Description
Ontological Security Studies has made important contributions for understanding how actors cope with the disruption to their identities and how they try to re-establish functioning autobiographical narratives. Yet is has to go a longer way to establish how different structures of modernity, which is a foundational conceptual element of the theory, affect the nature of ontological crises, biographical narratives, and the courses of actions pursued by actors to as a result thereof. This paper develops a historically contingent understanding of modernity that circumscribes the ideational scope that actors have available to reconstruct their autobiographical narratives. I showcase this argument by focusing on founding narratives of states: attempts to construct a state's foundational narratives that position itself in the international system, while simultaneously enrolling its society in the narrative it seeks to project internationally.
In doing so, the paper contributes to our understanding of modernity in IR, furthers our understanding of the level-of-analysis question by focusing on elites rather than homogenous state actors, and helps understanding state reconstruction projects.
