The Pressure to Adapt: Understanding the EU's Perception of Its Role in Arctic Security Governance

This paper aims to analyze the nature of the European Union’s articulation of its role in the Arctic region as a security actor. To do so, this study employs a theoretical framework built on existing EU actorness theory and a qualitative content analysis methodology to code and examine select EU institutional documents between 2021 and 2026. This study assesses the temporal drivers of change in the EU’s articulation of its ambitions as a global actor and finds that key external events and global developments, namely the war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Trump administration’s expansionist position concerning Greenland during the president’s second term, have served to both constrain and enable EU actorness regarding Arctic security in unique ways