Description
Research on Ontological Security Studies (OSS) has rapidly increased in recent years and, in many ways, become a victim of its own success. Once a radical intervention in International Relations (IR) that challenged the status quo and our very understanding of security, the field has witnessed a proliferation of loosely connected studies and attempts to typologise and “mechanise” the field in a manner that mirrors the trajectory of soft constructivism in the 2000s. This expansion, while intellectually diverse, has led to a loss of coherence and, more critically, a loss of purpose. It has also contributed to the depoliticisation of security, as politics are increasingly marginalised and security reduced to technical mechanisms detached from their social and political context. As OSS becomes domesticated within the IR mainstream, it risks forfeiting the critical and transformative potential that once distinguished it. What began as a project for understanding the existential and psychoanalytic foundations of political life increasingly serves the discipline’s conventional aims rather than challenging its boundaries and providing unique insights. This paper argues for reclaiming critique and, with it, reclaiming the political in OSS by returning to its existentialist and psychoanalytic roots. By re-centring questions of ethics, ambivalence, and responsibility, OSS can recover its immanent potential as a critical project. In doing so, it may once again speak meaningfully to the real world and reaffirm its commitment to explaining and transforming political life rather than merely fitting into IR.
