Summary of *SOME* the reading materials for the final exam (2023) for Security Challenges in a
Globalizing World. INCLUDES notes from (Total: 25 pages):
● Catarina Kinnvall & Jennifer Mitzen’s article (2020) “Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world
politics: thinking with and beyond Giddens”.
● Christopher S. Browning’s article (2018) “Brexit, existential anxiety and ontological (in)security”.
● Chris Rossdale’s article (2015) “Enclosing Critique: The Limits of Ontological Security”.
● Ben Rich’s letter (2021) “Political extremism, conflict identities and the search for ontological security
in contemporary established democracies”.
● John Cash’s article (2022) “Anxiety, Ambivalence and Sublimation: ontological in/security and the
world risk society”.
● Adam B. Lerner’s article (2023) “Global injustice and the production of ontological insecurity”.
● Andrew S. Rosenberg’s article (2024) “Race and systemic crises in international politics: An agenda for
pluralistic scholarship”.
● Christopher S. Browning’s article (2013) “Nation Branding, National Self-Esteem, and the Constitution
of Subjectivity in Late Modernity”.
Security Challenges in a Globalizing World Notes on *SOME*
Readings
Table of Contents
“Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world politics: thinking with and beyond Giddens” 1
“Brexit, existential anxiety and ontological (in)security” 5
“Enclosing Critique: The Limits of Ontological Security” 7
“Political extremism, conflict identities and the search for ontological security in contemporary
established democracies” 10
“Anxiety, Ambivalence and Sublimation: ontological in/security and the world risk society” 12
“Global injustice and the production of ontological insecurity” 15
“Race and systemic crises in international politics: An agenda for pluralistic scholarship” 19
“Nation Branding, National Self-Esteem, and the Constitution of Subjectivity in Late Modernity” 22
, 1
“Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world politics: thinking with
and beyond Giddens”
Ontological Security: A conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the
management of anxiety in self-constitution.
➔ Need for cognitive consistency & biographical continuity (security of ‘being’).
➔ Criticism = status quo bias: A perceived tilt toward theorising investment in the existing
social order.
Conventional IR talks about fear > anxiety.
➔ Fear: A basic emotion directed at a specified object that prompts an adaptive response: fight
or flight.
◆ Realist IR theory (implicitly) assumes that fear is the predominant emotion of
anarchy (Rathbun).
➔ It is difficult enough to theorise the processes through which individual emotions become
collective & political (Bleiker & Hutchison).
◆ HOWEVER, there is a widespread supposition across several social sciences that
anxiety & the emotions/behaviours it gives rise to have important social & political
effects.
➔ If anxiety has these different emotional & behavioural resolutions, then why does the
ontological security lens feel weighted toward theorising a conservative/realist world?
◆ Problem = rooted in the ontological security literature’s overreliance on Giddens.
The age of anxiety & the politics of fear
Anxiety: A sense or mood of unease, nervousness, or discomfort, associated with future uncertainty.
➔ ‘Age of Anxiety’: A period of generalised social unease, brought about by environmental
factors & existing on a collective scale.
➔ Anxiety is treated as a collective phenomenon & is important to world politics analysts
because of its political effects.
◆ Widely associated with the politics of fear (i.e., the manipulation & exploitation of
publics by leaders to secure political goals).
➔ Anxiety is prevalent in contemporary analyses, where the idea that anxious publics readily
become fearful publics. Linked to 3 effects:
1. Slide toward authoritarianism & police states (Rollo May).
a. Feeling as if they face constant existential threats might lead publics to
trade their own freedoms for the promise of absolute security.
b. The increasing legitimation of non-democratic forms of rule.
c. Several countries’ retrenchment from human rights commitments.
d. Non-democratic countries are becoming more repressive, BUT ALSO
democracies (e.g., Hungary, Poland, Serbia) are moving in that direction.
2. Feeling the precariousness of their condition might lead publics to be vulnerable to
scapegoating & Othering, with domestic & international effects.
● The state is called on to protect the fearful citizenry from the threat of these
internal and/or external others with:
, 2
○Investments in national security.
○Repressive political exclusions/policies aimed at protecting territorial
integrity.
○ Ethnic-separatism.
● A politics of fear leaves the public vulnerable to political repression &
conflict in the name of safety and security.
3. Risk Society: The conservative organisation of whole societies according to a logic of
fear. Their overall purpose is to provide the ‘comfort and reassurance’ of eradicating
fears while deterring the ‘risk’ of new thinking & experimentation.
● National & international security strategies, designed to identify, rank &
prioritise fears, aim explicitly to minimise exposure to risk & thus keep
populations safe.
Anxiety Fear
Similarities Both strongly aversive & uncomfortable affecting states that individuals tend to seek to
avoid or resolve.
Differences A diffuse, unpleasant & vague sense of Has a defined object & suggests a temporal
apprehension that exists prior to & urgency for responding (emergency mode
relatively independent of any given actual of decision-making).
threat object.
Makes it politically attractive.
Makes it trickier to manipulate.
Leaders can promise a total cure of
eradicating the known danger.
Politics of Fear Leaves the underlying anxiety entirely unattended → can make or maintain a profound
sense of ontological insecurity.
Ontological security & existential anxiety
Ontological security = focus on the relational constitution of the self in the context of anxiety.
➔ Social actors like to feel as if they are stable & continuous in time (sense of agency).
➔ Anxiety makes self-stability difficult to sustain.
◆ A sense that the future will be unlike the past in ways we can hardly conceive/control
plays into the tendency to seek security/safety daily.
◆ To feel ontologically secure (Giddens): To possess, on the level of the unconscious &
practical consciousness, ‘answers’ to fundamental existential questions which all
human life in some way addresses.
● Managing existential anxiety is at the heart of ontological security-seeking.
● Routines (Giddens): Practices that hold existential anxiety at bay (e.g.,
maintaining coherent autobiographical narratives).
◆ Psychoanalytic Perspective (Lacan): Ontological anxiety results from the split
between the inner world of the infant & the symbolic order that pre-exists it. This is
the anxiety associated with primary differentiation.
