In this article, we introduce the concept of politics of comparison in tourism development, looking at how comparison contributes to shaping and making sense of tourism development in Greenland. Decision makers and operators in Greenland foresee tourism growth as new transatlantic airports are set to open by 2024. To navigate an uncertain tourism future, many look towards neighbouring Iceland, who experienced exponential growth in international tourism arrivals between 2010 and 2018. In this North Atlantic reflection, comparison also works as a tool to understand tourism, positioning Greenland as a potential destination and deliberating about the future of tourism in the region, while also bringing forth competing logics and trajectories of development. Thus, comparison serves to engage with the meaning and value of tourism, seeing it not only as a pillar of the economy but also as a force affecting landscapes and communities. We argue that the comparisons made by tourism actors work epistemologically – creating knowledge of ‘what is’ – as well as ontologically, forcefully interfering with and producing tourism realities.

In this article, we show how Annemarie Mol's notion of ontological politics helps to open up the research agenda for cyber security in Critical Security Studies. The article hence seeks to further the debate about STS and Critical Security Studies. The article's main claim is that the concept of ontological politics enables an engagement with the complex and transformative dynamics of ICT and the new security actors and practices that shape security politics in the digital age. By examining the virulent attacks executed by the Mirai botnet – one of the world's largest, fiercest, and most enduring botnets – we point to four aspects of cyber security that attention to the ontological politics of cyber security attunes us to: the proliferation and entanglement of security agencies, actors, sites, and spaces. These aspects of cyber security, we argue, are becoming increasingly prominent alongside the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G network technology. In conclusion, we discuss the wider security theoretical and normative-democratic implications of an engagement with the ontological politics of security by exploring three avenues for additional conversation between ontological politics and Critical Security Studies.