Confidence and Security Building in the Arctic: proposals from the 2014 Arctic Yearbook
See The Simons Foundation's Disarming Arctic Security page for briefing papers on military policies and practices in the Arctic region by Ernie Regehr, Senior Fellow in Arctic Security at The Simons Foundation.
Confidence and Security Building in the Arctic: proposals from the 2014 Arctic Yearbook
February 4, 2015
The 2014 Arctic Yearbook is the third edition of what has become an important vehicle for publishing the results of current Arctic scholarship on a range of themes. Topics covered include regional governance, circumpolar relations, the geopolitics of the region, and security. In the latter section, one interesting offering explores possibilities for adapting confidence and security building measures developed in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for the Arctic.
Regional confidence and security building measures are neither disarmament nor demilitarization measures, instead, they are arrangements and initiatives intended to reduce tensions and the risks of direct conflict by promoting openness and transparency with regard to military capabilities and intentions, and thus build mutual confidence within a particular region. Measures for the exchange of verifiable military information and regularized opportunities for cooperation among regional military forces promote confidence and reduce threat and threat perceptions.
Author Benjamin Schaller, whose article is based on his Master’s Degree thesis at the University of Uppsala, makes it clear that his attention to the promotion of confidence building in the Arctic is not premised on any assumptions about rising tensions. Instead, it is based on the need for Arctic states to be deliberate in adopting ways to preserve and deepen confidence in the commitments to the peaceful settlement of disputes as articulated in the 2008 Ilulissat Declaration and the 2013 “Vision for the Arctic” statement by the Arctic Council. Declaring the further development of the region as a zone of peace to be at the heart of the Arctic Council’s work, the “Vision” statement reiterates the spirit of Ilulissat: “We are confident that there is no problem that we cannot solve together through our cooperative relationships on the basis of existing international law and good will. We remain committed to the framework of the Law of the Sea, and to the peaceful resolution of disputes generally.”
Within that political climate of peaceful intentions, which Arctic Council declarations themselves reinforce, the paper points out that it must nevertheless be acknowledged that the military capacities and deployments of Arctic states are on the rise and that measures of openness and transparency should thus be actively pursued in order to prevent misinterpretations of intentions from arising and to keep tensions from emerging.
The expansion of military capacity in the north, if undertaken openly and cooperatively with neighbors, can aid in preserving the region as a zone of durable peace inasmuch as enhanced capacity can aid enforcement of and respect for the rule of law, help to ensure compliance with national and regional regulations, enhance border security, especially maritime approaches to national land territories, and generally foster a sense of the region as a rules-based zone in which compliance with those rules is expected and respected. For that to happen, openness and transparency are essential. The Arctic Council itself, the Search and Rescue agreement, the oil spills agreement, and the Ilulissat Declaration are thus all confidence building measures. Continue reading...
Ernie Regehr, O.C. is Senior Fellow in Arctic Security at The Simons Foundation, and Research Fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo.