Laura Junka-Aikio's keynote speech

Decolonizing Arctic Geopolitics: Subaltern security dilemmas and the politics of rural land use in times of the green transition and militarization.

The recent rise of world political tensions will have a profound impact on Sápmi and the rural regions of Europe’s High North. While the climate change has been increasing the region’s susceptibility for economic, extractive, logistical and military exploitation already for some time, today land use and development in the region is reshaped also by new acute security and defense imaginaries, which are reflected in Sweden and Finland’s NATO memberships and in the new Nordic Defense Collaboration Agreements with the United States. In the new conjuncture,  Sápmi or the Nordic Arctic region more broadly is imagined in increasingly colonial terms, as a vast and “empty” space that can secure not just national needs for security and natural resources, but also those of the EU and the West at large -  whether in terms of the green transition, critical mineral self-sufficiency, or military build-up an international training for Arctic warfare. Although all of this may bring new investments and jobs to the region, it is also posing broad questions regarding whose needs, development and security are privileged, at what cost, and based on what kind of world views, epistemologies and visions of the future. In particular, as Arctic, EU and Nordic policies and debate focus more openly than before on traditional geopolitical concerns - hard security, military capabilities, infrastructure, and control of land and natural resources – regional governance and concrete territorial planning gets informed increasingly by strategies and interests that are defined in far-away centres of power, instead of being attuned to the concerns and visions of the local, rural and Indigenous societies and communities that are directly affected.

In this keynote speech, I address the new geopolitical situation from a decolonial perspective that centres especially Sámi concerns and experience. The aim of the speech is to bring attention to a variety of new questions and concerns that Indigenous and rural communities in Sápmi may face in the present conjuncture of the Arctic natural resource rush, the green transition, and militarization, and to outline a critical approach. Conceptualizing these challenges as subaltern security dilemmas, I argue that without concerted, conscious efforts to deconstruct hegemonic discourses on geopolitics and security building on local and Indigenous perspectives and experience, there is a high risk that the present era (which by the way is the only era in which we, people alive today, can have an impact) will significantly accelerate colonial structures, discourses and heritage in this region, this time through policies and practices that are justified in terms of national, EU and Western security.