Will Greaves

University of Victoria, Political Science, Faculty Member

University of Toronto, International Relations, Graduate Student

University of Toronto, Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict, and Justice Studies, Adjunct

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PhD Political Science (University of Toronto 2016). Major fields: International Relations and Canadian Politics. I am Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where I teach Introduction to International Politics, Global Security, and Canadian Foreign Policy. My primary research examines security in the circumpolar Arctic, climate change, energy, natural resource extraction, Indigenous peoples, and the social construction (or not) of security issues. Additional interests include Canadian foreign policy in a changing global order; counterinsurgency and complex peace operations; and the material and conceptual implications of living in the Anthropocene.

I am an Ontario Graduate Scholar, SSHRC Doctoral Scholar, DFAIT Graduate Fellow, and former Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Sami Studies, University of Tromso, Norway. I was previously Lecturer at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the University of Toronto and the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Comments, questions, and feedback always welcome.

@WillWJGreaves
Supervisors: Matthew J. Hoffmann, Steven Bernstein, and Rauna Kuokkanen
Address: Toronto, ON, Canada

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Papers by Will Greaves

CHAPTER 7 Damaging Environments Land, Settler Colonialism, and Security for Indigenous Peoples

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

Overlooking nature: the Arctic, climate change, and environmental diplomacy in the study of Canadian foreign policy

Canadian foreign policy, May 1, 2024

Climate Insecurity and Canadian Defence

Canada and international affairs, Dec 31, 2022

Security Culture and Social Change in Canada and the United States since 9/11

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Jul 15, 2023

‘Soft Securitization’: Unconventional Security Issues and the Arctic Council

Politik, Oct 2, 2017

This article investigates whether the Arctic Council has sought to discursively construct particu... more This article investigates whether the Arctic Council has sought to discursively construct particular security issues via its declarations and other official outputs. Through a textual analysis of its publicly available documents, the authors examine the Council's use of security language to assess whether such rhetoric is mobilized to identify specific threatreferent relationships or in an 'adjectival' sense that does not construct particular issues as existentially threatening. They, moreover, reflect on the analytical usefulness of securitization theory, and the dynamics of constructing unconventional and contested security threats in a multilateral intergovernmental forum.

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Climate change and security in Canada

International Journal, Jun 1, 2021

This article examines the implications of human-caused climate change for security in Canada. The... more This article examines the implications of human-caused climate change for security in Canada. The first section outlines the current state of climate change, the second discusses climate change impacts on human security in Canada, and the third outlines four other areas of Canada’s national interests threatened by climate change: economic threats; Arctic threats; humanitarian crises at home and abroad; and the threat of domestic conflict. In the conclusion, I argue that climate change has clearly not been successfully “securitized” in Canada, despite the material threats it poses to human and national security, and outline directions for future research.

Damaging Environments

Environment and society, Sep 1, 2018

This article theorizes why Indigenous peoples’ security claims fail to be accepted by government ... more 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.

Cities and Human Security in a Warming Arctic

In few places around the world are the issues of climate change, urbanization, and security more ... more In few places around the world are the issues of climate change, urbanization, and security more salient than in the circumpolar Arctic region. As a highly and increasingly urbanized global region that is also experiencing the most acute and widespread effects of global climate change, the Arctic must confront myriad public policy questions implicated by the growth of its cities under conditions of dramatic regional warming. In this chapter, I argue that cities are paradoxical with respect to providing human security for their populations in the face of environmental change, simultaneously reducing individuals’ environmental impact and insulating them from certain environmental hazards while making them reliant upon unsustainable and potentially vulnerable economic and social systems that both contribute to the production of environmental threats and expose individuals to risks of catastrophic harm. I outline three reasons to doubt whether Arctic cities will be able to protect the human security of their residents under conditions of environmental change: (1) Arctic cities are vulnerable to the effects of climate change in ways that undermine their critical infrastructure; (2) urbanization significantly increases local warming, meaning that the growth of Arctic cities will generate a positive feedback loop that will worsen the impacts of climate change; and (3) many Arctic cities rely on fossil fuel-based industries, producing a paradox whereby they are simultaneously threatened by and reliant upon the continuation of the very economic activities responsible for contributing to global climate change.

