This research examines the ways the hostile environment in the UK utilises domestic violence as a deterrent measure, weaponising this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as state violence. I frame this in the context of what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. The active exclusion of migrant women from these monitoring mechanisms embeds both an affective and a very real empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. This ontological insecurity is both inside and outside of state, making ontological security for some while unmaking it for others.

As social identities are not static but made, actors constantly invest in their public image, financially, institutionally, and aesthetically. This article examines and compares two vignettes of NATO’s public (visual) diplomacy and strategic communication. It shows the changing nature of the visual communication that NATO has applied to rationalise its military force and to fix its collective identity. In addition, the article illustrates that the changing visual communication of the alliance shapes and is shaped by its identity constructions and its quest for ontological security. For the vignette of a force comparison report from 1984, authored by the NATO Information Service, I argue that technical images are conditioning the sensible and possible by normalising the deployment of military force and disciplining anxieties about the self, deterrence, and defence. This look is based on spatial divisions, absent people, and relational objects. Compared to the vignette of NATO’s more recent social media campaign, #NATO2030, published in 2021, I argue that the latter reveals the progressive nature of the alliance by gaze to gender, diversity, and collective security. This shift from a deterrence-fixed to a human-faced episteme symbolises NATO’s ability to secure a stable self while adopting its public diplomacy.

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.

Leaders play a central role in world politics, and threat perception is a crucial element in the study and practice of International Relations (IR). Yet existing accounts of how leaders perceive threats are inadequate, drawing on an incomplete notion of leaders as (ir)rational information processors that pays no attention to the leader’s experience of danger as it unfolds in time and how such experience is structured. By integrating a framework developed by linguist Ray Jackendoff to describe the experience of language with the study of danger in International Relations, and by employing an interpretive textual analysis technique to danger descriptions made by world leaders embedded in different historical and cultural settings constructing different security dangers, I develop and illustrate the ‘danger framework’. In describing the unique features with which leaders experience security dangers, the danger framework theorises the qualia of danger experience and how it is organised into the conscious field of leaders. In doing so, the paper makes progress on three problems for existing accounts of threat perception in IR, illuminates important research puzzles, and provides the literature on experience and Ontological Security Studies (OSS) with micro-foundations.

The retreat of the modern liberal order in contemporary democracies can be understood as co-constituted with the normalisation of the far right. The far right has increasingly accessed the political ‘mainstream’ through the enabling of erstwhile-disavowing centre-right and right-wing counterparts. In contexts of political ‘victory’, the identity (re)formation of these mainstream right-wing subjects and discourses can be observed and analysed through celebrations alongside the far right and in emotions and attitudes like elation, gloating, and self-righteousness. In this article, I address how victory-related manifestations of enjoyment – or jouissance – are articulated in the discourses of mainstream right-wing subjects. I ask what enjoyment-based rhetoric reveal about the normalisation of the far right and the identity reformation of right-wing subjects and discourses. To address this, I first discuss the role of enjoyment on far-right normalisation by merging Derk Hook’s analytics of enjoyment (2017) with ontological security, expanding on the latter concept as a libidinal fantasy of ideological closure. Subsequently, analysing the case of the 2022 Swedish election, I explore three interrelated dimensions of co-(re)formation of right-wing enjoyment, discourses, and identities: the symbolic space where civilisational-securitising fantasies are produced; the threatening modes of enjoyment of cultural Others; and the imperilled enjoyment modes of the ‘real Swedes’.

This article makes a twofold contribution on the relationship between self/other securitisation, ambiguous threat constructions, and anxiety at the intersection of Securitisation Theory (ST) and Ontological Security Studies (OSS). First, we develop the concept topos of threat (TT) as a potent linguistic anchor in securitisation processes. TTs depict an entire self/other threat situation that warrants escape, serving identity needs while staying flexible and ambiguous. However, their frequent rhetorical deployment can blur the threat construction and increase anxiety: this challenges the classical scholarly assumption that antagonism necessarily alleviates anxiety. Second, we theorise metapolitics as an anxiety mediation strategy. Metapolitics is a mode of interpretation – a relentless analysis of surface clues to expose a deceptive, powerful adversary – which in the final event fails to alleviate anxiety. The dual practice of nurturing topoi of threat and metapolitics drives conflict because it sets in motion a vicious securitisation spiral that entrenches rigid patterns of self/other representation and fosters a bias of anticipating hostility. We employ abductive theorising: working with established theory alongside empirical discovery through a discourse analysis of Russia’s official rhetoric on NATO and the use of the TT ‘colour revolution’ since the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014.

