WCEE Emerging Issues Lecture: Why Greenland Matters Now

Open to Everyone

Greenland and the wider circumpolar Arctic are no longer peripheral concerns to observers of geopolitics, but are now central sites of geopolitical, economic, and environmental contestation. Focusing on Greenland, the lecture traces how debates over military basing, mineral extraction, Indigenous self-determination, and environmental protection have become tightly intertwined.

These overlapping pressures have produced new frictions between Washington, Copenhagen, Brussels, and Nuuk, revealing that Arctic security today is not only about hard security, but also about trade, governance, and competing visions of identity and sovereignty. The lecture will situate the current drama on Greenland in the context of changes in Arctic security as a whole. The lecture will show that Greenland offers a critical lens through which to understand broader shifts in Arctic order: how alliances adapt, how local actors navigate external pressures, and how environmental change is transforming what “security” means in the twenty-first-century Arctic.