Understanding Sovereignty and Security in the Circumpolar Arctic: An Introduction

University of Toronto Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2021

Indigenous peoples

Routledge eBooks, Jan 9, 2020

Arctic

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Aug 29, 2014

Insecurities of Non-Dominance

Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Feb 18, 2014

Understanding discourses of Arctic in/security

Routledge eBooks, Apr 11, 2023

Colonialism, Statehood, and Sámi in Norden and the Norwegian High North

Youth Anxiety and Pathological Security-Seeking in Turbulent Times

Springer eBooks, 2021

For Whom, from What?

International Journal, Mar 1, 2012

Since its inception in the iggos, human security has become a significant, perhaps defining, aspe... more Since its inception in the iggos, human security has become a significant, perhaps defining, aspect of Canadian foreign policy. Canada is credited with propagating a unique approach to human security by exercising international leadership on multiple high-profile policy initiatives. Many observers have noted that human security provides the most consistent unifying framework for Canadian foreign and security policy in the post-Cold War era. Some have gone further, suggesting it is the "central pillar," "political leitmotif," or "ethical guide" of Canada's global engagement over the past two decades.1 Though debates continue over the significance, efficacy, and desirability of incorporating human security into Canadian foreign policy - many in the pages of International Journal - there is general agreement that it has been central to Canada's post-Cold War global role, and that many foreign policy successes in that time have been prominently labelled human security achievements.The generally positive response to Canada's human security agenda does, however, obscure conceptual and practical challenges that attend how Canada has defined and approached human security. Unlike holistic human security frameworks employed by other actors, the Canadian approach is characterized by a focus on the prevention of violent harms to foreign human subjects. By marginalizing the socioeconomic and intersubjective dimensions of human wellbeing that are central to holistic human security, the Canadian approach ignores the radical reconceptualization of security that forms the core of human security studies. Moreover, by emphasizing the definitive role of violence, the Canadian conceptualization privileges the state and its institutions because of the former's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence within modern politics. A definitional emphasis on violence results in a practical emphasis on states, displacing people from the analytical centre of human security. In practice, therefore, the Canadian approach retains a state-centrism and conceptual narrowness that undermine employing people as the referent objects of security analysis.Why does the Canadian approach abandon the radicalism of holistic human security, and what are the implications for conditions of human (in)security on the ground? Examining Canada's current Arctic policy, I argue that the Canadian approach supports elitist and state-centric security discourse and practice while minimizing the emancipatory potential inherent in holistic human security. It does this by viewing human security as a central plank of foreign, not domestic, policy, and by employing a violence-centric definition that excludes from the scope of its analysis the most pressing insecurities in the Canadian north. The result is the marginalization of hazards that most affect the people who actually inhabit the region in favour of statist, militarized representations of insecurity generated by southern Canadian policymakers. In the context of the Canadian Arctic, narrow human security also reproduces structural relations of dominance and subordination between the federal and territorial orders of government, while failing to mitigate - indeed, contributing to - conditions of insecurity for northern peoples and communities. Current Arctic policy thus exemplifies a preference for militarism and legalism similar to that found in the Canadian approach to human security.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 towards the Arctic: the "Canada first defence strategy," "Canada's northern strategy," and "Canada's Arctic foreign policy. …

Constructing Arctic security: an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding security in the Barents region

Polar Record, Nov 17, 2016

The field of Security Studies traditionally focused on military threats to states' survival, howe... more The field of Security Studies traditionally focused on military threats to states' survival, however, since the end of the Cold War the concept of security has widened and individuals and communities have gradually become viewed as appropriate referent objects of security: Multifaceted challenges facing communities at the sub-state level are increasingly regarded as security threats, including their potential to cause instability for the larger society, thus affecting states' security. In the Arctic region, a central challenge is that inhabitants are exposed to multiple non-traditional and non-military threats resulting from environmental, economic, and societal changes, which can be understood as threats to human security. We argue that a comprehensive approach to human security overlaps with the concept of societal security, and must therefore consider threats to collective identity and the essential conditions necessary for the maintenance and preservation of a distinct society. We see the human security framework as a suitable analytical tool to study the specific challenges that threaten the Arctic population, and in turn the well-being of Arctic societies. Therefore, we argue that utilizing the concept of human security can promote societal security in the context of the Arctic, and in particular, its sub-regions, for example, the Barents region.

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Arctic (in)security and Indigenous peoples: Comparing Inuit in Canada and Sámi in Norway

Security Dialogue, Sep 21, 2016

While international relations has increasingly begun to recognize the political salience of Indig... more 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.

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Cities and Human Security in a Warming Arctic

Climate Change and Arctic Security, 2019