Traditionally used within the context of hard military power in interstate relations, the concept of deterrence has been progressively extended to non-state actors and new issue areas. While scholarship on the social aspects of deterrence has expanded our understanding of this core international security practice, the focus of existing research has largely remained on physical security. This article argues that there is a phenomenon in international politics that can be called memory-political deterrence. Memory-political deterrence refers to the ways in which states seek to dissuade other political actors from taking actions that threaten the collective memory narratives that underpin the ontological security of the deterring actor. Memory-political deterrence works, for example, through political rhetoric, declarations, diplomatic insults, commemorative practices, and punitive memory laws. We illustrate the article’s arguments through empirical examples from Russia’s and China’s recent memory-political deterrence efforts toward Ukraine and Japan, respectively. In doing so, we elucidate the ways in which memory politics is intertwined with geopolitics, underpinning wider world-ordering aspirations.

El concepto de disuasión, tradicionalmente utilizado en el contexto del poder militar duro en las relaciones interestatales, se ha extendido progresivamente a los agentes no estatales y a nuevas áreas temáticas. Si bien los estudios en materia de los aspectos sociales de la disuasión han ampliado nuestra comprensión de esta práctica básica en el campo de la seguridad internacional, la investigación existente se ha seguido centrando, en gran medida, en la seguridad física. Este artículo argumenta que existe un fenómeno dentro de la política internacional que puede llamarse disuasión política de la memoria. La disuasión política de la memoria se refiere a las formas por las que los Estados buscan disuadir a otros agentes políticos de llevar a cabo acciones que amenacen las narrativas de la memoria colectiva que sustentan la seguridad ontológica del agente disuasorio. La disuasión política de la memoria funciona, por ejemplo, a través de la retórica política, de las declaraciones, de los insultos diplomáticos, de las prácticas conmemorativas y de las leyes punitivas referentes a la memoria. Ilustramos los argumentos de este artículo a través de ejemplos empíricos obtenidos de los recientes esfuerzos de disuasión política de la memoria por parte de Rusia y China hacia Ucrania y Japón, respectivamente. Al hacer esto, ponemos de relieve las formas en que la política de la memoria se entrelaza con la geopolítica, apuntalando, así, aspiraciones más amplias de ordenamiento mundial.

Traditionnellement utilisé dans le contexte de moyens militaires dans les relations interétatiques, le concept de dissuasion s'est progressivement élargi pour inclure les acteurs non étatiques et de nouveaux domaines problématiques. Bien que les travaux de recherche relatifs aux aspects sociaux de la dissuasion aient enrichi notre compréhension de cette pratique clé en sécurité internationale, les recherches existantes se concentrent largement sur la sécurité physique. Cet article affirme qu'il existe un phénomène en politique internationale que l'on peut qualifier de « dissuasion politique Mémoire ». Celle-ci fait référence aux façons dont les États tentent de dissuader d'autres acteurs politiques de prendre des mesures qui menacent les récits de la mémoire collective qui sous-tendent la sécurité ontologique de l'auteur de la dissuasion. La dissuasion politique Mémoire fonctionne, par exemple, grâce à la rhétorique politique, aux déclarations, aux insultes diplomatiques, aux pratiques commémoratives et aux lois punitives sur la mémoire. Nous illustrons les arguments contenus dans cet article par le biais d'exemples empiriques issus de récents efforts de dissuasion politique Mémoire de la Russie et de la Chine à l’égard de l'Ukraine et du Japon respectivement. Ce faisant, nous clarifions l'enchevêtrement des politiques de mémoire avec la géopolitique, qui sous-tend les aspirations d'ordre mondial au sens large. 

Research problems are crucial in the sense that they provide new research with purpose and justification. So why, despite the abundance of guidance available from an extensive methods literature, do graduate students often struggle to develop compelling research problems? This article argues that the process of developing research problems epitomises the insecurity of doing research. We focus in particular on the anxiety that graduate students often seek to avoid or alleviate through a range of counterproductive coping strategies. The existing literature on research problems focuses predominantly on the technical aspects of doing research while neglecting how anxiety might affect the research process. This article seeks to rectify this shortcoming by providing advice on how graduate students can face such anxiety, and how professors can assist them in this endeavour. Drawing on theories about identity and anxiety, the article explains the allure of coping strategies such as gap-filling, while arguing that anxiety is not necessarily a negative emotion to be avoided at all costs, but integral to learning and creativity. It concludes by suggesting that compelling research problems can be constructed through the formulation of narratives that try to embrace anxiety, instead of seeking premature resolutions. 

Research on the legacy of Japanese imperialism and aggression has focused primarily on the conflictual aspects of East Asian international memory politics. In particular, it has highlighted the negative impact on Japan’s relations with China and South Korea. Scant attention has been paid to the reconciliation that arguably has been achieved, such as between Japan and Taiwan. How can such differences be understood? While numerous factors certainly matter, this chapter suggests that one hitherto overlooked aspect is the difference in how the anxiety associated with the ambivalence of complex historical experiences has been dealt with. Chinese and South Korean collective memory has taken the common approach of excising ambiguity and constructing a rather black and white coherent narrative about heroes, villains and victims, thereby avoiding anxiety. Taiwanese collective memory, by contrast, can be said to have faced anxiety and ambivalence to a greater extent by allowing historical complexity and ambiguity.

