realism, is also part and parcel of RSCT, which offers the additional advantage of introducing constructivist processes into substantive policy issues rather than the institutional arrangements and domestic processes that mediate responses to objective threats.

References:  

Buchanan, Elizabeth. Red Arctic : Russian Strategy under Putin. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2023. 

Dean, Ryan. “(De)Securitizing the Arctic? Functional Actors and the Shaping of Canadian Arctic Security Policy.” PhD diss., University of Calgary, 2022. 

Knutsen, Bjørn Olav, and Marius Pedersen. 2024. “How to Understand Climate Change as a Threat Multiplier in the Arctic.” Arctic Review on Law and Politics 15 (November): 153– 76. https://arcticreview.no/index.php/arctic/article/view/6500/10605. 

Østhagen, Andreas. “The Arctic Security Region: Misconceptions and Contradictions.” Polar Geography (1995)44, no. 1 (2021): 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937X.2021.1881645. 

Ripsman, Norrin M., Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, and Steven E. Lobell. Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 

Taub, Ben. 2024. “Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic.” The New Yorker, September 16, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/russias-espionage-war- in-the-arctic. 

Wæver, Ole, Jaap de Wilde, and Barry Buzan. Security : A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997.