Description
Research on deterrence has long occupied a central role in International Relations. Traditionally used primarily within the context of hard military power in inter-state relations, the concept has increasingly been applied to new issue areas ranging from terrorism to cyber. Another stream of research has begun to explore the more social, discursive and ritualistic aspects of deterrence. While such scholarship has expanded our understandings of deterrence, the focus has largely remained on physical security. This paper expands the application of deterrence beyond physical security and applies it to ontological security, and more specifically to mnemonical security—a subcategory of ontological security. In the context of memory politics, the concept of deterrence enables us to understand memory political actions along an escalation ladder containing a variety of different measures, ranging from prescribing and proscribing memory political messages to explicitly punitive memory laws with extraterritorial appeal. We demonstrate the functioning of memory political deterrence with illustrations from two empirical contexts: the deterrent dynamic and the openly extraterritorial zeal of Russia’s imperial memory politics and laws, with a focus on Ukraine; and China’s bilateral and international memory political deterrence attempts toward Japan.
