Introduction: Arctic International Relations in a Widened Security Perspective

Since the militarization of the circumpolar north during the Cold War, the Arctic has been imagined and analyzed as a space of (in)security. The relic stations of the Distant Early Warning System and the still active Russian and American polar nuclear submarine fleets hold testament to the 20th Century construction of not only a physical polar security space, but rhetorical spaces that came to construct an imagined North that informed southernpublics and politicians whom would never travel above 66 degrees North. Today, one of the dominant narratives of and valuation metrics for the Arctic in public discourse is still one of security. It has been over two decades since the Cold War thawed into amiable relations between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. And yet, as the ice at the top of the world melts, there has been a stark increase in the focus of scholarship, journalism, and discourse on a race for resources and remilitarization in what has been termed the “new cold war”.