No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare, civilisational geopolitics, and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety
Abstract
Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.
... HW and HT are repeatedly argued to be new terms deriving from old military tactics and war philosophy and linked to doctrines and actions from the Cold War (Muradov, 2022;Veljovski et al., 2017). It is also argued to be "self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical" (Eberle & Daniel, 2022, p. 1), because the discourse portrays HW to be something too mysterious, hidden, and shifting to be solved (Eberle & Daniel, 2022). State rivalry and conflict are argued to be investigated through a broader lens than the traditional peace-war dichotomy (Eberle & Daniel, 2022). ...
... It is also argued to be "self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical" (Eberle & Daniel, 2022, p. 1), because the discourse portrays HW to be something too mysterious, hidden, and shifting to be solved (Eberle & Daniel, 2022). State rivalry and conflict are argued to be investigated through a broader lens than the traditional peace-war dichotomy (Eberle & Daniel, 2022). And measures to fight HW are argued to lay within strategic and political domains rather than in the operational or tactical spheres (Johnson, 2018). ...
... As an internal warfare strategy this has meant preparing the public for geopolitical cyber-rivalry, maligning internal dissent as an epiphenomenon of Russian efforts and creating the fantasy of an "epistemically consistent past" (Marwick et al., 2021) to restore. It is a doctrine of warfare "stretched so as to incorporate almost anything that can be understood as a hostile activity" (Eberle & Daniel, 2022) from memes to the release of journalistically relevant and accurate information. 2 It also necessarily instrumentalizes hysteria and anxiety about enemies stalking dark corners of the internet, seeding the social space with malaise or weaponizing your cappuccino. ...
... As Mellamphy describes hybrid war turns "inward onto the battle eld that is subjectivity" (2015) charging the mundane aspects of social media life with national purpose and threats. An emerging eld of critical security scholarship views the logic of hybrid war as caught within Lacan's discourse of the hysteric (Jutel, 2022;Jacobsen, 2020;Eberle & Daniel, 2022) in which a neurotic citizenry is led by the hysteric cyber-security expert making impossible demands for eternal vigilance. Lack of discernment may make one an unwitting servant of Putin by relaying weaponized political discourse and attacking American institutions. ...
A defining legacy of the Trump insurgency and the journalistic and political preoccupation with Russiagate has been a transformation of web 2.0 platform governance. The digital teleologies of openness and self-correcting networks have faced a significant “techlash” and the looming threat of regulation. The heightened awareness of misinformation, cyberwar and far-right extremism have been responded to with a patchwork regulatory structure that explicitly enlists new media companies into the geopolitics of communicative technology. A technocratic apparatus of disinformation experts, academic research centres and tech-lobbyists, adjacent to the national security state, have emerged to bolster national myths of an epistemic consensus imperilled by geopolitical rivals. This patchwork is sustained by a technocratic class habitus in which the defence of truth is inseparable from geopolitics and weaponized communication. This alliance of the state, capital and cyber-warriors, in the place of robust anti-monopoly and public-interest regulation of platforms, is demonstrative of platform imperialism (Yong Jin, 2015); that is the centrality of the internet to American cultural and economic hegemony.
... They discarded the usefulness and desirability of a dialogue with Russia, because they considered it would lead to nothing, but also because such process would project and institutionalise the image of Russia as a (difficult) partner rather than as a (irremediable) foe. The othering of Russia has been, indeed, a core and long-standing component of Central European states' articulation of their European identity and, thereby, of their ontological security (Kuus 2007;Mälksoo 2009;Eberle and Daniel 2022). As a result, they have rejected the very idea of a dialogue with Russia and, therefore, the Bregançon initiative, even before its content was clarified. ...
France and Central European states have long been incarnating opposite sides of the European debates on how, where, and with (or against) whom to build the continent’s security. As this forum contribution will show, however, the major exogenous shock of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war has altered this state of affairs. Deep-seated changes in France’s policies towards Russia and the Eastern neighbourhood, and Central European states’ greater (though relative) opening towards self-standing European security initiatives, have made their strategic outlooks more convergent than ever. Studying their variegated geopolitical visions, their evolutions, and the imaginaries that underpin them, reveal particularly fruitful to explore the realm of the possible when it comes to re-organising European security.
... Several scholars have recently highlighted how nostalgia can affect scholars' and theorists' perceptions of previous ages and make the subsequent thought appraise the past as inherently better than the present (Egeland 2020;Fettweis 2019;Hanhimäki 2014;Murphy 2021). Other authors have proposed that anxiety may be partly responsible for the thought pertaining to hybrid warfare (Eberle and Daniel 2022;Mälksoo 2018) and nuclear strategic thought (Sauer 2015). ...
... The West-as-enemy image reflects a form of 'anxiety geopolitics' dividing the world along an East/West axis (Eberle and Daniel 2022). As the West was similarly portrayed as the 'enemy-other' during the Cold War, these anxieties are likely to resonate with the Russian population and act as an 'affective sticking point', in Eberle and Daniel's (2019) sense of the expression. ...
Drawing on ontological security studies and Lacanian theory, the article examines the role of ?spiritual-moral values? (SMV) in Russian politics. It argues that SMV have been employed by the Russian political elite to construct an (illusory) sense of ontological security, presented as attainable via the promotion of sovereignty and national unity. Through the analysis of policy documents and Vladimir Putin?s speeches for the period 2012?2023, the article outlines three interlocking narratives: (a) Russian cultural norms are under attack; (b) attacks can be resisted through cultural sovereignty, with SMV playing a crucial role; and (c) the Russian population is united through the same SMV. These narratives (?fantasies? in the Lacanian sense) create promises destined to remain unfulfilled: cultural sovereignty is based on the unrealistic belief that culture can remain unaltered, while existing policies fragment society, causing the ontological insecurity of ethnic and sexual minorities, but also the Russian population more widely.
... And this is the most dangerous pitfall regarding Johnson's speech, we argue here, for it is neither a playful, nor an innocent act at all. The populist, phantasmagorical connection between in this case, the Roman Empire, climate change, borders and migration, Johnson's speech act and "hegemonic" (in Foucauldian terms) discourse cunningly invokes a certain affect and emotion and thereby shapes a certain reality and truth (Eberle and Daniel 2022). In the above, by dissecting and close reading specific speech moments, we have debunked his populist and extreme nationalist postulation that "the fall" of the Roman Empire could be seen as a fate the E.U. would fall victim to as well, lest the E.U. would not protect its borders against migrants. ...
... 31 Vieira 2018. 32 Eberle and Daniel 2022;Bilgic and Pilcher 2023. 33 For exceptions, see Eberle (2019) and Solomon (2015, 53-62). ...
The traditional Laing–Giddens paradigm views ontological insecurity as an unusual mental state triggered by critical situations and characterized by feelings of anxiety, disorientation and paralysis. However, theories inspired by Lacan suggest a different perspective, stating that ontological insecurity is not an exception but rather a regular state of mind. Similarly, ontological security is a fantasy stemming from the desire to fill the primordial lack, thus fuelling agency. While these Lacanian interpretations have introduced a fresh viewpoint into Ontological Security Studies (OSS), they have not fully incorporated one of the key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis – the object-cause of desire (French: objet petit a) – into international relations theory. In this article, we present a framework of how to conceptualize and empirically study the objects-cause of desire in world politics. Our arguments are exemplified in a case study of Serbia's resistance to Kosovo's UNESCO membership in 2015.
... Puzzlingly, the role of emotions is still a relatively under -researched subject as far as the foreign policy of the Central European countries is concerned (but see Eberle -Daniel 2022). This is especially odd in the light of the important role populist parties play in many countries of the region. ...
This paper aims to enhance our understanding of the foreign policy of Hungary by looking at the emotional underpinnings of the relationship between Fidesz and Germany. Inspired by the ‘emotional turn’ in social sciences in general, and IR in particular, this paper charts the changing ways in which Fidesz politicians (both in government and opposition) have perceived Germany and German politics on an emotional level since 1990. We show how a mostly positive emotional climate before 2010 slowly turned into anger, culminating in repeated allusions to Germany’s Nazi past. The main question is: how can we account for the fluctuations in the way Fidesz politicians have perceived Germany over the past three decades? While ‘rational’ policy disagreements have certainly played a part (i.e. on migration), they cannot explain on their own the ever intensifying anger on the part of Fidesz decision-makers, especially as the two countries are still close political and economic partners and share a wide range of common interests. Complementing rational approaches, we propose that ‘collective narcissism’ informs the general emotional disposition of key Fidesz figures since 2014, leading to a continuing estrangement between the successive Orbán governments and its German partners.
