Description
It was the fear Athen's rise instilled in Sparta, Graham Allison claims, that made war inevitable [All15]. Sparta could have avoided war, Allison finds empirically, had she changed her attitudes. But how do changing attitudes resolve fear? Ontological Security Studies (OSS) and Ancient Greek dictionaries - documenting that `phobos' used to denote both fear and doubt - can provide Allison with a theoretical foundation.
OSS hold that actors seek physical and ontological security. Following Anthony Giddens [Gid84], OSS assume actors who are certain that they know what the world is like to be ontologically secure. To maintain certainty, philosophers of science have stressed, agents alter their knowledge only as a last resort [Kuh62]. Because knowledge enters the context it analyses [Gid91], knowledge-informed actions can corroborate it. It is unsurprising, therefore, that incumbent powers prefer taking action to changing their attitudes/knowledge, when confronting instilled doubt.
This makes war indeed seem inevitable. Faced with war or the threat thereof, epistemologists pondered solutions. Projecting the epistemological thought presented onto OSS scholarship allows the identification of (1) specific sets of attitudes to be changed to facilitate systemic change without a war and (2) general assumptions to be abandoned to prevent future emergences of Thucydides' Trap.
