Agentive minorities: place-memory, identity and ontological security in post-war Sri Lanka

What is ontological (in)security? Recent scholarship on ontological security in International Relations has increasingly turned to the concept's theoretical origins in psychoanalysis and existential philosophy to address the field's (meta)theoretical limitations. This article argues that this development also necessitates an interrogation of the concept of ontological security itself to address the field's theoretical tensions. Further developing the nascent Kleinian approach to ontological security, this article conceptualises ontological (in)security as two distinct positions that denote the different ways in which subjects, be they individuals, groups, or states, manage anxiety. To develop this proposition, the article draws on Melanie Klein's work on the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions to elucidate these positions of ontological (in)security, their respective defence mechanisms against anxiety, and their socio-political implications. This Kleinian approach facilitates a clear theoretical distinction between security and insecurity, providing an analytical toolbox to differentiate the various ways in which anxiety is managed in different positions. This framework particularly underscores the ethical, reparative, and transformative potential of the position of ontological security, aspects that have received limited theoretical and empirical attention to date.

Research on ontological security in world politics has mushroomed since the early 2000s but seems to have reached an impasse. Ontological security is a conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the management of anxiety in self-constitution. Building especially on Giddens, IR scholars have emphasized how this translates to a need for cognitive consistency and biographical continuity – a security of ‘being.’ A criticism has been its so-called ‘status quo bias,’ a perceived tilt toward theorizing investment in the existing social order. To some, an ontological security lens both offers social theoretic foundations for a realist worldview and lacks resources to conceptualize alternatives. We disagree. Through this symposium, we address that critique and suggest pathways forward by focusing on the thematic of anxiety. Distinguishing between anxiety and fear, we note that anxiety manifests in different emotions and leaves room for a range of political possibilities. Early ontological security scholarship relied heavily on readings of Giddens, which potentially accounts for its bias. This symposium re-opens the question of the relationship between anxiety and subjectivity from the perspective of ontological security, thinking with and beyond Giddens. Three contributions re-think anxiety in ontological security drawing on existentialist philosophy; two address limitations of Giddens' approach.

Unlike traditional approaches that analyse an actor’s foreign policy by focusing on the search for physical security and material interests, ontological security advocates a more nuanced approach that considers identity politics, regime security, issues of legitimacy, and emotional motives. This article aims to examine Iran’s Axis of Resistance from the perspective of ontological security, without rescinding the possibility of power struggles or ideological motivations in influencing Iran’s foreign policymaking process. This study posits that the Axis of Resistance embodies a profound meaning and overarching significance for Iran that transcends mere considerations of physical security or sectarian-­ideological inclinations. The pursuit of the Axis of Resistance by Iran serves to provide the regime with ontological security, achieved through the utilisation of national narratives, the establishment of routines, concerns pertaining to domestic order, and the incorporation of emotional underpinnings of the Islamic regime. The existential significance that Iran ascribes to the Axis of Resistance is of crucial importance in maintaining this paradigm, despite all its costs.

What is the role of ontological security in the constitution and maintenance of security communities? Traditionally, security community members are seen to maintain dependable expectations of peaceful change, rooted in mutual trust and a sense of ‘we-ness’. Thus, they seem ontologically secure in their collective identity. I argue, however, that security communities need not only to reinforce a sense of ‘we-ness’ but also to recognise members’ distinctiveness. Denying this recognition threatens the self, undermining trust and eroding ‘we-ness’, while intersubjective expectations and practices that routinely legitimise members’ distinctiveness allow for a stable sense of self within the community. Thus, processes of (de)legitimation of distinctiveness vis-a-vis a collective identity constitute and maintain communities or explain their breakdown. The paper makes three main contributions: First, with regard to the ontological security literature, it highlights that routinising relations with others is an ongoing struggle for recognition, a process that may in fact be highly conflictual. Second, with regard to the security community literature, it theorises the overlap and tension between members’ sense of self and their collective identity. Third, it argues that focusing on struggles for recognition and different layers of identity provides better purchase for understanding challenges to cohesion in security communities.

