Understanding Violence and Conflict: Greenland as a Theory-Building Case Study

Abstract

Greenland is a land where unresolved conundrums and fast-paced emerging threats intersect. If not properly addressed, these could worsen the critical rates of suicide (one of the highest in the world and 6-7 times higher than the other Nordic countries), multigenerational trauma, and other forms of abuse. By developing and applying a renewed conceptualization of violent conflicts aimed at unravelling their roots, this study recognises that there are precise violent phenomena and conflictual dimensions that curb Greenlandic development across human security and international relations. The study confirms that the Danish 'benign' colonisation, by constituting a discriminatory relationship, provoked frustration among the Inuit, fostering the psychological push factors to self-destruction and violence against other fragile individuals, while environmental conditions and contextual phenomena limited violence at the micro-level. More broadly, the case study demonstrates that discrimination in its wider sense is the main source of violent conflicts and that the redistribution of the ownership of resources is the main way to prevent large and organised violent phenomena. In fact, Greenland currently needs a multi-agency psychosocial healing programme that addresses households and individual therapy....