Description
Ontological Security Studies (OSS) is primarily concerned with how actors, usually states, cope with anxieties, traumas, and various other ailments that befall them as their identities are no longer reconcilable with their social reality. This has generated a voluminous body of scholarship that helps us understand crises and the consequences of the securitisation of identity. Yet more work needs to be done for understanding how individuals cope with ontological (in)securities in healthy ways. This article therefore seeks to move beyond OSS’s traditional research agenda focused on state actors and critical junctures. Instead, it develops the argument that individuals’ consumption practices, understood as acts of self-authorship and autonomy, can significantly reshape their autobiographical narratives and routines. The article explores this broader argument in by following the recent (re)turn towards the microlevel in IR and OSS and putting it into conversation with historiographical and sociological theorisations of consumption. Arguing that OSS has largely framed individuals as actors with little agency whose ontological (in)securities are primarily shaped by the state, the paper then theorises different acts of consumption as forms of asserting agency, autonomy, and, ultimately, as an act of security-seeking. This conceptual argument is then explored in two short case vignettes, the emergence of affluence in Britain and Germany in the 1950s.
