Kunuk took it to the streets of Greenland: single-issue protests in a young online democracy

Abstract

Single-issue protests and online mobilization have proliferated in the wake of social media. While significant ground has been covered regarding the changing possibilities for mobilization, the question of how specific circumstances condition the political impact of online mobilization and public protests has received much less attention. During the last couple of years, Greenlanders have increasingly employed Facebook to mobilize the populace and arrange public demonstrations with noteworthy results. Arguing that single-issue protests cannot be separated from the issues they are concerned with, the paper explores how a single and potential trivial political issue-a new parliament building-developed from a prestige project supported by a nearly unanimous Parliament into a public-contested issue and a failed political project. The paper invokes Actor-Network Theory to account for the trajectory of the issue and how it was translated along the way as actors built and broke alliances. The concepts of mobilizing structures, opportunity structures and framing processes are employed to shed light on the conditions of possibilities for the emergence, development and impact of the protest against the parliament building. Finally, the paper discusses social media's impact on the image of politically engaged Inuit and on the power relations between citizens and parliament in Greenland. This discussion is of paramount importance as Greenlanders are struggling with their colonial heritage while they are constructing Greenlandic democracy.

Arctic Connectivity: A Frugal Approach to Infrastructural Development

“…So far, research on social media in the Arctic and Greenland has concentrated on social media as a platform for political mobilization. A study by Jørgensen (2017) on a protest movement against the new Greenlandic Parliament building that was mobilized on Facebook is a case that shows the internal political significance of social media in Greenland. Another example is a study by Yunes (2016), who analyzed the #sealfie movement, which protests the negative portrayal of seal hunting by environmental celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres, to show how Arctic online mobilization also has political impact outside the region's limits.…”