Description
The field of Ontological Security Studies (OSS) have brought to the fore the articulation between emotions, identity, and foreign policy. Since its debut in the discipline of IR in the early 2000s, the initial insight that a pre-conceived self is maintained and recognised by interpersonal practices of trust, routine and biographical narratives has received a variety of insightful theoretical alternatives. Yet, the emphasis on a subject-centred analysis across these pluralist approaches has left a theoretical gap, unacknowledging the affective surrounding environments from which subjectivities emerge. Overcoming this limitation is important, as it expands OSS towards more contemporary issues such as climate change and the role of technology in subjectivities. In this piece I propose an analytical framework to address such limitation. I draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri to whom subjectivity is rather a movable outcome of encounters between transpersonal actors than an agency to be exercised by subjects. The environment has an affirmative role to play in such a process, because humans and nature are mutually entangled by what Deleuze and Guatarri call desiring-machines, in machinic (rather than mechanic) relations. This brings a transhumanist approach to ontological security, capable of accounting for the affective role of the environment. I empirically demonstrate my framework through the case of the maritime domain. I argue that sea-reliant states experience a sense of ontological maritime security through a machinic encounter with the surrounding environment of the ocean. This emerges through an asymmetrical process whereby the ocean become-states, and states become-ocean in face of a perceived existential erosion of states’ world view. I illustrate this argument historically analysing the development of Britain’s maritime security policy. This piece brings an innovative contribution to the field of OSS, incorporating the notion of desire beyond a humanistic perspective.