The advent of Ontological Security Theory (OST) in sociology has introduced a new instrument for understanding sociological processes and their effects. However, in its current form, OST is in the evolutionary phase and needs enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration regarding certain conceptual and theoretical understandings. This study has tried to discuss three fundamental constructs in OST, including the role of trust in transforming existential anxiety into {in}ontological insecurity, the role of securitisation (of subjectivity), and the link between ontological insecurity and primordialism. We illustrated these concepts through the case study of ‘protests for peace’ in the Swat district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan. In Swat, the sudden reappearance and rumours of the government’s negotiations with militants caused an unprecedented mass uprising for peace in 2022. The study established that the lack of trust in the ontological security-providing actor creates a critical juncture, causing the shift from existential anxiety to ontological insecurity. The study also found that securitisation of subjectivity plays a vital role in attaining the ‘default condition’ of ontological security. The study further revealed that an ontological insecure condition urges communities to redefine their identities and leads them to ‘primordialism’ that can potentially push them into prolonged and violent conflicts.

This article presents an explorative qualitative case study of how sixteen young Somali migrants stranded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia feel about staying in touch with loved ones abroad using Internet-based transnational communication. Left-behind during transit migration from Somalia to overseas, at this moment they can only digitally connect with contacts living inside for example dreamed diasporic locations in Europe. Based on in-depth interviews, a focus group and concept maps drawn by informants the ambivalent workings of affects spurred by transnational communication are explored. The intense feelings of togetherness originating in Skype video-chat, mobile phone calls and Facebook use are conceptualized with the notion of transnational affective capital – one of the only sources of capital the informants have. The ambivalence of transnational affective capital is scrutinized by exploring whether such connectivity routines offer trust, enable anxiety management and promote ‘ontological security’. Alternatively, the question arises whether transnational communication may further exacerbate ontological insecurity: discomfort, unsettlement and increased anxiety related to the precarious situation of being stranded.

This study attempts to describe and explain the views, experiences, and attitudes of oral sources during the DI / TII movement under the leadership of Abdul Kahar Muzakkar in South Sulawesi. The method used is the historical method in general that explains the problem based on a historical perspective, especially oral history, without ignoring other data sources. The results of the study showed that the cause and effect of the DI / TII movement in South Sulawesi was an accumulation of various factors that led to Abdul Kahar Muzakkar's disappointment. Verbal sources also revealed, but the frustration was just momentum, another reason according to some verbal sources was because of the strength and influence of the communists in the community and the TNI, including in South Sulawesi. That is what must be cleared up in Sulawesi, but instead becomes a source of widespread and prolonged conflict. The impact is comprehensive, while the rescue of the people of South Sulawesi during the movement, also varied. The completion of the movement was very complicated because many DI / TII troops were loyal, but many also turned; TNI officers who tried to defeat him, among them were his comrades in arms, they also managed to approach the aristocrats and the scholars, the people of South Sulawesi were supportive. Although finally, the DI / TII movement could be crushed using cultural approaches through officers from aristocratic ethnic groups. Keywords: DI/TII Movements, Verbal Resources, Communist, Rescue

The history of genomic research on the pig (Sus scrofa)—as uncovered through archival research, oral histories, and the analysis of a quantitative dataset and co-authorship network—demonstrates the importance of two distinct genealogies. These consist of research programs focused on agriculturally oriented genetics, on the one hand, and systematics research concerned with evolution and diversity, on the other. The relative weight of these two modes of research shifted following the production of a reference genome for the species from 2006 to 2011. Before this inflection point, the research captured in our networks mainly involved intensive sequencing that concentrated primarily on increasing the resolution of genomic data both in particular regions and more widely across the genome. Sequencing practices later became more extensive, with greater focus on the generation and comparison of sequence data across and between populations. We explain these shifts in research modes as a function of the availability, circulation, distribution, and exchange of genomic tools and resources—including data and materials—concerning the pig in general, and increasingly for particular populations. Consequently, we describe the history of pig genomics as constituting a kind of bricolage, in which geneticists cobbled together resources to which they had access—often ones produced by them for other purposes—in pursuit of their research aims. The concept of bricolage adds to the thicker vision of genomics that we have shown throughout the special issue and further highlights the singularity of the dominant, thin narrative focused on the production of the human reference sequence at large-scale genome centers. This essay is part of a special issue entitled The Sequences and the Sequencers: A New Approach to Investigating the Emergence of Yeast, Human, and Pig Genomics, edited by Miguel García-Sancho and James Lowe.

