scholarly journals Ontological Security and Public (Mis)Recognition of International Crises: Uncertainty, Political Imagining, and the Self

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 581-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry Chernobrov
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
International Crises

Self-Monitoring, US Presidents, and International Crises

2018 ◽  
pp. 67-102
Author(s):  
Keren Yarhi-Milo
Keyword(s):  
International Conflict ◽  
The Self ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Self Monitoring ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes

This chapter looks at original surveys of sixty-eight presidential historians on the president each had studied in depth. The historians’ survey suggests that American presidents exhibit variation in their self-monitoring dispositions. The chapter then leverages this variation to test statistically whether US presidents’ behavior during international crises is consistent with the expectations of the theory presented in this book. The self-monitoring disposition of a US president is a significant predictor of his likelihood of employing and initiating military instruments to demonstrate resolve during international conflict. Low self-monitor presidents not only engage in less militarized interstate disputes, but they are also significantly less likely to initiate such disputes, compared to high self-monitor presidents. The chapter also presents findings indicating that high self-monitor presidents are more likely to prevail in militarized interstate disputes compared to their low self-monitor counterparts.

‘This is not who we are’: Gendered bordering practices, ontological insecurity, and lines of continuity under the Trump presidency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Christine Agius
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Immigrant Children ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
The Us ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
Gender Lens ◽  
Policies And Practices

Abstract The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised a return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.

scholarly journals (Re-)imagining the ‘Self’ of Ontological Security: The Case of Brazil’s Ambivalent Postcolonial Subjectivity

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco A. Vieira
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Mirror Image ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
Postcolonial State ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Postcolonial States

In this article, I critically engage with and develop an alternative approach to ontological security informed by Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject. I argue that ontological security relates to a lack; that is, the always frustrated desire to provide meaningful discursive interpretations to one’s self. This lack is generative of anxiety which functions as the subject’s affective and necessary drive to a continuous, albeit elusive, pursuit of self-coherence. I theorise subjectivity in Lacanian terms as fantasised discursive articulations of the Self in relation to an idealised mirror-image other. The focus on postcolonial states’ subjectivity allows for the examination of the anxiety-driven lack generated by the ever-present desire to emulate but also resist the Western other. I propose, therefore, to explore the theoretical assertion that postcolonial ontological security refers to the institutionalisation and discursive articulation of enduring and anxiety-driven affective traces related to these states’ colonial pasts that are still active and influence current foreign policy practices. I illustrate the force of this interpretation of ontological security by focusing on Brazil as an example of a postcolonial state coping with the lack caused by its ambivalent/hybrid self-identity.

Drawing the discourses of ontological security: Immigration and identity in the Danish and Swedish cartoon crises

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Agius
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Security Concerns ◽  
Key Sites ◽  
Cartoon Crisis

The controversy of the Danish cartoon crisis in 2006 overshadowed a similar one that took place in Sweden a year later. The crises have broadly been framed as a clash of values but both cases reveal differences worthy of investigation, namely for the complex tensions and convergences between the two states on questions of immigration, Nordic solidarity and national identity. This article aims to explore the intersubjective discourses of identity that were threaded through the debates on the cartoon crises, looking to the overlapping discourses that have constructed ideas of identity in terms of ontological security, or security of the self. It argues that both cartoon crises represent a complex discursive performance of identity that speaks to a broader set of ontological security concerns which intersect at the international, regional and national levels. Even in their differences, Swedish and Danish discourses show the tensions associated with the desire for a stable and consistent idea of self when contrasted with the Muslim ‘other’, explored in the context of discourses of modernity and tolerance, which operate as key sites that work to reiterate, reclaim and reinstate the idea of the progressive state.

scholarly journals Becoming a strategist: The roles of strategy discourse and ontological security in managerial identity work

2020 ◽  
pp. 147612702090878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saku Mantere ◽  
Richard Whittington
Keyword(s):  
Identity Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Occupational Groups ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Emotional Basis ◽  
Opening Up

What is the managerial identity work involved in becoming a “strategist”? Building on a rich, longitudinal set of interviews, we uncover three tactics through which managers mobilize the strategist identity. The self-measurement tactic uses strategy discourse as a normative measuring stick for evaluating the individual as a manager. The self-construction tactic uses strategy discourse as a blueprint for realizing career aspirations. The final self-actualization tactic uses strategy discourse as an emotional basis for crafting meaning into work. We find that strategy discourse can play both disciplinary and emancipatory roles, influenced by managers’ sense of ontological security. The article highlights the importance of social-psychological processes in strategist identity work and discusses implications for the contemporary opening up of strategy and for other similarly loosely structured occupational groups.

Creativity, Establishment, and the Self

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-92
Author(s):  
Trever Hagen
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The Self ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
The Core ◽  
Music Making

This chapter outlines how acts of state oppression repressed environmental conditions that contradictorily enabled the expressive practice of “truth to self.” This repression heightened forms of collective awareness of an Underground “way of life” and points to how the politics of music-making is an emergent and embodied phenomenon. I trace how musicking came to be crafted within the Merry Ghetto, showing how practices (composing to lyrics, listening to records, playing with spirit, adapting poems as lyrics, writing and thinking about music) were linked to aesthetic phenomena (out-of-tune, rough and ragged sounds, sing-song recitation, heavy bass lines, screamed vocals, raw, unmusical sounds) that provided models, through contrast and comparison structures, for learning dispositions (how to feel and know “establishment,” “truth to self,” historical commitment, rejection) in the Merry Ghetto. This chapter considers some of the core building blocks of cultural ecologies by asking how music mediates knowledge production, commitment-making, and ontological security. I explore the “life sustaining” qualities of a habitat built through music that in fact have more to do with well-being, mental health, and protection than with protest and revolution. In short, it addresses music as a material of “cocooning,” as a form of protection.

Jimmy Carter and the Crises of the 1970s

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-171
Author(s):  
Keren Yarhi-Milo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Self Monitoring ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Primary Documents

This chapter examines Jimmy Carter and several of the international crises he faced during his presidency that many observers argue risked the United States' reputation for resolve. Unlike those of most of his predecessors or successors, Carter's discourse and policies seem to show that he was not motivated by projecting resolve for the sake of reassuring allies or intimidating adversaries. In fact, evidence from primary documents reveals that Carter's behavior during international crises corresponds closely to the reputation critic ideal-type. The chapter then reinforces the classification of Carter as a reputation critic using additional qualitative evidence in the form of Carter's personal diary and prepresidential speeches, memoirs written by his advisors, and other secondary literature. It also uses available biographical evidence to illuminate the self-monitoring tendencies of Carter's closest advisors: National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

scholarly journals Fit for purpose? Fitting ontological security studies ‘into’ the discipline of International Relations: Towards a vernacular turn

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Croft ◽  
Nick Vaughan-Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mutual Interest ◽  
Fit For Purpose

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.

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