The dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands is generally analysed as a Sino-Japanese competition over material and strategic interests, regional preponderance, and nationalistic symbolism. Yet, such explanations cannot fully explain the endurance of the conflict and overlook its origin in the period leading up to the UN’s derecognition of Taiwan’s sovereignty in 1971. Drawing on the concept of ontological security, defined as ‘security of the self’, we contend that it was the looming loss of its sovereign self that prompted Taiwan (Republic of China, ROC) to assert itself as the true defender of Chinese interests by laying claim to the islands. This caused anxiety in China (People’s Republic of China, PRC), which had to follow suit in order to secure its own sovereign self. China thus inherited the conflict with Japan when it took over the ‘true China’ mantle upon its entry to the UN in 1971. Extant explanations overlook the important factor of inter-Chinese competition over sovereign selfhood. In developing this argument, the article makes two contributions. First, it draws attention to a much-overlooked early phase of the dispute, and shows how the same dynamics of ROC–PRC status competition continue to inform the dispute between China and Japan today. Second, it contributes to the literature on ontological security by conceptualising the ‘self’ as sovereign state personhood, thereby further clarifying the distinction between self and identity, and highlighting the relational effects of ontological security-seeking.

The concepts of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are often implicitly conflated in constructivist research, limiting our understanding of important theoretical issues. The Ontological Security Studies (OSS) literature provides one example of this, often reducing a concern with ‘security of the self’ to a matter of identity, thereby limiting OSS’ analytical reach. This article draws from the writings of Laing and Giddens to make the case for keeping ‘self’ and ‘identity’ analytically distinct. Understanding ontological security as a multidimensional framework meant to affirm the self’s existence, it proposes to see ‘identity’ as just one dimension of ontological security, and to conceptualise ‘self’ in terms of personhood. Such a reading allows us to grasp the discursive and ritualistic institution of sovereignty as an existential framework on which the personhood, and therefore ontological security, of all states depends. Thus, OSS would benefit from considering ontological security beyond identity. Beyond this, the article shows that distinguishing more clearly between ‘self’ and ‘identity’ illuminates the debate on state personhood in IR, indicating that paying more attention to these key concepts would be helpful for constructivist research more generally. 

The growing literature on ontological security theory (OST) in international relations, ontological security studies (OSS), is characterized by great internal diversity. This internal pluralism is one of its greatest strengths, but it is also potentially confusing, for example, when different works using an ontological security lens arrive at contradictory conclusions without it being obvious why. In order to make sense of this diversity, this article traces two interrelated conceptual divergences related to the notion of anxiety. The first one concerns the observation that anxiety is seemingly both debilitating and an impediment to action, as well as a call to action, inspiring adaptation and change. The second divergence centers on whether ontological security is at all attainable, which is largely a matter of whether anxiety is best understood as an extraordinary and temporally limited condition or as an ever-present and normal part of life. This article argues that the divergent answers to these questions, and the problems they give rise to, are primarily the result of ambiguity with regard to the key concept of anxiety. The malleable nature of the concept of anxiety engenders deviating interpretations and applications among scholars. While awareness of these issues already goes a long way toward making sense of some of the diversity within OSS, this article further suggests ways to increase the conceptual clarity of anxiety and to address the two issues of change and attainability. Doing so increases our conceptual understanding of OST.

The concept of ontological security has proved a valuable addition to International Relations (IR). At the same time, its discipline-specific incorporation has had consequences. Specifically, the widespread opposition of ontological security to physical security sometimes makes the ontological security-seeking self appear as disembodied. While a second wave of ontological security studies (OSS) has challenged such assumptions and paid greater attention to the ways in which ontological and physical security intersect, it has yet to address in detail the most immediate physical aspect of the self: its material body. Doing so allows us to extend the analytical reach of OSS and to move beyond a concern with particularised role-identities. Thus, this article draws on the foundational ontological security literature, as developed by Anthony Giddens and especially R. D. Laing, to highlight the importance of embodiment for ontological security. It argues that there is a genuine two-way relationship between physical and psychological security and that ontological security is consequently best understood as ‘security of the self-in-the-body’. Upon theorising what it means for states to have bodies, a brief analysis of the psychological impact of the so-called ‘North Korean abduction issue’ in Japan serves to illustrate this point.

