What Borgen gets right (and wrong) about Danish politics

Adam Price with cast members from Borgen: Power & Glory on location in Greenland

Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (UCL Scandinavian Studies & Nordic Noir Book Club) has written a piece for The Conversation (‘an independent source of news analysis and informed comment written by academic experts, working with professional journalists who help share their knowledge with the world’) about the new season of Borgen: Power & Glory currently streaming on Netflix. If you are interested in what Borgen gets right and wrong about Danish-Greenlandic relations, this might be something for you.

Go to The Conversation to read the whole piece

Extract:

The new season has one major narrative arc: oil has been discovered in Greenland. The seasoned Nyborg rightly predicts trouble when geopolitical superpowers Russia, China and the US rush to assert themselves in the Arctic. Economic interests threaten to trump her party’s environmental ideals, and the already tense relationship between Greenland and Denmark threatens to erupt in a bitter struggle over political power and profits from oil extraction. It also depicts the unequal impacts of climate change. While colonial powers’ oil extractions have driven climate change for centuries, Indigenous people such as the Greenlandic Inuit are witnessing the effects on their vulnerable ecosystems. This reality opens old wounds in the Danish realm that includes the former colonies and current dependencies of Greenland and the Faroe Islands.