Anxiety, time, and agency

In this article, we begin to extend ontological security to third-image theorizing. We argue that the autobiographical conceptions of international agents, along with other stories told about international politics, constitute ‘the international’ as a system, society, community, or inhabitable realm beyond and between first- and second-image relations. To develop this point, we focus on the relationship between narrative, anxiety, and time. We contend that ontological security issues resound in the third image once we shift from treating the international realm as social agents' external environment to treating it as a collective project in its own right. Doing so highlights the promise of ontological security studies for further differentiating international fear and anxiety, for enabling novel explanations of international phenomena, and for elaborating third-image identity formation as a wide-ranging timing effort to surmount a dynamic, processual environment full of interconnected coordination challenges.

supporting

confidence: 63%

“… 21 Ibid., 60. Berenskoetter 2020 similarly refers to routines as ‘locking the [Self] into … the “ longue duree ” of institutional time’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Anxiety, time, and ontological security's third-image potential

Hom

Steele

2020

“… 17 My proposal is very different not only from Berenskoetter 2020 and Hom and Steele 2020 in this Symposium but also from most of the IR literature on the topic of time and temporality.…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

“… 29 Berenskoetter 2020 and I agree that in certain respects it would be better conceptually to speak of becoming rather than being .…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Securityquaexistential surviving (while becoming otherwise) through performative leaps of faith

Arfi

2020

This paper analyzes the idea of ‘ontological security’ to make three arguments: (a) that to be secure in one's being is paradoxical in the sense that to be is to survive while always becoming otherwise, (b) that to survive is to be anxious, and (c) that to get attached to such a security of one's always becoming otherwise is to engage in performative leaps of faith in the security of one's existence. This framework is used to suggest a new interpretation of the security dilemma.

“…For example, Solomon 2015Solomon , 2017aChernobrov 2016;Kinnvall 2018;Mitzen 2018. 55 Tillich 2014, 37 (quoted in Browning 2018. Berenskoetter (2020) argues that while focusing on anxiety widens the range of behaviors that ontological security scholarship can address, that focus alone does not necessarily permit account of radical agency. This is because extant work focuses on one dominant aspect of what he calls the anxiety paradox, the fleeing from freedom's possibilities.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Anxiety, fear, and ontological security in world politics: thinking with and beyond Giddens

Kinnvall¹,

Mitzen

2020

Research on ontological security in world politics has mushroomed since the early 2000s but seems to have reached an impasse. Ontological security is a conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the management of anxiety in self-constitution. Building especially on Giddens, IR scholars have emphasized how this translates to a need for cognitive consistency and biographical continuity – a security of ‘being.’ A criticism has been its so-called ‘status quo bias,’ a perceived tilt toward theorizing investment in the existing social order. To some, an ontological security lens both offers social theoretic foundations for a realist worldview and lacks resources to conceptualize alternatives. We disagree. Through this symposium, we address that critique and suggest pathways forward by focusing on the thematic of anxiety. Distinguishing between anxiety and fear, we note that anxiety manifests in different emotions and leaves room for a range of political possibilities. Early ontological security scholarship relied heavily on readings of Giddens, which potentially accounts for its bias. This symposium re-opens the question of the relationship between anxiety and subjectivity from the perspective of ontological security, thinking with and beyond Giddens. Three contributions re-think anxiety in ontological security drawing on existentialist philosophy; two address limitations of Giddens' approach.