*Originally published in 2022. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work.

A growing body of scholarly work has used the concept of ontological security to explain the ways through which political actors in international politics exhibit certain traces when it comes to how they understand security. In simple words, ontological security at the state level is ensuring a sense of routinised continuity, order, belonging, as well as the survival of the self-image and identity states wish to project at home and in the wider international political scene (Giddens 1991: 37; Steele 2008; Innes and Steele 2014: 15). Not only does the subdiscipline of Ontological Security Studies (OSS) raise questions beyond the confines of physical security and materiality, but it also asks difficult questions about how we live and what it means to feel and be secure and safe. Is security merely about securing ourselves from a threat? Is it the state in which we are secure and free to pursue stability in our lives? These questions are equally posed to states and societies when exploring their daily operations across time and space.

Nonetheless, the insights obtained from this highly engaging approach are largely conceptual in nature; in practice, critical approaches to security are often not easily understood by policymakers and decision-makers. Even though the policymaker is not concerned with academic debates, they should be concerned with how key concepts in academia can transform their own work. From a policy perspective, OSS has strong practical applications that are discussed within academic spaces, yet not so easily understood within policymaking circles. For instance, the discipline addresses the importance of continuity in states’ routine operations as a means of securing society. However, what happens when state action (or inaction, for that matter) is a security threat on its own? As such, an important question that has been left largely unaddressed is the capacity for political actors to secure themselves from themselves. In other words, how do we, in our present form and capacity, ensure that we protect our stability in the future from our current actions and discourse? To what extent do state institutions and society plan ahead of large, disrupting crises? Finally, how resilient are our institutions across state and society in the face of less predictable and irregular dangers in the hybrid threat era?

In this short piece, I puzzle with the concept of entanglement in OSS and what it means for future policymaking and decision-making in the fields of foreign, defence, and security policies. For one thing, entanglement is understood as the act of taking precautions to ‘secure ourselves from ourselves’, due to the enmeshed, perplexed nature of security referent objects resulting from growing insecurities and vulnerabilities in the face of hybrid threats (Hamilton 2017; Donnelly and Steele 2019). The problem with hybridity in International Relations and Security Studies is a trifecta targeting the following areas: attribution, stagnation, and uncertainty. This means that (a) it is often difficult to attribute the exact threat to a specific actor with concrete evidence, even if a suspected political actor is the likely origin of such a threat; (b) coming up with clear policies to combat hybrid threats is often a painstakingly slow process that may even come to a complete standstill due to infrastructural constraints; and (c) there are limited techniques in which states and political actors may choose a certain policy with confidence and certainty that it is the appropriate or best course of action for future threats.

The puzzle that is pieced together, therefore, puts together an analytical interpretation of the role and/or disruptiveness of entanglement in transforming ontological security. The insights developed here in this approach are largely drawn from my own PhD thesis, which looks at the role and capacity of hybrid threats in disrupting ontological security in Cyprus and Estonia. The argument herein is that it is in the nature of hybrid threats to disrupt the political process, not least at the societal level, but also across state institutions as well. While this conceptual approach should not by any means constitute a predictive model that would completely alleviate us from experiencing crises and hybrid threats in the microcosmos of our respective communities and beyond in the international political scene, the chief purpose is to understand our own limitations as practitioners and strategists in the policymaking and decision-making spheres.

Ontological Security – How and For Whom to Secure?

One of the starting points on non-traditional security approaches other than pure coercion and military combat, the Copenhagen School’s Securitisation Theory first began discussing security framing across different sectors that also engage and affect society, while connecting the dots between the politicisation of objects and entities and........

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