Recent high-profile cyber-attacks affecting the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK have brought into focus the fact that data, devices, and people are so intermingled that we now need a new way of approaching everyday security that provides an account of place. The assumption until now has been that the security of the individual will follow from technical security and that designing for security requires purely technological solutions. Our creative engagement method puts the human security of actors in the foreground, ensuring that actors who may ordinarily be marginalized may have their perspectives taken into account. The creative methods used include participatory physical modelling to co-design representations of what constitutes ontological security in the everyday for communities. LEGO and other materials allow participants to physically model matters of concern as tangible scenarios, using colored bricks to encode actors, infrastructure, and the movement of data. In this paper, a single LEGO model, depicting an internet-protocol home-banking service, is described in detail. A number of playful and agonistic interactions between our participants are examined through a place-based lens, using descriptive concepts from ontological and autonomous design, an approach designed to tease apart different aspects of our results. This reveals how a community constructs place, the perspectives and horizons of actors, and networks of resilience. We find that participants achieve positive insight into these scenarios by testing out the ways in which they can be broken down by antagonists and adversaries. Participants sustain a space of contestation in which dissensus is established and anticipation of breakdown can be played with. Keywords: ontological design, autonomous design, ontological security, co-design, LEGO.

This article explores the fraught, shifting terrain of'community’ as lived out in 1970s Belfast. Applying Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structures of feeling,’ it explores ‘community’ consciousness that is rooted in affection, sensation, and knowledge. It then considers campaigns against redevelopment in west Belfast at this time, and the ways they were inspired and limited by the contemporary experience of ‘community.’ Based on fieldwork, oral histories, and archival resources, the discussion proposes that political action in divided societies is not reducible to sectarian geography. Rather, it advocates analysing the historically specific contours ofnuanced emotional allegiances and spatial associations that motivate and limit political action, and attention to how social content and place figure in conceptions of collectivity.

The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia has been unfolding over a long period, influencing the politics and conflicts in the Middle East. The dynamics, content, and form of the rivalry have changed dramatically following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Sectarianism is frequently seen as the constitutive element of the conflict between the two countries. This paper brings a new light into the literature on the nature of the evolving Saudi–Iran rivalry. Specifically, it explains Saudi Arabia’s ideational balancing and threat perception against Iran by highlighting the ontological security narratives under which the Saudi–Iran rivalry evolves. In doing so, it draws on the fatwas (i.e., religious opinions), issued by Saudi scholars, as an empirical object of investigation, and explores how they constitute and reconstitute Saudi Arabia’s ontological security narratives. In this way, this work critically explains the ontological security regime in Saudi Arabia and the nature of the political struggle and antagonism between the two countries.

Turkey’s domestic and foreign policy agendas have long been dominated by the state survival politics (‘Beka Meselesi’ in Turkish). This survival logic is so powerful as it gravitates around collective anxieties and their re-production since the beginning of the early Republican period, the separation of Turkey along ethnic lines being the most distressing. Building on this, this article makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that alternative interpretations have emerged regarding Turkey’s self-image under the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) rule. Specifically, the JDP elites re-imagined the country’s standing in world politics by drawing on the nostalgia for Ottoman grandeur. With this new self-image in mind, the JDP elites have critically engaged with the survival codes and priorities of the ‘Old’ Turkey by taking these notions as negative reference points in shaping the ‘New’ Turkey’s foreign policy direction. With this revised worldview and self-image, Turkey would finally reclaim its agenda-setter role in International Relations based on the historical, political, and sociocultural links with its imperial geography and beyond. Secondly, we argue that this shift from a more defensive survival-based approach towards a more offensive-interventionist imperial stance has two-fold dynamics. On the one hand, it has emerged in parallel to the changing nature of international order, that is, multipolarity and the rise of illiberalism. On the other hand, it has gained further momentum by the rising Turkish military-industrial complex that is closely linked with Turkey’s post-2016 realities. The article unpacks Turkey’s bid for neo-imperial standing in an evolving international order by drawing on the self-interrogative reflexivity approach in ontological security theory.

