Desecuritizing Svalbard: the limits of expertise

Despite escalatory media coverage characterising Svalbard as a potential flashpoint between Russia and the West, official Norwegian and Russian policy has remained strikingly low-tension. This article argues that long-standing desecuritization practices, active state-directed efforts to frame Svalbard as a domestic administrative matter rather than a security concern, explain this persistence. Drawing on a discourse analysis of 48 Norwegian and Russian policy documents and 15 semi-structured interviews with external political science experts and Norwegian ministerial officials, this article makes two contributions. First, it applies desecuritization theory to Svalbard for the first time, showing how both states have consistently articulated the archipelago away from security framing even in the face of rising bilateral tensions, particularly the increasing usage of hybrid threats. Second, it demonstrates that desecuritization also constrains the power of external experts. By removing security framings, both states remove the discursive space through which such experts could otherwise claim policy relevance. The Norwegian case is theoretically significant because expert exclusion coexists with a broader tradition of Arctic policy consultation. The study has implications for the study of expertise, state–expert interaction, and research on Svalbard.