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

Abstract

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.

Anxiety, time, and agency

“…53 Although these meta-narratives differ regarding the relative openness of the future, they all picture the world on a path through time and invite us to travel along and to optimize our standing on it. As Hom and Steele 54 point out, such narratives are often located in the international realm.…”

Nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide: inescapable dread in the 2020s

“…While I have focused in this response on the US’s handling of anxiety, I agree with Rumelili that ‘anxiety has a continuous effect on international relations as a constitutive condition’ (see also Rumelili 2020 ). This is, in her view (and in my own work with Andy Hom—see Hom and Steele 2020 ), a deeper condition than the ordering principle of anarchy (or hierarchy, or heteronomy, or something else). As a result, it can explain ‘the power competition in the state of nature, can be ultimately traced to the human desire to know and shape the—ultimately unknowable—future in Hobbesian thought’ (Rumelili keynote).…”

Internationalizing Afghan security? Strategic narratives and transnational public sphere (dis)formation in Chinese, Russian, Afghani, and US media

“…According to Miskimmon et al (2014), narratives play a central role in organizing and defining not only specific policies and national identities, but also the means by which the international system is structured and made sense of. As research into ontological security studies argues, these narratives come to constitutively form the “international” as a system, society, and community beyond just individual national identities (Hinck et al, 2022; Hom & Steele, 2020).…”