Description
The introduction of ontological security to mainstream security studies inaugurated two debates. First, ontological security baptized the security of conventional IR as ‘physical,’ which cried out for explicit thematization. Second, the ‘level of analysis’ problem was a disciplinary gatekeeper bottlenecking early ontological security research. Initially pitched as a question of whether an individual level need could be ‘scaled up’ to groups, lurking in the background was the question of whether state-centric ontological security studies necessarily assumed that states really are persons. Different scholars have responded in different ways, from adopting the ‘as if’ approach, to taking Wendt’s provocation at face value. In this paper, which is part of a larger “Introduction to Ontological Security Studies,” we discuss the state-centric approaches and their rationales and limits, societal approaches, and approaches centered on individual subjectivity. We then consider some recent thematizations of personhood, and, placing the old and the new side by side we propose new areas for research.
