A new northern security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 44

only the Russian North, but also northern Norway and northern Finland, and
even Iceland, due to nuclear submarine accidents (Heininen and Segerståhl
2002:263-4). This was enough to initiate international cooperation for
nuclear safety, as a part of Arctic environmental protection under the auspices
of the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (see 'Rovaniemi Declaration'
1991) between the governments of the Arctic states in the Barents Sea area, as
well as in the entire Arctic region. As a result of this close technical coopera-
tion between the former enemies, the Russian Federation, Norway and the
USA, the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation (AMEC) was founded.
In this example, nuclear safety was redefined as a security threat to the peoples
and communities of the Barents Sea area rather than a military threat from
radioactivity, as defined by traditional security.
Based on the mainstream definition of traditional security, it is not sur-
prising that the purpose of regional security, i.e. to define security from the
perspective of a region and its citizens, is a sensitive and complicated issue
in the context of the unified state system. This is also the main reason that
traditional security policy and the military are not a part of the agenda of the
new international organizations and forums of the Arctic and entire Nort h, 3
though they are said 'to decrease tension and increase stability and to pro-
mote sustainable development' in the region (see Heininen 2004b:32-3). To
citizens it is, however, important, even critical in some situations, to know
exactly how decisions about their security and security policy are made and
by whom. This approach of security closely deals with governance, though it
is challenging.
Different stages of security in the North
In the post-Cold War circumpolar North, there has been a significant
shift from military tension into international and regional cooperation in
many fields such as economics, environmental protection, research and
higher education. Governments and other state organizations, in addition
to northern indigenous peoples' organizations, sub-national governments,
civil organizations and trans-national corporations, are expressing inter-
est in the North in new ways to search for their share of control of space
and resources (see Heininen 1999a). Thus, as mentioned earlier, instead of,
or parallel to, traditional geopolitics, new approaches of geopolitics have
raised human-oriented concerns like human capital, societal responsibility
and the question of identity politics (see Chaturvedi 2000). This strongly
indicates the importance of new actors in (geo)politics, and economics over
politics. Correspondingly, 'critical geopolitics' is interested in this kind of
new approach dealing with control of a space, where identity has become
relevant (Harle and Moisio 2000).
Summarizing the situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the
Arctic Human Development Report (AHDR) identified three main themes,