Description
Within OSS there has been a considerable focus on autobiographical narratives as a prerequisite for ontological security. Unique to state actors, autobiographies reaffirm continuity by ‘telling a story of the self’. However, the recognition and acceptance of state identity narratives, particularly by ‘significant Others’, is not guaranteed. Thus, as the constitutive core of the Self, misrecognition of – or open challenges to – the content of a state’s autobiography can expose actors to ontological insecurity. Accordingly, this paper draws on the scholarship of (mis)recognition and ontological security to advance the argument that Ukrainian war narratives, and their reappropriation of historical and cultural property, have contributed to existing Russian anxiety over its sense of self by contesting the foundations of its autobiography. This paper pays close attention to the perpetuation of antagonistic narratives throughout Putin’s recent invasion of Ukraine, before highlighting the articulation of incompatible perspectives on sovereignty and diverging representations of (historical) Ukrainian and Russian identity. This explication of Ukraine’s refusal to recognise the Russian ‘story’, and the active contestation of key ‘identity markers’ during wartime, seeks to link relational and internal aspects of ontological security with processes of (mis)recognition to understand Russian refusal to undertake real diplomatic reconciliation with Ukraine.
