Instrumentalization of Chaos: Habit and Crisis Routine for Constructing (in)security in Iraq

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.

India is a rapidly growing democratic naval power. Moreover, its features such as the strong and fast-growing economy, newest military technologies and nuclear weapon make a big impression. Considering the other major powers, it seems that the world is becoming multipolar where India could have a significant role and become one of the major poles. It has been a subject for discussions among journalists and academics for a log time. On the other hand, there are a lot of discussions about India’s “friendly and mild” foreign policy; also, it is sometimes named the non-ambitious passive player in the international arena. The optimism with doubts: the paradoxical situation composed of the history of the impressive imperial civilization, modern-day economic growth, huge progress in technologies versus the major internal problems and “soft” state image. Here emerges the problem: why India’s foreign policy, despite its power growth, is still passive/neutral on the international arena? The hypotheses to answering this question are: 1. India’s role and status are restricted by its lack of power. 2. India’s role on the international arena is restricted by its ideological and neutrality traditions, which provide ontological security to India. The aim of this article is to ascertain and explore India’s status (regional or global) and to ascertain India’s role (self-identification) on the international arena by using the ontological security theory.The theoretical background of this essay is ontological security theory which ten years ago was absorbed from sociology and is quite new in the international relations and security studies. Its main arguments are: ontological security is the security of being; in addition to physical security, states also seek ontological security (security of the self); ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, after all players become attached to those relationships, even if they are dangerous to their physical security. This theory is strongly bound with the identity that India always gives the self culture prominence in its discourse and its friendly discourse in the Ministry of Defence annual reports. This is the reason why the ontological security theory was chosen to help understand and explain India’s foreign policy. First, links between ontological and traditional security are discussed in the first part of this work. There is a broad analysis of the assumptions of the ontological security theory in the same paragraph. Second, there is a short criticism of the ontological security. Finally, the ontological security theory as the India’s foreign policy explanation tool is discussed; the discourse analysis is introduced as a methodological instrument of the work, and the model of analysis of the second part of the work, is defined. The second part of the work contains the content analysis of experts’ articles and official documents of India’s Foreign Ministry, using the model defined in the previous part and ontological security for the results’ explanation.The analysis made in the second part of the work has shown that the ontological security theory is able to explain India’s foreign policy and does it. The first hypothesis (India’s role and status are restricted by its lack of power) was denied. This means that India can be a major global power. The second hypothesis (India’s role in the international arena is restricted by its ideological and neutrality traditions, which provide ontological security to India) was approved. Strictly, it means that India does not want to be a major power because of it self-identity and ontological security. India does not expose itself as a major power but thinks that is worth to be such. On the other hand, if India has absorbed the international politics routine form the British Empire, this could mean that India’s identity is to be a global power, but it does not want to publicise it yet.The study has shown that it is hard to regard India in the international community as a major power without special observation or using just the realism theory tools. Consequently, the ontological security theory has shown that it has the tools that can be used in countries’ foreign policy explanation.

Recent advancements in ontological security (OS) derived from Lacan’s psychoanalysis rethink the concept in terms of the subject’s desire for completeness through attempting stabilised and fixed identities. This approach can offer a novel way to examine the rise of political homophobia where power works pervasively. However, the current conceptualisations of ontological (in)security are not theoretically equipped to unpack and examine such violent politics. This is mainly because ontological (in)security has yet to grapple with the concept of power. This article will address this gap and rethink Lacanian ontological (in)security as a framework for critical power analysis. It equips it with two theoretical moves: Queer studies, which advances the understanding of ‘the other’ and ‘othering’, and emotions research, which demonstrates how emotions work in othering, in International Relations. These two theoretical moves enable the framework to examine how emotions do political work to (re)produce binaries such as subject and object, ‘self’ and ‘other’, and ‘normal’ and ‘perverse’ in the subject production process in heteronormative ‘regimes of normal’. Consequently, Lacanian ontological (in)security can help us understand how and why a gendered and sexualised politics is normalised. The argument will be illustrated through analysis of emotional representations of LGBTQI+ communities in the state-level political discourse in Turkey.

This article widens and deepens the notion of ontological security and therefore both the scope of ontological security studies (OSS) within the discipline of international relations (IR) and ontological security theory (OST) writ large by introducing and explaining the implications of (re/dis)embodiment—the continually contested social–political process through which bodies come to be or not be and upon which everybody existentially and ontologically depends. Understood as both a source of and a threat to individual and collective bodies’ ontological security, in this article I explain how taking the process of (re/dis)embodiment into account entails widening and deepening OSS to allow for the consideration and appreciation of how individual and collective bodies are continually, simultaneously, materially, and ideationally contested. As a primarily theoretical contribution, this is done through an interdisciplinary approach bringing Achille Mbembe's necropolitical theory into conversation with Sara Ahmed's theses on willfulness and use and is illustrated through discussions on the body politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, I argue that, under conditions of contemporary global necropolitics, individuals’ ontological security as bodies becomes increasingly threatened according to raced, classed, and gendered local–global hierarchies which determine the reduction and use of individuals to the status of parts within collectives that are themselves embodied and increasingly unfit for the purpose of healthy living, especially in a time of pandemic.

Ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations (IR) emphasize the role of identity, anxiety, and a sense of self in world politics. Yet suggesting that states act in certain ways because of ‘who they are’ also assumes that they are in fact states. In this article, I problematize the presupposition of state subjects in the context of separatist conflicts in which claims to statehood compete and overlap. Where unrecognized de facto states are pitted against their unyielding parent states, the two threaten each other’s very state personhood, thereby presenting a more radical challenge to their existence than traditional ‘physical’ and ‘ontological’ security threats. Separatist conflicts thus reveal a widely overlooked dimension of fundamental ontological security, provided by the constitution and recognition of states as such. Moreover, because of the exclusiveness of state subjects in the modern international order, any third parties attempting to resolve such conflicts inevitably face a meta-security dilemma whereby reassuring one side by confirming its claim to statehood simultaneously renders the other side radically insecure. Thus, rather than regarding particular state subjects as merely the starting point of quests for ontological security in international relations, they should also be understood as already their result.

What does it mean to search for trust—the constitutive element of feeling ontologically secure—in the context of protracted conflict, trauma, and forced migration? This article addresses this key question in ontological security (OS) studies in International Relations (IR) by analyzing an unrecognized consequence of the Israeli‐Lebanese conflict: a Lebanese community of forced migrants created overnight on Israeli premises due to Israel's unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. Relying on 60 in‐depth interviews with Lebanese migrants in Israel, the article demonstrates how forced migrants engage in various OS‐seeking strategies in relentless efforts to reconstitute trust. These strategies range from self‐justification and securitizing identity through religious and communal practices, to a search for recognition from statist institutions and boundary‐work vis‐à‐vis “sibling” disempowered “others” in the host state. However, the article shows how under political circumstances of protracted conflict and repeated perceived betrayal by the state, forced migrants are unable to reconstitute the routinized relations of trust on which OS is based. By exposing the particularistic, dynamic, and highly political character of the migrants' quest for trust, the article sheds new light on the political psychology of an “old” conflict and on the multiple meanings of ontological (in)security in migration.

What role do national icons play in a political community’s drive for ontological security? And what implications does this have for global politics? This article situates national icons in service of state ontological security. Icons both unify and divide political communities; therefore they serve, but also disrupt, ontological security-seeking of collectives. Building on research on ontological security and status in International Relations, we examine two case studies of national icons – Vesna Vulović, the celebrated Serbian flight attendant who miraculously survived a major plane crash, and Muhammad Ali, the American boxing legend. Both Vulović and Ali initially generated, and then countered, ontological security for their national communities as they transformed from popular culture celebrities into anti-regime political activists. We conclude the article by discussing opportunities for future avenues of research on icons and the politics of identity going forward.

This article utilizes van Gennep's neglected theory of territorial passages to answer two key questions in the study of ontological security (OS) in migration. First, why do the members of the receiving society lose their perceived sense of OS in face of a mass of strangers arriving at their gates? Second, how, if at all, do they attempt to reconstitute it while incorporating the strangers into their world? Following the recent call within OS studies in international relations (IR) to spell out the social mechanisms that facilitate the anxiety and uncertainty of the agents, I use the case of the German societal response to the 2015 refugee crisis to demonstrate that van Gennep's classical approach, far from being structural and functionalist, offers an advanced, power-informed, and processual perspective for uncovering a possible sociosymbolic mechanism behind the perceived “losing” and “re-finding” of OS in migratory encounters. The article delineates the principles of a “thick” approach to OS in migration, explains how van Gennep's theory adds to this approach, and highlights the ultimate unattainability of OS as an essentialist category that is either “present” or “absent” throughout the migratory encounter. It concludes by discussing the added value of van Gennep's theory to the study of OS in the contemporary global milieu of the “age of migration.”

How do state leaders utilise a national ritual to remedy their sense of ontological insecurity, especially when there is a sudden need to recalibrate foreign policy? Despite the growing prominence of the ontological security approach in International Relations (IR), there is a notable lack of discussion on the relationship between ontological security, ritual, and narrative, particularly in empirical studies. Building on the ‘ritual-approach literature’ in IR, this paper argues that national celebration, ceremony, and festival are the performative rituals that mirror the state’s ontological security and insecurity. This paper substantiates the argument by examining the case of Thailand’s United Nations Celebration Day at the dawn of the Cold War. During the Second World War, Thailand allied with the Axis powers before narrowly escaping harsh punishments after the end of the war to cement strong ties with the US and the victor powers. To demonstrate that the Thai nation became one with the United Nations’ peaceful cause, the Thai government organised the United Nations Celebration Day to inform the world of its pacifistic intent and to reconstruct the new foreign policy narrative.

