| In the last decade, the media has continued to report on the dramatic climatic changes occurring in the Arctic and how these changes could lead to a confrontation between Arctic states. Scholars from many different fields have taken on the challenge of trying to decipher the facts behind these reports and they have come up with various projections. On the one side, some realist scholars have argued that the changes that are occurring in this region have created new security concerns for Arctic states. On the other side, liberal institutional scholars have argued that the changing environmental nature of the Arctic has created new collective problems that can only be solved through greater cooperation between states. There are few scholars who have taken a middle position. Furthermore, in the current literature, there are very few studies that have used specific international relations theories to explain changing Arctic conditions. This thesis argues that while both viewpoints touch on pertinent issues, by focusing either on the military and high political issues or on low political issues, scholars have failed to capture the overall nature of security problems in the Arctic and how these issues are related. The purpose of this thesis is to reconcile these viewpoints by using different international relations paradigms to examine both arguments in order to find common ground between each extreme position. |
