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AbstractThis article examines Canada-US relations through their shared membership in a pluralistic security community (PSC). While the bilateral relationship has been turbulent for decades, the Trump presidency has damaged the Canada-US PSC by (1) exacerbating a decades-long trend of weakened shared identity and mutual trust between Canadians and Americans, and (2) undermining the democratic norms and institutions that uphold American domestic stability and Canadians' expectations of peaceful change. Assessing the combined implications of the decline in shared identity, mutual trust and democratic stability, I argue that the Canada-US PSC cannot endure if the United States does not also consider Canada's national and security interests or if the United States itself poses a threat to those interests. Given current trends, the future absence of war in North America may reflect American domination over a weaker and dependent Canada rather than their continued membership in a bilateral PSC.

This article theorizes why Indigenous peoples' security claims fail to be accepted by government authorities or incorporated into the security policies and practices of settler states. By engaging the concepts of securitization and ontological security, I explain how Indigenous peoples are unable to successfully "speak" security to the state. I argue that nondominant societal groups are unable to gain authoritative acceptance for security issues that challenge the dominant national identity. In effect, indigeneity acts an inhibiting condition for successful securitization because, by identifying the state and dominant society as the source of their insecurity, Indigenous peoples' security claims challenge the ontological security of settler societies. Given the incommensurability of Indigenous and settler claims to authority over land, and the ontological relationship to land that underpins Indigenous identities and worldviews, the inhibiting condition is especially relevant with respect to security claims based on damage to the natural environment.

While international relations has increasingly begun to recognize the political salience of Indigenous peoples, the related field of security studies has not significantly incorporated Indigenous peoples either theoretically or empirically. This article helps to address this gap by comparing two Arctic Indigenous peoples – Inuit in Canada and Sámi in Norway – as 'securitizing actors' within their respective states. It examines how organizations representing Inuit and Sámi each articulate the meaning of security in the circumpolar Arctic region. It finds that Inuit representatives have framed environmental and social challenges as security issues, identifying a conception of Arctic security that emphasizes environmental protection, preservation of cultural identity, and maintenance of Indigenous political autonomy. While there are some similarities between the two, Sámi generally do not employ securitizing language to discuss environmental and social issues, rarely characterizing them as existential issues threatening their survival or wellbeing.Drawing on securitization theory, this article proposes three factors to explain why Inuit have sought to construct serious challenges in the Arctic as security issues while Sámi have not: ecological differences between the Canadian and Norwegian Arctic regions, and resulting differences in experience of environmental change; the relative degree of social inclusion of Inuit and Sámi within their non-Indigenous majority societies; and geography, particularly the proximity of Norway to Russia, which results in a more robust conception of national security that restricts space for alternative, non-state security discourses. This article thus links recent developments in security studies and international relations with key trends in Indigenous politics, environmental change, and the geopolitics of the Arctic region.

This article surveys the conceptual development of human security and its incorporation into Canadian foreign policy. It traces the narrowing of Canada's human security agenda from 1996-2006, providing a critical account of the factors behind the Canadian approach to human security. The implications of a narrow human security agenda are examined in light of three areas of federal policy: trade, climate change, and aboriginal governance. The conceptual and practical significance of Canada's narrow human security approach is then demonstrated by analyzing three central documents of the federal government's policy toward the Arctic: the "Canada first defence strategy," "Canada's northern strategy," and "Canada's Arctic foreign policy," It concludes with a defence of holistic human security as a guide for policy in the Canadian Arctic. Adapted from the source document.

This paper will examine the prima facie case that Canadian policy and practice in Afghanistan have not been consistent with the principles of human security and the protection of Afghan civilians. The failure to protect human security is twofold: first, international forces have inadequately addressed the threat posed to civilians by the Taliban insurgency and associated terrorist groups. Second, the tactics employed by international military forces have failed to adequately discriminate between civilians and combatants and have directly resulted in increasing numbers of civilian casualties. These failings indicate that Canada's practices in Afghanistan do not to cohere with its own policies regarding the protection of human security, violate the emergent international doctrine of human security, and seriously question the validity of official claims that Canada and the international community are protecting the human security of civilians in Afghanistan. This paper argues that the effective application of the principles of human security to the conduct of counterinsurgency by international military forces would greatly improve the likelihood of success in the long-term Afghan state-building project.