Postcolonial bordering and ontological insecurities

This special issue takes as its point of departure the historical trajectories of modernity and globalisation, as they have impacted on colonial and postcolonial pasts and on the postcolonial present and its potential futures. In particular, it is focused on the emerging ontological insecurities that are manifest in the (re)bordering of identities, cultures, communities and states. These ontological insecurities are spurred by global processes of free trade and augmented capital flows as well as by new technologies of communication, information and travel and not least by current crises and political uncertainties at all levels of analysis. Of importance is how such emerging ontological insecurities can be understood in terms of social and political change, dislocation, hybridity and impermanence and how they typically generate a search for ontological security and stability that affects contemporary political identities in one way or another. Here we highlight not only the securitising aspects of identity stability but also the opening up of these processes in terms of refusing or resisting contemporary narratives of closure and essentialisation. Hence, the special issue deals with critical aspects of bordering, territory and the rewriting of the state in postcolonial terms. It also takes seriously the psychic and cultural processes through which identities are organised, reiterated and/or reorganised. The articles in this special issue cover a broad range of sites and concerns regarding ontological security and postcolonial bordering. These include the relationship between human security and ontological security and the role of postcolonial Sikh identities; violent cartographies of ontological insecurities in postcolonial Russia and Ukraine; the performance of citizenship rituals in postcolonial Canada; the interplay between postcolonial expressions of religious social formations in response to ontological insecurities in postcolonial South Asia; the Green Line in Cyprus as a circulating symbol of ontological insecurity; the practice of drone warfare and the re-inscription of specific power relations of ontological insecurity in postcolonial Pakistan, and finally; the dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland.

Postcolonial bordering

When considering the postcolonial, it is important to keep in mind its historical trajectory in terms of how certain discourses of western self-understanding have reconciled the humanist and universalist elements of modernity with systematic oppression and exploitation. This is the subjugation involved in knowledge production about conquered peoples and their lands – about the bordering of postcolonial communities and peoples through the idea of the nation-state.¹ The impact on early ethnography, cartography and cosmology cannot be overestimated, leading to a focus on nations as naturally enclosed territorial units and the state as their guardians. But it is also the inauguration of the ‘Subject’ itself, as Spivak argues.² The emergence of the modern subject with a claim to knowledge who was guided by Enlightenment principles of reason and science, but also by the ‘urge to shut the other out into the opacity of the unknown alien, to be excluded or reduced to the status of a beast of burden and treated accordingly’.³ As Butler argues, power relations and hierarchies are affected by different temporal conceptions, where a linear and progressive understanding of time (and borders) facilitates the representation of some collectives as modern – as actors that advance history – while others are stuck in the past.⁴ Hence, it is difficult to talk about narratives of borders apart from the imaginary logic of international relations (IR) theory in which the organising principle of state sovereignty has resulted in the loss of sovereignty for others – other states, other communities and other individuals.⁵ This implies that the traces of the colonial state have not withered away as sovereignty in the postcolonial world has often remained provisional and partial, and at times even despotic and viciously violent.⁶ As Jean and John Comaroff write:

Identity struggles, ranging from altercations over resources to genocide, seem immanent almost everywhere as selfhood is immersed – existentially, metonymically – into claims of collective essence, of innate substance and primordial sentiment, that nestle within or transect the polity. In short, homogeneity as a “national fantasy” is giving way to a recognition of the irreducibility of difference.⁷

This national fantasy is closely connected to imaginations of borders as bounded space, despite much evidence to the contrary, and often hinges on an obsession with the limits of sovereignty. Much of what is often referred to as the ‘crisis’ of the state thus centres on the idea that states are no longer able to control their economies, labour or commodities, environment, information or unwanted aliens. To reclaim control over this lost sovereignty and fulfil, the national fantasy of homogeneity tends to involve diffuse attempts at governing securities, identities and histories.

