Description
The literature on ontological security has quickly and extensively widened the debate about the assumptions underwriting security scholarship. In doing so, it has helped advance our understanding of how ontological security can at times outweigh more traditional security concerns. This paper argues, however, that when faced with the existential politics of climate change, the ontological security literature struggles with the tension that is inherent in the materiality of climatic effects, the lived reality of climate effects, and the otherwise ontological effects of climate change loss, for example, the loss of territorially and spatially rooted routines. I posit that this tension arises because so far ontological security studies has paradoxically examined conditions of ontological insecurity rather than theorise the conceptual underpinning for ontological security. This paper remedies this gap, by developing an argument that shifts the conceptual tenets of ontological security literature, namely crises, routines and anxiety, towards extraordinary politics, reflexivity and resilience. The move towards the conceptual reframe allows us to dissolve tensions around the material and ontological dimensions of climate effects.
