In the current moment of entangled and accelerating crises, trust emerges as a key concept for developing robust and resilient Arctic relations and communities. This workshop invites researchers to critically explore trust as a bridging theme for rethinking resilience and security in the Arctic.
In the current moment of entangled and accelerating crises, trust emerges as a key concept for developing robust and resilient Arctic relations and communities. Long-standing assumptions about the protective capacity of democratic states and multilateral institutions are under pressure, while security in the Arctic is increasingly framed as “total security,” integrating community resilience, emergency preparedness, infrastructure reliability, and energy and communications systems into broader defence and security logics. At the same time, the Arctic polycrisis is marked by cascading risks—from geopolitical tensions and climate impacts to cyber threats and disinformation—that expose the limits of purely technical or sectoral responses. Building robust societies under these conditions requires renewed attention to how trust is produced, experienced, and contested across communities, institutions, and practices.
This workshop invites researchers to critically explore trust as a bridging theme for rethinking resilience and security in the Arctic. We welcome reflections on which forms of trust may be eroding or emerging, how trust is experienced and practised in different contexts, and whether trust can function as a key leverage point in times of Arctic polycrises. By bringing together scholars from Indigenous, natural, humanistic, and social sciences, the workshop aims to foster an open interdisciplinary dialogue on how trust can inform more legitimate, inclusive, and effective approaches to building robust societies under conditions of heightened uncertainty and loss.
The workshop will be opened by director of GPS, Johanna Ikävalko.
Professor Christine Hentschel, a leading expert in security and resilience, will give the kick-off talk. Below you will find the title and abstract of her presentation.
Trust and Preparedness in Catastrophic Times
How do European societies prepare for a future that no longer appears as a hopeful horizon but rather as a constellation of existential threats? And how do state–society relations change amid this growing turn toward preparedness? In this talk, I outline the conceptual foundations of our new research collaboration in Hamburg on “The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times”. By ‘catastrophic times’ we refer to the entanglement of three crisis dimensions: the rise of global authoritarianism, the worsening ecological crisis, and the return of war in Europe. In particular, I reflect on the role of trust as a powerful lens for understanding the political, collective, affective, and temporal dimensions of dealing with these interwoven threats.