This focus on sovereignty and governing techniques has been the subject of many academic debates on security and securitisation, as evident in the emphasis on ‘critical’ as well as ‘human security’, but also in the increasing attention given to the concept of ‘ontological security’ in which securitisation and desecuritisation have come to refer to elements of societal and existential security both within and beyond the spatial confines of the nation-state. In particular, it has come to include the notions of e-borders, virtual or biometric, and how portable borders constitute government techniques through which subjects are rendered mobile, predictable and/or threatening in relation to influential notions of belonging and apartness.⁸ However, the emphasis on postcolonial bordering also takes into account and develops the notion of ontological insecurity as not only referring to subjects and identities but also to the embodied transpersonal movements that exceed individual subjects and bind together collectives in ways that create conditions of possibility for both the crystallisation of postcolonial structures and for their contestation.⁹ Hence, although much work on ontological (in)security has focused on subjects and identities, both of which will be addressed throughout this special issue, it is important to be aware of the postcolonial context that affects the constraints and possibilities within which insecurity prevails and security can be sought. If the subject and her memories, histories and symbols are already framed through postcolonial structures and practices, then we must take seriously the ways in which ideas, myths and memories are being (re)created through these symbolic imaginaries and how they affect not only imaginary nations but also the imagination of (in)secure futures.

Ontological insecurities

Much work on ontological security has focused on the ontological security of individual subjects. This focus was originally developed by the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who described an ontologically secure person as someone who has a sense of ‘presence in the world as real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person’.¹⁰ It became increasingly popular through the works of Anthony Giddens¹¹ and has been incorporated into a plethora of studies in political science, IR, cultural studies, political psychology and media studies. For Giddens, ontological security refers to:

the confidence that most human beings have in the continuity of their self-identity and in the constancy of the surrounding social and material environments of action. A sense of the reliability of persons and things, so central to the notion of trust, is basic to feelings of ontological security.¹²

Within IR theory, the focus on ontological security has predominantly centred on states and inter-state relations, as scholars have attempted to understand how state narratives become routinised and, often, attached to certain self and other-images in which conflict is likely to be perpetuated,¹³ or how states invest in and increase their ontological security by developing and investing in international organisations.¹⁴ The main inclination has been to problematise realist and liberal notions of security concerned with security dilemmas and physical security by focusing on ‘security-of-being’ rather than ‘security-as-survival’.¹⁵ As noted by a number of scholars in this tradition, a rigid attachment to a monolithic identity narrative is only one possibility, however, and a dangerous one at that.¹⁶

Others have focused more on the sociological aspects of ontological security, being concerned with how individuals, groups and other collectives construct homogenous identities in response to uncertainty and prevailing risks and insecurities.¹⁷ Here the main referent is the individual rather than the state and the focus is on how individuals connect socially to ontological security structures and to the illusion of homogenous identities, be they national, religious, ethnic or gendered. The self is not regarded as fixed in these studies but as constantly in motion, security-as-becoming rather than being. Narratives of past practices, memories and symbols become emotional, embodied and material representations to which individuals and groups attach a sense of self and purpose, but also tools for elites to create borders and boundaries around constructions of collective identities. This implies that ontological insecurity is at the heart of any identity construction as foreignness can never be entirely removed from identity and as competing and contradictory narratives of identity and difference can never be eradicated. As Mälksoo insists, ‘[t]he perils of collapsing ontological security and the securitization of identity should thus be recognized whenever ‘historical memory’ is summoned in discourses and practices of security policy’.¹⁸ Mälksoo is here concerned with the depoliticising effects of assuming that individuals, groups and states seek ontological security on the same terms.

Another substantial disagreement within much work on ontological security is focused on the extent to which the study of ontological security opens up or closes down the question of the subject in world politics, with certain authors¹⁹ arguing that ontological security scholars encourage the illusion of unified identities. In response to such critique, we maintain that any focus on postcolonial borders and ontological insecurities proceeds from a view of identity and identifications as a process of becoming rather than being. However, the emotional aspects of feeling insecure can be very threatening and the imagination of homogenous identities can be immensely powerful. This brings us back to the postcolonial structures through which bordering and ontological insecurities are both manifest and imagined – often as individual stories of lost identities or homogenous selves – but more importantly as incomplete and ruptured narratives that allow for affective and structural insecurity to be both repressive and resistant.

