Arctic Security

Alaska was famously described by Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell in 1935 as "The most strategic place on earth." Alaska-based assets have been particularly active lately in supporting the Arctic policy of the United States. Last month the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies held its official ribbon-cutting ceremony to become the newest Department of Defense regional center . Alaskan Command on August 26 hosted Arctic Resolve 2022 , "The first of the three-day exercise [consisting] of a series of academic briefings pertaining to the nature of seismic activity, natural disaster emergency preparation, and the Alaska Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management’s role in disaster response." Space Force "started building a gateway site at Clear Space Force Station, Alaska, where it will operate two new polar communications payloads scheduled to launch in 2023 on a Space Norway mission," part of the space strategy collaboration between the ...

First published in 2020 and newly available in paperback , The Routledge Handbook of Arctic Security is an edited collection of essays on Arctic security topics by an array of academics and researchers, the majority of them from Norway. In recent years Routledge has published quite a few good titles on economic, environmental, and security policy in the Arctic, and this one is no exception. Editors Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Marc Lanteigne, and Horatio Sam-Aggrey, present two introductory chapters followed by thirty-three chapters in a hefty 462 pages. The non-introductory chapters are 10-15 pages in length and are organized into five sections that also feature a number of figures, tables and maps: Theorizing Arctic Security The Arctic powers: "Arctic Five" and "Arctic Eight" Security in the Arctic through governance Non-Arctic states, regional, and international organizations People, states, and security The introductory chapter argues that historical tendencies to...

Over a decade ago John Allen Paulos, Professor of Mathematics at Temple University and author of multiple books on the intersection of numbers and narratives, published an intriguing article in the New York Times wherein he observed, "In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled." Stories and data are both important of course, and while it may not be surprising that we treat them in different ways it is critical for policy advocates to know that as humans we have evolved to have a preference for stories over data. This was illustrated in a 2007 experiment that showed that a story alone beat both data and a combination of story and data in soliciting donations for a worthy cause. Another quote from Chip Heath, author of Made to Stick, drives the point home : "In the average one-minute speech, the typical student us...