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DOI: 10.5564/mjia.v0i15-16.33Mongolian Journal of International Affairs No.15-16 2008-2009 pp.108-133

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, accelerated initiatives tocombat terrorism have been criticized for overstepping the bounds of universal human rights norms. A defining feature of European Union (EU) policy as a normative power is how it navigates the customary frictions between human rights and counterterrorism by committing to “combat terrorism globally while respecting human rights, and make Europe safer, allowing its citizens to live in an area of freedom, security and justice.” This paper argues that the threat of transnational terrorism has led Europe to stray from its normative position. This is most clearly understood by examining the securitization of EU interactions with the Mediterranean - particularly North Africa - with regard to migration policy. Migration is considered as “transformed into a key element in the context of transnational threats,” and indeed EU Member States are targeted by Islamist terrorists entering EU soil by way of the Middle East or the Maghreb. Finally, this paper explores how the post-9/11 threat environment - anintensified “global risk society” -has led the EU to downplay its traditional role in ensuring protection of universal human rights through such normative instruments as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

This special issue of Politik aims to widen the debate on Arctic security relations through a more comprehensive dialogue inclusive of the many different types of security, their interactions, and their challenges by using the theoretical approach of the Copenhagen School. A better understanding of security dynamics in the circumpolar North today demands a critical analysis of those changes through a multidisciplinary and multi-modal lens. Each chapter in this special issue provides one layer of that multimodal lens of Arctic security that, together, weave a complex web of change. This special issue therefore continues to move the discourse of polar security beyond – but not excluding – the conventional debates of military capabilities and state sovereignty towards a more comprehensive definition of security, including its interacting environmental, economic, political, health and cultural dimensions.

The complex constitutional relationship between Greenland and Denmark has had no clearer manifestation than the last decade’s juridical and political wranglings over the control for uranium. In the article, we argue that the quarrel between Nuuk and Copenhagen found in their diverging uranium policies can be seen as what we term a ’securitization controversy’. That is, a form of negotiating process which delicately postpones securitization proper due to the entangled role of the uranium issue in the independence debate. Through narrative analysis of contemporary Danish and Greenlandic government policy documents (2008-2016) we thus demonstrate how Greenlandic documents attempt to desecuritize risks pertinent to extraction of uranium and REE while Danish government papers seek to risikfy uranium in order to keep the issue open to future securitization. In the analysis, we further show how certain risks in the policy papers are connected and constitute a narrative conflict involving identity and sovereignty. We argue, that the controversy found at policy level in turn is the result of the underlying ‘sovereignty game’ in the constitutional relationship between the two countries. The article introduces a methodological framework for studying such securitization controversies drawing on risk analysis and narratology. We argue that in order to account for the entangled and narrative nature of the discursive movements in the policy texts, structural narratology can be a viable methodological alternative to the Copenhagen School’s preferred method of discourse analysis.