Decentering the Self, Seeing Like the Other: Toward a Postcolonial Approach to Ontological Security

Abstract

AbstractThis article advances a critical outlook on dominant interpretations of ontological security in international relations. It suggests that the preoccupation with state- and identity-centric analyses diminishes the value of the Other to an archetype of ontological insecurity and a source of ontological insecurity for the Self. It argues that seeing ontological security from the postcolonial perspective expands the self-referential understanding of ontological security to a Self-Other relation of mutual coexistence. To do so, the article proposes a framework that loosely intersects Giddens’ work on late modernity with postcolonial notions of interstitiality and hybridity. Postcolonial ontological security foregrounds the emergence of a “third hybrid Other” from an ontologically insecure status through three interrelated conditions of reflexivity, resourcefulness, and resistance. It aims to shed light on creative, nondestructive ways of confronting ontological insecurity and to encourage a view of the postcolonial Other as a learning source for the Self. These arguments are illustrated with the case of Okinawan “Otherness” vis-à-vis the US and Japanese selves, with particular attention to antimilitary base movements.