TAI Bookshelf Podcast - Alternative Approaches to Arctic Security with Gabriella Gricius

This week’s podcast guest, PhD researcher in Political Science at Colorado State University, Gabrielle Gricius. Photo: Gabrielle Gricius

The Arctic Institute’s Bookshelf Podcast is back with its second series! This season, your favorite hosts Liubov Timonina and Romain Chuffart are joined by a new host, Saga Helgason. Together they chat with scholars and experts to make the Arctic easy and accessible to everyone. Tune in every other week and join our in-depth conversations that take you beyond the headlines and right into the latest ideas, challenges, and experiences from the Arctic.

This week, Liuba and Romain had a conversation with Gabriella Gricius about rethinking security in the Arctic from a decolonial perspective. They talked about bringing a local angle to mainstream approaches to security and how to reframe security issues in the Arctic. Gabriella also discusses the differences between security studies in the United States and in Europe, and how these two diametrically-opposed visions of the field shape the relationship with and understanding of the Arctic.

Gabriella Gricius is a PhD Political Science student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Colorado State University and a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network (NAADSN). She received her Master’s degree in International Security from the University of Groningen in 2019. Gabriella also co-hosts Disrupt: a revolutionary critical podcast that acts as an introduction to international relations (IR) for students, academics, and activists alike.

Her interests are focused on the Arctic region, particularly as it concerns Russian policy and the risk of securitizing the region. She is also a freelance journalist and has published in Foreign Policy, Bear Market Brief, CSIS, Responsible Statecraft, Global Security Review, and Riddle Russia as well as the academic journals The Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Sicherheit und Frieden, the Kyiv-Mohyla Law & Politics Journal, and the Canadian Naval Review.

References and further readings:

• Adamson, Fiona B. “Pushing the Boundaries: Can We “Decolonize” Security Studies?.” Journal of Global Security Studies 5, no. 1 (2020): 129-135.
• Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political-economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality.” Transmodernity: Journal of peripheral cultural production of the luso-hispanic world 1, no. 1 (2011).
• Sabaratnam, Meera. “IR in Dialogue … but Can We Change the Subjects? A Typology of Decolonising Strategies for the Study of World Politics.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 39, no. 3 (2011): 781–803.
• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1 (2012)

This episode was recorded in May 2021.