A new northern security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 42

institutions, like armies, are not very practical for securing people and states
against new threats. To the contrary, armies are likely to produce these threats
themselves, as was the case in the accident of the Kursk nuclear submarine in
August 2000; this Russian submarine was very modern and new with secret
military technology, but was destroyed and sunk when the crew tested a new
torpedo (Häyrynen 2003) . 2
Indeed, trying to broaden the mission of the military in the 1990s to include
environmental protection partly meant some sort of militarization of the envi-
ronment or 'militarized environment' rather than 'green security' (Käkönen
1994). The fact that the military tried to control ideas about environmental
problems, and the so-called 'environmental rearmament' of an army, greatly
strengthened authoritarian tendencies in environmental policy, increasing
the role and legitimacy of the military and even giving a new mission to it
(Haila and Heininen 1995:162-4). Collectively, environmental security has
appeared less fruitful as an alternative approach to traditional security than
hoped by many of those who launched and supported it, and, therefore, the
academic discourses in the 1980s and 1990s have resulted in some backlash
(see Häyrynen and Heininen 2002).
What is, however, important and interesting behind these alternative
security concepts is that there are theories and perspectives that consider
and include the fields of the so-called 'low' politics (a moniker that is chal-
lenged by newer security approaches as these fields have the most meaning to
individuals and communities), such as environmental protection, social and
cultural issues and civil society. For example, a new understanding of geopoli-
tics, or new geopolitics, supports this wider approach to the concept of power
and security. Specifically, these approaches provide alternatives to the chal-
lenges of the power and hegemony politics of the Cold War period and the
geo-strategic discourse of the unified state system, through new actors, such
as indigenous peoples, and the consideration of their autonomy (see Heininen
2010b). Here, the focus is not how to control a region and gain more power
through control, but how to reach a socially stable and peaceful situation as
well as environmentally sustainable order (Chaturvedi 2000). Thus, instead
of power being defined as the traditional type of coercive power by military
or money, or both, there are other types of connotations, such as governance
and influence. Combined with this we see that the main factors of new geo-
politics, i.e. actors, space (including social space) and identity/ies, mirror the
priorities being made through human security. Thus not only are geography
and political systems important, but also people(s), societies and the envi-
ronment. The above, broadened and deepened understanding of security is
connected to the relationship between people and their spaces, thus integrat-
ing the point of view of a region and its inhabitants, linking comprehensive
security to regional security.