How do apologies and other acts of contrition after war and atrocities matter in international politics? Much of the existing scholarship has been concerned with whether such gestures can facilitate reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. While recognizing the value of such scholarship, this entry also discusses what apologies and other acts of contrition do more broadly. It suggests that apologies can have effects other than facilitating reconciliation. Apologies and other acts of contrition provide opportunities for former perpetrators to distinguish themselves from what they used to be. Through such differentiation, states and collectives that transgressed in the past can construct new identities for themselves and relate in new ways to other states and groups. However, this entry also suggests other possible consequences of such identity redefinition through apologies. First, it may lead the former transgressor to want this new self-understanding to be recognized by others. If such recognition is not forthcoming, it might result in bilateral friction. Second, such changes may also contribute to enabling security policies that previously could not be enacted. These points are developed and illustrated through engagement with the case of Japanese apologies for colonialism and World War II.

Identity change is an important phenomenon in international politics. It can radically alter how states orient themself and act internationally. But how does identity change occur? For some, it is merely an epiphenomenal result of changes in the international distribution of power. Others highlight domestic factors, while still others see it as occurring through a social process of interaction with other states. There are also explanations that combine these and other factors. While existing accounts have pushed the debate on identity change forward, this article suggests that incorporating anxiety into our understanding of identity change would help us better understand two important aspects of it: how an existing identity comes to be doubted and how a new one becomes thinkable and eventually accepted. Drawing on the work of psychologist Rollo May, this article explores the link between identity change, anxiety and creativity. The argument is illustrated through reference to 19th century Japan. For much of its history, Japan was part of the Sino-centric order and looked up to China as a “teacher in the ways of civilization”. However, in the 19th century, Japan radically redefined its identity in relation to China, and Asia more broadly, and rejected the Sino-centric world view as it sought to become a “civilized” state similar to the Western countries.

This chapter discusses the 2015 inscription of archival documents related to the 1937 Nanjing massacre into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Memory of the World (MoW) Register within the context of Sino-Japanese memory politics. Seven Chinese archives jointly submitted a nomination for the inscription of the documents. The chapter analyses both Chinese and Japanese reactions to the inscription. It shows that in China the inscription was understood as recognition and a way of securing the official Chinese narrative about the massacre against what is considered Japanese denial of this memory. In Japan, the inscription was criticized as a Chinese attempt to use UNESCO for political purposes. While the Japanese government was unable to reverse the inscription, it focused on reforming the system for MoW inscription in order to prevent the inscription of documents similarly related to wartime Japanese aggression on behalf of China or other states in the future. Through the analysis of this case, the chapter highlights the difficulties related to archives as instruments for reconciliation in international as opposed to national settings.

A large literature within the field of international relations has now explored both how emotions can shape political perceptions and behavior and how international actors may seek to manipulate, harness, or deploy emotions and emotional displays for political ends. Less attention, however, has been paid to how political struggles can also center upon issues of who can or should feel what emotion and whose feelings matter. Precisely, we theorize a distributive politics of emotion that can manifest in three general forms, all of which have their own properties and logics of contestation. The first centers on emotional obligations, understood as an actor's duties to feel and express specific emotions. The second concerns emotional entitlements, or the rights an actor enjoys to either feel or not feel certain emotions. And the third involves hierarchies of emotional deference, that is, the varying degrees of priority accorded to different actors’ feelings. We illustrate how the politics of emotions can unfold on the international stage by looking at developments in the so-called history problem within Sino-Japanese relations. 

Bahar Rumelili's article in this forum raises several important issues related to the study of anxiety in International Relations (IR). One of these is that anxiety can facilitate a redefinition of identities and break with long-held feelings of animosity in favour of new, emancipatory and more conciliatory ways of being. However, empirically it seems that attempts to deal with anxiety through securitisation and populist and nationalist frameworks that offer ideological and moral certainty tend to be more successful. Why is the kind of novel change in international politics that existentialists suggest anxiety has the potential to bring about relatively rare? This article reflects on this question and explores the links between anxiety and creativity by consulting the work of the existentialist anxiety theorists Rollo May and Paul Tillich. It outlines how anxiety is related to creativity and suggests that part of the answer to the question addressed in this article is that creative and novel ideas are often seen as threatening, while familiar ideas appear easier to embrace. The article also argues that IR, and the practice of international politics that it informs, has long been dominated by ideas that impede initiatives seeking to face anxiety.

This article explores the Internet’s often touted potential for facilitating reconciliation. It conceptualises Wikipedia as a site for collective memory construction and analyses the Chinese- and Japanese-language entries on the bilaterally contentious Second Sino-Japanese War. It addresses the question of how to make sense of the construction of these online collective memory narratives theoretically. Both historical determinism and instrumentalism – two influential theoretical approaches to collective memory and reconciliation – have great difficulties in fully accounting for this case. Instead, it is argued that ontological security theory is better equipped for understanding collective memory construction in Wikipedia. It is suggested that ontological security seeking can impede efforts for reconciliation even when, as in Wikipedia, there exist norms seeking to promote more neutral narratives. It is argued that a subtle bias in favour of the in-group and against the out-group functions as a mechanism for ontological security management that protects a positive self-identity.

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.