The growing literature on ontological security has generated important insights about the behaviour of individuals, groups, and states in international politics. It has thereby greatly contributed to the discipline of International Relations (IR), especially to IR theory and the sub-field of Security Studies. By focusing on the ‘security of the self’ and the consequences of feelings of anxiety, Ontological Security Theory (OST) challenges the primacy of physical security-seeking and gives us a way of accounting for the psychological underpinnings of security-seeking in IR. Yet, in spite of its contribution to rethinking some of the fundamental tenets of the discipline, Ontological Security Studies (OSS) retains assumptions characteristic of IR as a whole, and is itself characterised by certain biases and ambiguities. Motivated by a desire to continue OSS’ critical engagement with IR, to sharpen OST as an analytical tool, and to advance our empirical understanding of state behaviour and the world, this dissertation adopts a conceptual lens to analyse and rethink two of OST’s key concepts: ‘self’ and ‘anxiety’. Specifically, it traces the usage of ‘self’ and ‘anxiety’ through the current OSS scholarship, and compares it with some of the literature’s precursors in sociology, phenomenology, and psychological existentialism. This makes it possible to recover lost meanings, on the basis of which the OST framework is rethought and applied to current IR issues in East Asia.

In adopting a strategy of recovering lost meanings, the five self-contained articles in this dissertation do not seek to return to a ‘purer’ reading of ontological security or to imply that these readings are more ‘correct’. Rather, the articles treat past usages of ‘self’ and ‘anxiety’ as sources of inspiration, which can complement current OSS and propel it forward by highlighting and problematizing underlying assumptions. They aspire to make us see and understand actor behaviour differently. In pursuing this aim, the articles provide an in-depth engagement with OSS and make three interrelated arguments. First, the ontological security-seeking ‘self’ is an embodied self, which suggests not only that we need to consider the bodies of states and other actors in IR, but also that physical and ontological security-seeking are closely intertwined and not easily distinguished. Second, though often equated, the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are analytically distinct, from which it follows that ontological security is not reducible to matters of identity. Instead, ontological security is better understood, and provides greater analytical purchase, as consisting of multiple dimensions, which together create and reaffirm a sense of personhood. Third, while feelings of anxiety are ubiquitous, not all anxieties are the same, which is why it is useful to recover the existentialist distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety. Doing so allows us to account for different kinds of behavioural responses without falling into the trap of equating all anxiety with a lack of ontological security.

Ultimately, this dissertation reveals the crucial importance of concepts for shaping our analyses and imagination, develops the recovery of meaning as a key strategy to rethink concepts and theories, points to the important role of sovereignty in the ontological security-seeking of states, and advances OST by critically engaging with and rethinking two of its key concepts.

Research on ontological security in International Relations (IR) has grown significantly in recent years. However, this scholarship is marked by conceptual ambiguity concerning the meaning of and relationship between the key concepts of ontological insecurity and anxiety. In addition, ontological security scholarship has been criticized for applying a concept that was originally developed for understanding individuals to states, and for being excessively concerned with continuity while largely ignoring change or seeing it as a negative force to be avoided. Despite such issues, however, reflection on the theoretical origins of ontological security remains limited. Based on such reflection, the present article argues that these issues can be circumvented if we return to one of the theoretical precursors of ontological security studies, the existentialist literature on anxiety. R.D. Laing, who coined the term ontological security, was strongly influenced by the existentialist anxiety theorists. Anthony Giddens, however, who drew on Laing and whose understanding of ontological security permeates IR scholarship, explicitly rejected the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety, which was central to the work of existentialists like Rollo May. This article reintroduces this distinction. Doing so is useful, the article argues, both for providing conceptual clarity and for moving beyond the criticisms of ontological security mentioned above. More generally, the article suggests that ontological security studies has much to gain from drawing on the insights of the existentialist literature on anxiety to a greater extent than has hitherto been the case.