Just as the effects of colonialism were global and not restricted solely to colonising and colonised societies, similarly the postcolonial, both in terms of subjects and structures, is manifest in all corners of the world. The legacy of imperial structures lives on as present realities that affect processes of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and non-belonging, insiders and outsiders. It is a process in which the postcolonial, through its very bodily effects in both former colonies and postcolonial societies, challenges the Eurocentrism at the heart of the last few hundred years of imperialism. The values, traditions, norms and social structures that made imperialism possible are being questioned and ‘provincialised’ with an ever-increasing intensity. Both this erosion of the old certainties and the many efforts to sustain them are prone to create confusion, anxiety and ontological insecurity. This has resulted in attempts to govern not only physical borders, but also ideational, emotional and embodied borders and boundaries – often through narratives of one kind or another. Rather than being a linear process in temporal terms or solely an homogenising process in subjective, spatial or territorial terms, this ongoing conflict and tension generates a border politics filled with ruptures, ambivalences and insecurities, in which societies, identities and the postcolonial present are being redefined, reconstructed and reimagined.

The articles

This latter aspect of how ontological insecurity works in postcolonial settings is clearly delineated in Giorgio Shani’s article on ‘Human Security as Ontological Security: A Post-colonial Approach’, in which he argues that a ‘post-secular’ understanding of human security may potentially offer a more productive engagement with ontological security in times of rapid global transformation, given the centrality of religion to postcolonial subjectivity. However, this requires a different understanding of the terms ‘human’ and ‘security’ – one that leaves behind the Eurocentric conception of the human as a rational autonomous agent in favour of one that recognises a multiplicity of different culturally embedded understandings of the terms, without prioritising any one conception. Empirically Shani explores how colonialism led to the division of Sikhi into ‘sacred’ and ‘temporal’ domains in which Sikhism became a ‘religion’ and the Sikhs an ethno-national group. This splitting, he argues, of the ‘secular’ and ‘temporal’ aspects of Sikhi may be seen as a cause of ontological insecurity for many Sikhs.

In contrast to Shani’s focus on the different domains and splitting functions of identity, Emil Edenborg in his article ‘Undoing Cartographies of Violence: Satire on Russia and the war in Ukraine’ is more interested in exploring the role of creativity and artistic imagination (especially satire) in challenging and destabilising dominant narratives of ontological security. Such narratives are described in terms of violent cartographies that act as a form of securitising bordering practices performed by postcolonial states to produce ontological security. These are the geographical imaginaries that come to appear as logical and necessary for the achievement of order, security and progress. With an empirical focus on Russia and Ukraine, Edenborg shows how discourses of dangerous others produce and naturalise the borders that differentiate communities, but also how such violent cartographies ultimately fail as they are internally contradictory, beset by gaps and ‘haunted by the “unruly” elements and histories they seek to exclude’.

Similarly, Paul Nesbitt-Larking and James W. McAuley in their article ‘Securitisation through Re-Enchantment: The uses of myth and memory in strategic rebordering’, look at how dominant state actors (or identity entrepreneurs) may promote particular narratives and myths to provide discursive anchors that will attach certain collectives to specific constructions of political reality and projects. Looking at the former Canadian conservative government, they show how a politics of division and fear was propped up by myths and memories of Anglo-conformist nationalism and loyalism in response to ontological insecurities. This re-enchantment of a colonial past both challenged and was challenged by a liberal regime of postcolonial citizenship and its emphasis on multiple and hybridised belonging.

