Ontological security refers to the security of being rather than of survival. The concept was developed in sociology by R.D. Laing and elaborated by Anthony Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), where it describes the confidence individuals maintain in the continuity of their self-identity and the constancy of their social environment. International Relations scholars imported the term in the 2000s to explain state behaviour that seems irrational from a purely materialist standpoint.
Key IR contributions include Jennifer Mitzen's "Ontological Security in World Politics" (European Journal of International Relations, 2006), Brent Steele's Ontological Security in International Relations (2008), and work by Ayşe Zarakol on stigmatised states. These authors argue that states pursue biographical continuity — a stable autobiographical narrative — through routines, relationships, and self-images. When that narrative is disrupted, states experience anxiety and may act in ways that compromise physical security to restore identity coherence.
Core claims of the literature:
- States can become attached to conflicts themselves because long-running rivalries provide identity stability (Mitzen's argument on rivalry as routine).
- "Critical situations" — events that rupture routines — generate ontological insecurity and prompt narrative repair, apology, or doubling-down on existing identities.
- Identity, status, and recognition are not merely instrumental but constitutive of state agency.
Applied examples in the scholarship include analyses of post-Cold War NATO's search for purpose, Japan's and Germany's post-WWII pacifist self-narratives, Turkey's and Russia's relationships with the West, and British identity debates around Brexit. The framework sits within constructivist and post-structuralist IR but draws methodologically on psychology and sociology.
Critics, including some realists and rationalists, argue the concept is difficult to operationalise, risks anthropomorphising states, and can be applied so broadly that it loses explanatory power. Proponents counter that it captures puzzles — persistent rivalries, costly apologies, status-seeking — that material approaches struggle to explain.
Example
Scholars have used ontological security to explain why Russia, after 2014, doubled down on a confrontational identity vis-à-vis the West rather than accommodating, since the rivalry itself anchored its self-conception as a great power.
Frequently asked questions
Physical security concerns survival of the body or state from material threats; ontological security concerns the stability and continuity of identity and self-narrative. The two can conflict — a state may prolong a costly conflict because doing so sustains who it believes itself to be.
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