How can we understand the audience agency and securitisation processes that can induce anxiety? The Copenhagen School of security studies conceptualises an audience as possessing political agency which is contingent on their capabilities to respond to securitising moves. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s approach to ontological security, we argue that there is another type of agency supplementing political agency. Ontological agency refers to exercising control over the stability and continuity of one’s everyday routines and practices to minimise disruption to these routines caused by securitisation. Because routines of day-to-day life are central to bracketing sources of anxiety, people may choose to overlook and not react to securitising moves designating threats and implementing emergency measures that can undermine ontological security. We illustrate the analytical purchase of ontological agency by using unstructured observations of South Korean people’s responses to military practices that securitise North Korea. Our observations reveal that there is latent anxiety regarding North Korea that manifests in varying degrees ranging from inaction when routines are not disrupted by securitisation to outward bursts of emotional reactions and breakdown when securitisation practices disrupt people’s basic routines. This raises implications about the importance of ontological security driving the success or failure of securitisation and the politics of existentialism.

Observers have noted that world politics is replete with shame. Whether they observe this concerning the apologies regarding past atrocities, the felt necessity for revenge after a humiliating defeat, the feelings that populist leaders find antithetical to the greatness of their nation, or the affective responses to the latter's election, shame seems to be ubiquitous. Vital to understanding the particular politics of this emotion is the concept of state shame. However, the origins, divergent effects, and social and moral roles of state shame are left obscure in International Relations (IR) scholarship, making the concept undertheorized and in need of further elaboration. The primary goal of this research is to (re)conceptualize state shame as a narrative on the social position of the state by building on insights developed by IR theory, sociology, and social psychology. Moreover, the article proposes four types of state shame narratives, namely situational shame, narcissistic shame, aggressive shame, and deferential shame, that can separately account for the divergent effects and social and moral roles that the emotion can be attributed with. These four types, and the politics that characterize them, aim to capture and explain lived practices and meanings that state shame can come to hold.

This paper makes the case for a discursive understanding of ontological security and demonstrates the utility of such an approach in an analysis of European Parliament (EP) debates between 1990 and 2020. We argue that articulations of ontological (in)security operate through the (re)inscription of a set of metanarratives in what we call ‘discursive nodal points’. Building on an extensive analysis of EP debates over 30 years, we demonstrate that in contrast to the prevailing view of the European Union (EU) as an ‘anxious community’, at least on the political level, EU actors remain surprisingly confident in the European project. While they do invoke challenges to the EU, they see these as incentives to strengthen the integration project and often consider operating in crisis mode as an essential EU characteristic. In doing so, they draw on modernist metanarratives of progress, control, and power to construct an ontologically secure EU. We argue that the future ontological security of the EU will partly depend on allowing for more ambiguity in this modernist narrative without accepting a nationalist counter-narrative that undermines the idea of European integration.

Germany’s content moderation law—NetzDG— is often the target of criticism in English-language scholarship as antithetical to Western notions of free speech and the First Amendment. The purpose of this Article is to encourage those engaged in the analysis of transatlantic content moderation schemes to consider how Germany’s self-ideation influences policy decisions. By considering what international relations scholars term ontological security, Germany’s aggressive forays into the content moderation space are better understood as an externalization of Germany’s ideation of itself, which rests upon an absolutist domestic moral and constitutional hierarchy based on the primacy of human dignity. Ultimately, this Article implores American scholars and lawmakers to consider the impact of this subconscious ideation when engaging with Germany and the European Union in an increasingly multi-polar cyberspace.

International Relations (IR) scholarship on ontological (in)security has explored how political agents seek to shape collective identity through the contestation and securitisation of memory narratives around controversial historical events. This article contributes a novel approach for understanding how actors promote emotional engagement with such narratives, synthesising nascent scholarship on vicarious identity and military subjectivity to develop the concept of ‘militarised vicarious identity promotion’. I use this framework to analyse how national custodian, the Royal British Legion, used the British 2014–18 First World War (WW1) centenary to promote affectively resonant revisionism around a war with difficult resonances in Britain by encouraging subjects to ‘live through’ others. Its ‘LIVE ON’ and ‘Every One Remembered’ initiatives first countered the centenary’s potential to destabilise homogenised militarist narratives underpinning national ontological security by rehabilitating WW1 through vicarious frames blurring different military subjectivities together in ways designed to reincorporate WW1 into homogenised remembrance discourses. Second, Britons were encouraged to integrate the nation’s military history into their personal biographies by vicariously identifying with ancestral and adoptive WW1 connections. Through enabling feelings of pride and status assuaging civilian anxiety, ‘vicarious military subjectivity’ based on family connections provided emotional reinforcement for identification with simplistic WW1 revisionism and homogenised British militarism more broadly.

International relations theory tends to build on the conventional narrative of the Wars of Religion (WoR), which holds it was the irrationality of religious violence that generated the modern international system of pragmatic secular states—resulting in the presumed secularized, rational, and unemotive nature of politics. In contrast, this article reorients our focus to Durkheim's more social view of religion as a community of believers and to the continued role of the sacred and shared emotion/affect in social and political life. Specifically, it examines how modern communities (such as nations) remain constituted by a shared faith in conceptions of the sacred and how the corresponding sense of moral order is central to the enduring pursuit of ontological security. Therefore, it argues that international relations should focus on the perennial struggles over what communities hold sacred and that we can better understand the propensity for (“religious” or “secular”) violence by examining the continual interplay between the sacred, ontological security, and the hermeneutics of morality—with the so-called WoR being the locus classicus of this argument. Historical studies exploring how participants in the WoR navigated such struggles over the sacred thus allow us to explore these dynamics and further conceptualize our understanding of the sacred within modern “secular” politics. The article concludes by examining how the prospect for violence is interrelated with the perennial struggles over the sacred within, and between, political orders—a sentiment that brings into relief some of the hazards accompanying growing intrastate moral polarization and interstate ideological rivalry.

