Description
While much work has been done on ontological security relating to the state’s sense of self, whether addressing the role of migration, globalization, and even membership to supranational entities like the European Union, scholars have less explored how ontological security could be linked to shared environmental spaces. In this paper, we conceptualize an ‘Ontological Insecurity Community’ – where groups of states that surround transboundary environmental spaces are bound together by a shared insecurity driven by environmental change. We suggest that unpacking these spaces provides particular lessons for better understanding environmental change through the lens of ontological security and the place of transboundary spaces for state’s anxiety. In this paper, we theorize this new concept in Ontological Security and provide two illustrative case studies of the Amazon and the Arctic.
