Foreign policy is often associated with nation states and this understanding manifests in the very name of the study of International Relations. Despite this presumption by practitioners and theorists alike, global affairs have hardly been limited to the transaction between nations and/or states. Autonomous polities have actively invested in foreign relations and thus challenged the traditional binary understandings of sovereignty. This phenomena has been conceptualized as paradiplomacy. The Nordic region provides interesting and important case studies as the autonomous polities of Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Åland have all engaged in varying forms of paradiplomacy. This study will use historical and comparative methodologies to analyse the development of the respective external policies of the three autonomous polities in the Nordic Region. The main material used will be publicly available documents. The aim of this comparison is twofold: firstly to contribute to the historiography of the Nordic autonomous polities with a foreign policy perspective and secondly to contribute to the development of paradiplomacy theory by adding perspectives from the Nordics. This project will use constructivist methodologies advocated by the Copenhagen School of IR focusing on the uses of political language. This project will engage in a historiography which incorporates the perspective of groups which have been often analysed as objects and stress their subjectivity in global affairs.

2021