The traditional Laing–Giddens paradigm views ontological insecurity as an unusual mental state triggered by critical situations and characterized by feelings of anxiety, disorientation and paralysis. However, theories inspired by Lacan suggest a different perspective, stating that ontological insecurity is not an exception but rather a regular state of mind. Similarly, ontological security is a fantasy stemming from the desire to fill the primordial lack, thus fuelling agency. While these Lacanian interpretations have introduced a fresh viewpoint into Ontological Security Studies (OSS), they have not fully incorporated one of the key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis – the object-cause of desire (French: objet petit a) – into international relations theory. In this article, we present a framework of how to conceptualize and empirically study the objects-cause of desire in world politics. Our arguments are exemplified in a case study of Serbia's resistance to Kosovo's UNESCO membership in 2015.

The role of performance in ontological security seeking is underdeveloped, despite the fact that many elements of such behaviour – narratives, rituals, routinised meetings – carry a distinctive performative quality. Drawing on Butlerian performance theory, this article makes the case that performances are essential to re-establishing coherence and a sense of self following ontologically critical situations. The reproduction of the self, especially while directly addressing fundamental existential questions, is an important way to overcome critical situations. At the state level, this reproduction of self also includes a reproduction of the international system, a task which is best enacted in everyday diplomatic practice. To explore this theory, I use Brexit as an illustrative case study. Brexit was a moment of profound crisis for the United Kingdom (UK) and an ontologically critical situation. It forced the UK to reposition itself on the world stage and confront significant challenges to its self-understanding. In Westminster, these efforts centred on ‘Global Britain’ – a narrative shift that bridged the identity gap and provided a thin framework for foreign policy. At the same time, British diplomats were tasked with international realignment post-Brexit. In this way, everyday diplomatic practice became Brexit performances.

This paper contributes to this special issue by examining the existentialist themes re-emerging in Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and does so by proposing an under-explored and overlapping terrain regarding the function of myths and ontological security. What Blumenberg calls the ‘absolutism of reality’ becomes something to avoid through the process of telling, retelling, and adapting myths to suit our existential needs. The paper distinguishes our existentialist intervention into OSS from recent ones within that research community and then draws examples of the work on and of myth from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Speaking to the need for OSS to develop an ethical-political perspective to not only explain but also change the world, the account we develop here also provides a pathway for an alternative politics based in counter-myth. It discloses, therefore, a promising and, in the face of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic forces, necessary moral ethos regarding prescriptive ideas about what to do and how to confront and and counter the mounting challenges of global politics in the 2020s and beyond.

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.

While ontological security (OS) studies have gone through a recent evolution, shifting toward psychoanalytic and existential accounts of anxiety, this article argues there remains a deficient engagement with the affective environments within which actors operate. Specifically, focusing on shared emotions/affect allows for a thicker account of the mechanisms of OS – including the constitutive forces underpinning society/societal trust, the role/power of signifiers and narratives, and the basis upon which actors promote social change. Accordingly, it suggests Durkheim's social theory, his broader concept of ‘religion’ as an affective community constituted by faith in a moral order entwined with the sacred, offers a viable pathway to develop these insights and develop a new basis for the mechanisms of OS. The drive for OS thus becomes reconfigured as an effort to act faithfully toward a dynamic moral order, while ontological insecurity emerges from the unbearable lightness of being experienced within moral disorder. Following Durkheim's preliminary argument on nationalism representing the continuation of religion, we can then revise how/why nations are integral to OS and International Relations. Specifically, we can view foreign policy as informed by debates around how to act faithfully toward the moral order – a process interrelated with revitalization and renewal of the sacred.

This article will examine the response of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) to the COVID-19 pandemic from an ontological security approach to illustrate how critical junctures may help de facto states in their quest for status and internal legitimacy. Stressing the pandemic’s role in the reconstruction of political narratives and self-legitimating practices among Turkish Cypriot elites, it sheds light on the effects of this global crisis on domestic power struggles in Northern Cyprus as well as its quasi-foreign relations with its patron state (Turkey), parent state (Republic of Cyprus), and the European Union. The study shows that both nationalist and federalist elites of the de facto entity instrumentalized the pandemic in their legitimation strategies and engaged in opportunistic behavior amid the outbreak. It also reveals how the pandemic enhanced the ontological security of Northern Cyprus while advancing its nationalist leadership’s claims for legitimate authority by enabling state-specific forms of agency and unilateral acts concerning the Cyprus dispute that may jeopardize the resumption of peace talks with Greek Cypriots. Thus, it can be assumed that advanced ontological security of the TRNC is highly volatile given the prospects of further isolation and de-engagement in the post-pandemic era.