While Nesbitt-Larking and McAuley focus on the remnants of the British empire in Canada, ‘Ontological Security and the Limits to a Common World: Subaltern pasts and the inner-worldliness of the Tablighi Jama’at’ constitutes an attempt to speak to an IR and postcolonial studies audience concerned with conflict and liberal governance in a postcolonial world. Here Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson explore the fractured relation between the possibility of a common world and the inherent silence of the postcolonial, or the subaltern, within the parameters of the international and the global. Using the case of the revivalist movement the Tablihi Jama’at in South Asia, they examine how the religious is conceptualised within liberal notions of shared boundaries of commonality, how it relates to ontological security and what specific shape it takes within the modernist narrative of cosmopolitan rootedness. Above all, Kinnvall and Svensson discuss how ontological insecurity can act as an enabling force for disrupting and evading the appeal of a global and cosmopolitan common.

The following article, ‘Mobile Diasporas, Postcolonial Identities: The Green Line in Cyprus’, by Alexandria Innes addresses how adversary identities unfold and are reconstructed in a postcolonial context. Rather than seeing the Green Line that divides Cyprus into a Greek and a Turkish part as a hard border, Innes conceives of it as a symbol of ontological insecurity that is played out in terms of postcolonial, transnational, diasporic and migrant experiences. In this, she links discussions of memory, trauma and ontological insecurity to postcolonial bordering practices that make the Green Line into a marker of difference that reflects but also produces a fluid and intersectional Cypriot identity – both in Cyprus and among Cypriot diaspora groups. By discussing the many faces of the Line, Innes explores the multifaceted nature of postcolonial bordering processes, at the same time as she adds an important perspective to the ontological security debate in IR theory.

The study of IR and its preoccupation with conflict and war is also at the heart of Chris Agius's article ‘Ordering without Bordering: Drones, the unbordering of late modern warfare, and ontological insecurity’. In this, she investigates how drones perform a complex form of ordering without borders in postcolonial space. By examining how drones reshape the battlefield and how they extend forms of control over populations and space in unique ways, Agius points to how they supply ontological security to the liberal state while creating deep ontological insecurities within postcolonial borderspaces, thus performing a form of ‘vertical Orientalism’. Central to this process is how drones complicate aspects of intimacy and distance and how drone warfare differentiates ontological insecurity between liberal and postcolonial subjects. Empirically, Agius addresses the surveillance, targeting and strikes by drones in the FATA region of Pakistan.

In the final article entitled ‘The Dilemmas of Ontological Insecurity in a Postcolonising Northern Ireland’, John Cash addresses the legacies of the British colonisation of Ireland within Northern Ireland, and the more recent internal postcolonising process that is slowly and unevenly displacing that legacy, with significant implications for the ontological security of its citizens. He points to the friend–enemy ideological formations and ‘the structures of animosity’ that dominated social and political identities and relations in Northern Ireland and how, since the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, these are being challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations. Ironically, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

John Cash is a social theorist and political scientist with a particular interest in psychoanalytic political theory and the incorporation of psychoanalytic theory into social and political analysis. He is a Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where, formerly, he was Deputy Director of the Ashworth Program in Social Theory. He is an editor of Postcolonial Studies and a co-editor of Political Psychology. His recent publications include ‘To Dwell in Ambivalence: On the promise and dilemmas of Beck’s “The Art of Doubt”’ in The Consequences of Global Disasters (Routledge 2016) & ‘The Case Study as Representative Anecdote’ in Case Studies and the Dissemination of Knowledge (Routledge 2015).

Catarina Kinnvall is Professor at the Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. She is the former Vice-President of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP) and the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Psychology. Her research interests involve political psychology, migration and multiculturalism, globalisation and security, religion and nationalism, with a particular focus on South Asia and Europe. Some of her recent publications include: ‘The Postcolonial has Moved into Europe: Bordering, security and ethno-cultural belonging’, (JCMS, 54(1), 2016); Bordering Securities: The Politics of Connectivity and Dispersion (co-ed, Routledge 2014); The Political Psychology of Globalization: Muslims in the West (co-author, Oxford University Press 2011); Globalization and Religious Nationalism in India: The Search for Ontological Security (Routledge 2006).

