Research areas

Ulrik Pram Gad’s core research interest concerns how identities are constituted and negotiated by and in opposition to the nation state. Particularly how these processes shapes and are shaped by diplomacy and security politics, in discourse and practice.

Current research

Empirically his focus is primarily the re-constitution of the Danish ‘Community of the Realm’, however he most often studies the Greenlandic-Danish relation as part of regional Arctic or global security configurations, or places the relation in a comparative perspective. Conceptually oriented projects have focused on securitization, sovereignty, paradiplomacy, postcoloniality, infrastructure and sustainability.

Projects

A volume on “Greenland in Arctic security: Entangled (de)securitization dynamics under climatic thaw and geopolitical freeze” developed securitization theory by way of detailed case studies of related Arctic dynamics (2024, University of Michigan Press, co-edited with Marc Jacobsen and Ole Wæver).

2020-2024, Ulrik Pram Gad directed the collaborative research project ”Imagining Independence in the Arctic: Greenland’s Postcolonial Politics of Comparison [Imagine PoCo]”, financed by a Sapere Aude grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The project analyzed with whom and how Greenland compares itself when seeking inspiration for how to develop towards independence. Researchers from DIIS, Aalborg University and Greenland contributed to the project. 

A series of small policy projects and affiliation with Nasiffik - Center for Foreign and Security Policy at Ilisimatusarfik/University of Greenland aims to enhance the common Greenlandic/Danish knowledge base on foreign, security and defence politics under 'hybrid sovereignty'. Specifically, the perspectives after the new Greenlandic draft constitution were discussed in two seminars on Free Association, and a project pinpointed a series of dilemmas involved in the organisation of foreign, security and defense policy in the Kingdom of Denmark.

Since 2014, he has organized the Arctic Politics seminars which serves as a core research infrastructure research environments across the humanities and the social sciences working on Greenlandic and Arctic projects.