It has long been argued that identity matters in international relations. Yet how identity impacts enmity and conflict among states remains the subject of debate. The existing literature asserts that differences in identity can be a source of conflict, whereas convergence and similarity lead to cooperation. Nevertheless, empirical evidence from the Middle East has long defied this hypothesis. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which prides itself on being an Islamic model and claims Islamic leadership, has opposed the rise to power of Islamist movements in the Middle East. To address this paradox, this article builds on the growing literature on ontological security to propose a theoretical framework explaining how similarity can generate anxiety and identity risks. This framework, I argue, moves beyond traditional regime security approaches to reveal that security is not only physical but also ontological. I then illustrate the argument through a comparison of Saudi identity risks in the wake of the Iranian revolution (1979) and the ascendance of the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt (2012). Ultimately, these cases provide intriguing insights into foreign policy behavior during critical situations.

Globally, hip fractures in elderly individuals are a prevalent and serious issue. Patients typically have a longer length of stay (LOS), which increases the risk of complications and increases hospitalization costs. Hemoglobin (Hb) is a routine blood test that is associated with disease prognosis. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between preoperative Hb and LOS in elderly hip fracture patients and to determine a reliable transfusion threshold. The clinical data of hip fracture patients (aged ≥ 60 years) admitted to the Department of Orthopaedics, Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital, between January 2012 and December 2021 were retrospectively analyzed. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to assess the linear relationship between preoperative Hb and LOS. Smooth curve fitting was performed to investigate potential nonlinear relationships. In the case of discovering nonlinear relationships, a weighted two-piecewise linear regression model was built, and the inflection points were determined using a recursive algorithm. Subgroup analyses were conducted based on age and gender. A total of 1444 patients with an average age of (77.54 ± 8.73) years were enrolled. After adjusting for covariates, a nonlinear relationship was found between preoperative Hb and LOS. The two-piecewise linear regression model revealed an inflection point of 10 g/dL. On the left of the inflection point (Hb < 10 g/dL), the LOS was reduced by 0.735 days for every 1 g/dL increase in Hb (β = ‐0.735, 95% confidence interval: ‐1.346 to ‐0.124, P = .019). On the right side of the inflection point (Hb > 10 g/dL), the relationship was not statistically significant (β = 0.001, 95% confidence interval: ‐0.293 to 0.296, P = .992). In elderly hip fracture patients, there is a nonlinear association between preoperative Hb and LOS. However, when Hb levels were <10 g/dL, there was a negative correlation with the LOS. No correlation was observed when Hb levels were >10 g/dL. These findings underscore the importance of timely intervention to manage Hb levels in elderly patients with hip fractures, potentially reducing hospitalization durations and associated complications.

This article examines how home states define and redefine membership within ‘their’ diaspora and how certain groups and individuals are excluded from this conception through discourse, policy and practice. We argue that ontological security, or the state’s need for a stable sense of identity, coherence and continuity, involves a consistent narrative about belonging that is directed at emigrants and their descendants and shapes how states interact with ‘their’ diasporas. The theoretical literature typically portrayed diaspora engagement in positive and inclusionary terms. Recently, however, scholars have argued that diaspora engagement may also have negative and exclusionary dimensions in the form of marginalisation, securitisation and persecution of specific groups and individuals abroad, as well as the cooptation of other groups. Such practices are likely in the context of divided societies, mirroring domestic modes of exclusion. Our comparative study of Israel and Turkey reveals such exclusionary dynamics based on ethnicity, religion and political inclination, which not only characterise both countries’ domestic contexts but also extend to their overseas populations. Our findings suggest that in divided states, where identity struggles and uneven citizenship shape politics and society, diaspora policies claiming to tie emigrants and co-ethnics to the homeland may never achieve full inclusion.