ORCID

John Cash http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6227-0925

Catarina Kinnvall http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8401-6434

Notes

1. Couze Venn, Occidentalism: Modernity and Subjectivity, London: Sage, 2000.

2. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

3. Venn, Occidentalism, p. 117.

4. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010, p. 102. See also Emil Edenborg, Politics of Visibility and Belonging: From Russia’s “Homosexual Propaganda” Laws to the Ukraine War, London: Routledge, 2017.

5. Karen Fierke, Political Self Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

6. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputut (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

7. Jean Comaroff and John L Comaroff, ‘Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalyses, and the Postcolonial State’, in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputut (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 120–148, p. 127.

8. Louise Amoore, ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror’, Political Geography 25, 2006, pp. 336–351; Catarina Kinnvall and Ted Svensson (eds), Governing Borders and Security: The Politics of Connectivity and Dispersal, London: Routledge, 2015.

9. Ty Solomon, ‘Ontological Security, Circulations of Affect, and the Arab Spring’, Journal of International Relations and Development (doi: 10.1057/s41268-017-0089-x) (Early Online Publication), 2017.

10. Ronald D Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, London: Penguin, 1969, p. 40.

11. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990; Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

12. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, p. 92.

13. Jennifer Mitzen (2006a), ‘Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations 12(3), 2006, pp. 341–370; Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Anchoring Europe’s Civilizing Identity: Habits, Capabilities, and Ontological Security’, Journal of European Public Policy 13(2), pp. 270–285; Brent J Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations, New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.

14. Felix Berenskoetter and Bastian Giegerich, ‘From NATO to ESDP: A Social Constructivist Analysis of German Strategic Adjustment after the End of the Cold War,’ Security Studies 19(3), 2010, pp. 407–452.

15. See for example Mitzen, ‘Ontological Security in World Politics’; Brent J. Steele, ‘Ontological Security and the Power of Self-identity: British Neutrality and the American Civil War’, Review of International Studies 31, 2005, pp. 519–540; Steele, ‘Ontological Security’; Bahar Rumelili (ed), Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security: Peace Anxietites, London: Routledge, 2015; Amir Lupovici, ‘Ontological Dissonance, Clashing Identities, and Israel’s Unilateral Steps Towards the Palestinians’, Review of International Studies 38(4), 2012, pp. 809–833; Dmitry Chernobrov, ‘Ontological Security and Public (Mis)Recognition of International Crises: Uncertainty, Political Imagining, and the Self’, Political Psychology 37(5), 2017, pp. 581–596.

16. For an overview see Catarina Kinnvall and Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Ontological Securities in World politics’, Cooperation and Conflict 52(1), 2017, pp. 3–11.

17. See for example Stuart Croft, Securitizing Islam: Identity and the Search for Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012; Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Globalization and Religious Nationalism: Self, Identity, and the Search for Ontological Security’, Political Psychology 25(4), 2004, pp. 741–767; Catarina Kinnvall, ‘Feeling Ontologically (in)secure: States, Traumas and the Governing of Gendered Space’, Cooperation and Conflict 52(1), 2017, pp. 90–108; Sean Kay, ‘Ontological Security and Peace-building in Northern Ireland. Contemporary Security Policy’, 33(2), 2012, pp. 236–263; Alanna Krolikowski, ‘State Personhood in Ontological Security Theories of International Relations and Chinese Nationalism: A Sceptical View’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics 2(1), 2008, pp. 109–133; ‘Encountering the Stranger: Ontological Security and the Boston Marathon Bombing’, Cooperation and Conflict 52(1), 2017, pp. 126–143.

18. Maria Mälksoo, ‘“Memory Must be Defended”: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security’, Security Dialogue 46(3), 2015, pp. 221–247, p. 226.

19. Chris Rossdale, ‘Enclosing Critique: the Limits of Ontological Security’, International Political Sociology 9, 2015, pp. 369–386; Richard Ned Lebow, National Identities and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.