GREENLAND AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF ARCTIC SECURITY: A SECURITY INTERFACE PERSPECTIVE

VULETIĆ Dejan (Research Fellow, The Strategic Research Institute, University of Defence, Belgrade, Serbia), dejan.vuletic@mod.gov.rs
RAWAT Suryang (PhD research scholar, Symbiosis International University, Lavale, India), suryang.rawat1996@gmail.com

This article examines how Greenland helps explain the restructuring of national security under conditions of layered sovereignty and the structural transformation of Arctic security. Drawing on securitisation theory, it develops the concept of Greenland as a security interface—an intermediate political space in which Greenlandic authorities, despite lacking full sovereignty in foreign and defence policy, exercise significant political capacity in areas such as economic regulation, resource governance, and external cooperation. The study employs a qualitative, theory-guided interpretation of relevant literature and demonstrates that Greenland’s contemporary strategic significance cannot be adequately explained by geography, natural resources, or military infrastructure alone. Instead, security increasingly develops through the interaction of political authority, institutional arrangements, economic governance, and systemic competition across multiple levels of governance. The findings indicate that contemporary security environments blur the boundaries between domestic governance and foreign and security policy, challenging exclusively state-centric and military conceptions of security. By conceptualising Greenland as a security interface, the article offers a transferable analytical framework for understanding how layered sovereignty and systemic competition increasingly reshape national security beyond traditional state-centric models.

Keywords: Arctic security; security interface; layered sovereignty; national security; systemic competition.