The notion of human security was popularised through the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report with the intent of establishing a broader notion of security, including dimensions of food, health, community, environmental, economic, personal and political security. This notion has since been employed by the United Nations and by states around the world, in particular by northern states interested in promoting human security in the Global South. This has lead to criticism that the concept entrenches linear and elitist thinking with regard to security, insofar as it is implied that countries of the Global North have no experiences to share with the Global South, and that the North remains secure, while the South is not.

The end result is an imbalance between understandings of what is actually happening within and across regions, and the assumptions of “North-secure, South-insecure” serve to disguise and prevent shared human security concerns and experiences. This is well exemplified through, for example, indigenous and gender experiences which transcend the North-South construct and reveal human insecurities occurring on different levels, to different degrees, throughout the world.

It is becoming clear that recognition of human security issues in northern contexts is imperative to the development of the concept as a whole, as well as to eliminating the ‘us-them’, othering approach inherent within such notions. Recognition of shared human insecurities between North and South leads to better definitional clarity, and better policy making on behalf of all parties concerned.

As such, we are hosting a workshop that attempts to address the neglect of human security issues in the Global North, in this case with a focus on the Arctic region. The Arctic has long been a peripheral region of the north. As a region not mired in open armed conflict, the region has not been the focus of human security researchers. However it is becoming more apparent that to take human security seriously, issues of the Arctic need to be taken into account. In this region we find a particular and intricate blend of security issues from the environmental (eg. persistant organic pollutants), health (increases of breast cancer, neurological damage due to pollutants from the southern, industrialized regions), and food (toxins in traditional foods, access and health problems associated with southern foods) to economics, cultural and identity (high rates of suicide associated with loss of culture/identities among indigenous peoples, traditional economies struggling against market economies, reduced access to market economies, etc).

By bringing together researchers in human security (some of whom have had a primarily Global South focus) and Arctic researchers, all from diverse backgrounds such as the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine, the Norwegian Polar Institute, the Liu Centre for Global Issues (Canada), the Department of International Development Studies (Canada), Fridjof Nansen Institute, the Scott Polar Research Institute (Cambridge), the Mid Canada Research Institute, and the UiTø Department of Political Science we hope to significantly contribute to a multidisciplinary effort of understanding human security in the Arctic, under the themes of gender, indigenous peoples, the environment, and governance.

Gunhild Hoogensen, Ph.D.

More information is available at the Human Security in the Arctic homepage