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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Natural News, State Discourses & The Canadian Arctic
upon state interests, has prevailed in the media texts which report upon the Canadian Arctic. In
doing so, however, these naturalized and popularized texts recycle enduring ideas about natural
agency in support of state-centred agendas: such as the exercise of sovereignty and the promotion of
economic development through corporate megaprojects. In this sense, although the media does not
invent the neo-realist context in which it tends to define all things Arctic, it is nonetheless quite
culpable in supporting and reinforcing these types of geopolitical assemblages. Again, here Penrose‘s
(2011) assessment of the critical interplay between state and non-state agency in reproducing
foundational state-centred imagery is enlightening.
Querying the Texts: Some Methods and Results
This article discusses the role of media in orienting geopolitical assessments concerning the
Canadian North. It speaks, theoretically, to questions of how audiences are constructed which
enable security ‗threats‘ to move from an isolated performative act of elites and decision-makers, to
a more general arena of interest (see Balzacq, 2011; Buzan, Waever and de Wilde, 1997; or c.a.s.e.
collective, 2006, for example), and the representation of threats in neo-realist ways (see Dittmer et
al., 2011; Borgerson, 2008). The print media does not create the security threat, but rather
contextualizes it and embeds it within normative day-to-day understandings of news and world
events. But in doing so, it uses a very specific discourse, involving key phrases and ideas, which it is
hoped will resonate with a broad audience.
In order to understand how discourses concerning Arctic issues and threats are constructed,
particularly with reference to potentially neo-realist state-centred understandings of the North in
Canada, in this article I undertake the collective compilation of key words and coded messages
obtained from all major Canadian daily newspapers over a thirty year study period. While not
wishing to suggest that such questions should be reduced simply to quantitative evidentiary
frameworks, it is nonetheless important to understand the relationship between what are arguably
popular neo-realist geopolitics reflected in media accounts, and broader geopolitical assessments and
securitization discourses. To these ends, I incorporate the perspective of southern Canada‘s daily
newspapers and their reportage on the Arctic since 1970 using a modified content analysis approach.
The rationale is to identify and trace the changing foundations of what I consider to be a publically
articulated or popular geopolitics of southern Canada, as reflected through media assessments of the
North. I have created samples which include the entirety of the 1970s, one year samplings of articles
at the end of each decade from 1989 to 2009, as well as all stories published in Canadian major daily
newspapers in 2013, up to time of writing (Table 1). Key words and themes in each story are
identified, counted and compared, and the results triangulated with a body of secondary literature
and political texts to deepen the understanding of the content of the assemblage of discourses so
identified.
The overall results from this type of content analysis (Table 1) suggest that that current ‗Arctic
geopolitics‘ in the Canadian context reflect the rise of a rather stable hegemony of geopolitical
discourses. As Table 1 indicates, four key types of stories are consistently identified over a 40-year
period since the 1970s. They are: those concerned with economic and resource development, those