In this brief essay, I explore the relationship between ‘states’ (or more broadly, institutions of political authority) and ontological security. Drawing from historical examples, I argue that it is a mistake to assume that all ‘states’ seek ontological security: this generalisation applies only to those polities that claim to be the main ontological security providers. I then develop a typology of institutional ontological security provision arrangements as have existed throughout history, arguing that another reason the concept of ontological security is valuable for international relations (IR) is because it offers a way to compare systems across time and space without assuming the primacy of politics or religion. In summary, IR does not have to limit its use of the concept of ontological security to a synonym for ‘state identity’ – ontological security can offer much more than that by helping the discipline reach across time and space.

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

Security discussions of the Taliban’s second takeover of Afghanistan center on physical security threats, neglecting the ontological aspect related to how security entails the metaphysics of life—being, feeling alive, or having a sense of self. This article examines this ontological threat to the Afghan people to complement the security discussion and open up more avenues of dialog. I use ontological security to explain the Afghans’ behavior toward the Taliban takeover and ask how does the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan pose a security threat to urban Afghans? Why are urbanite Afghans paranoiac about the Taliban presence to the extent that some choose to die by falling from a moving aircraft? I use the ontological security analytical framework and discursive approach to finding answers. I argue that the Taliban takeover creates ontological insecurity that threatens urban Afghans’ sense of ordinary living or being in the world. Specifically, ontological insecurity creates significant and chronic uncertainties and dangers to Afghans. This is especially so regarding the urbanites with higher socioeconomic status, whose being in the world is threatened as their ordinary living conditions are likely to be contested by the Taliban. The contest is asymmetric, favoring the Taliban. Such uncertainty of existential conditions leads to mistrust of Urban Afghans’ basic sense of safety and a misrecognition of their true identity. Thus, their actions and behaviors have been consequent attempts to respond to the anxieties and risks to their existential position. This work contributes to the ontological security literature, helping fill the gap in the security discussions in international relations and serves policy relevance.

Despite continuing to be a strong tendency in international relations today, “state revisionism” has been theoretically and empirically understudied. This article attempts to fill the lacuna by further conceptualizing revisionism and subsequently investigating its relationship with ontological (in)security through studying the ways in which revisionist states envision their identities and interests and take measures to secure them. It argues that revisionists define their relationship with outside “Others” primarily in terms of dissatisfaction and self-extending change and thus find themselves operating within an enmity-centric “Hobbesian culture of anarchy,” which may ironically serve as a source of ontological security due to the consequent “singularity” status it confers upon them. By opposing the prevailing status quo, however, revisionists are likely to subject themselves to a “geopolitics of exclusion,” which in turn helps render them more prone to feelings of ontological insecurity. To instantiate the theory, I focus on Iran and its nuclear behavior, contending that it represents a case of “thin revisionism” aimed at attaining ontological security, but which also entails undesirable consequences that generate ontological insecurity. The case furthermore reveals the limits of seeking ontological security, suggesting that the degree of revisionism is usually checked by existential fears of threat to survival.

The performance of International Relations (IR) scholarship – as in all scholarship – acts to close and police the boundaries of the discipline in ways that reflect power–knowledge relations. This has led to the development of two strands of work in ontological security studies in IR, which divide on questions of ontological choice and the nature of the deployment of the concept of dread. Neither strand is intellectually superior to the other and both are internally heterogeneous. That there are two strands, however, is the product of the performance of IR scholarship, and the two strands themselves perform distinct roles. One allows ontological security studies to engage with the ‘mainstream’ in IR; the other allows ‘international’ elements of ontological security to engage with the social sciences more generally. Ironically, both can be read as symptoms of the discipline’s issues with its own ontological (in)security. We reflect on these intellectual dynamics and their implications and prompt a new departure by connecting ontological security studies in IR with the emerging interdisciplinary fields of the ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ via the mutual interest in biographical narratives of the self and the work that they do politically.

This paper builds upon previous work that has sought to use ontological security to understand problematic and violent state practices, and how they relate to the securitizing of identity. Yet like much (although not all) work which has utilized it in International Relations theory, the application of ontological security theory (OST) to state ‘drives’ has provided only a superficial unpacking of ‘the state’. Further, while OST scholars have examined environmental or background conditions of ‘late modernity’, and how these conditions facilitate anxiety and uncertainty for agents, the content of such factors can be further explicated by placing OST in conversation with one particular systemic account. Alongside ‘the state’ and ‘late modernity’, the paper therefore explores several complementary sites shaping the ontological security seeking process of, within and around states. The paper reads the 2000s re-embrace of torture by the United States by examining ontological security alongside: (1) the structural level via Laura Sjoberg’s ‘gender–hierarchical’ argument; (2) the routinized organizational processes (via Graham Allison) of the US intelligence community and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency; and (3) the narrated interplay between public opinion and elite discourses.