The Arctic Conundrum: Great Power Politics in the era of Geoengineering

Abstract

There is a growing corpus on ways to mitigate or solve climate change, but due to its crisis multiplying and complex characteristics, no single method is globally endorsed. One such method is Geoengineering, and even though economic and normative aspects of it have been widely discussed, its security concerns and military usage has yet to be studied in a systemic fashion, with clear variables and future expectations, following the lakatosian model of progressive science. This is the aim of the present thesis, and to do so, the geographical scope of the Arctic was chosen - as it is the region where climate change and security competition meet, rendering the research question: what are the possible future security scenarios of Geoengineering deployment in the Arctic? The methodology of futures studies - with scenario analysis as the specific method - was deployed, combined with the theoretical framework of Neorealism, which produced a total of 6 scenarios.