... 14 In psychoanalytical thought, whereas fear is situational and associated with a distinct threat, anxiety "disregards the object" ( Freud 1974, 395, quoted in Giddens 1991. Building on Lacanian theorization on anxiety, Zevnik (2021) directs our attention to the role of anxiety both in the constitution of the subject and as transformative power for political action, while Eberle and Daniel (2022) explore the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety to engage with OSS. Other scholars have drawn on Lacanian conceptions of fantasy ( Eberle 2018 ;10 See, for example, Eklundh, Zevnik, and Guittet (2017) , Browning (2018) , Mitzen (2018a) , Arfi (2020) , and Gustafsson (2021) . ...
Because of the novel explanations it generates for states’ security- and identity-related behavior, the concept of ontological security has been used increasingly in the International Relations (IR) literature in recent years. However, the abundance of interpretations of the concept means that it is often used in conflicting ways. To counter the risk of conceptual stretching and provide the foundation for a common research agenda, this article constructs a typology of ontological security mechanisms. Two dimensions of ontological insecurity are highlighted: the sources and the causes of anxiety. We argue that the source of anxiety can be reflexive, relational, or systemic, while the cause of anxiety can be either shame or discontinuity. These two dimensions produce six mechanisms of ontological insecurity that reflect how the concept is used in the contemporary ontological security literature in IR. By specifying these mechanisms, we argue that the typology offers IR scholars the ability to produce even more nuanced and fine-grained explanations of state behavior driven by ontological insecurity. Finally, to demonstrate the utility of this typology, the article provides an illustrative case study of Russia's engagement in the conflict in Syria in 2015–2017.
... Along with the growth of information's role, the importance of its protection also increases. It is ensured by using information protection tools, which becomes especially relevant during hybrid warfare , (Eberle & Daniel, 2021). ...
Taking into account the tendencies of democratization and informatization of all sectors of the economy and spheres of public administration, and, accordingly, the increase in information risks, the vast majority of countries in the world today go through a series of stages of ensuring information security. Despite the legislatively established powers of the relevant state authorities and local self-government in this area, the issues of defining their competence and effective interaction are real and effective guarantees of preventing a variety of information threats to national security as in this case effective and timely ways of eliminating existing dangers are provided. Given that large-scale invasions and hybrid wars can cause catastrophic harm and undermine public confidence in the government, the state must make quick decisions. Consequently, establishing an effective mechanism for ensuring information security has become more relevant than ever nowadays. The purpose of the academic paper is to clarify the theoretical fundamentals, as well as the components, directions and other critical practical aspects of the process of ensuring the state’s information security under conditions of hybrid warfare. Methodology. In the course of the research, abstraction, idealization, system-structural, comparative, logical-linguistic methods, analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction were used to process scientific information on issues of the state’s information security. Results. Based on the research results, the features of the process of ensuring the state’s information security in a hybrid war were studied and certain practical aspects of this issue were clarified.
... Since then, human geographers have examined how fear is situated, historicised and relational, and the work of emotion in the 'alteration or reproduction of geopolitical relations' (Jones, 2020, p. 649). In doing so, we engage with literature on 'emotional geopolitics' (Pain, 2009), 'affective geopolitics' (Gökarıksel & Secor, 2020) and 'anxiety geopolitics' (Eberle & Daniel, 2022). A key thread through the 'emotional geopolitics' literature has been how geopolitical discourses conjure emotional responses, which manifest in the embodied encounters between subjects. ...
Geographers have increasingly attended to the role of emotion in geopolitical encounters and the geopolitics of cross‐border infrastructure projects. While scholars have theorized fear as an emotion produced by elite geopolitical discourses and encounters between bodies, we know much less about how infrastructure’s materialities provoke fear and anxiety. Furthermore, key distinctions between anxiety—or a psychological state of insecurity and unease—and fear, which is attached to a specific target object, are still not fully understood. Focused on the uncertainties over China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), we develop the concept of sovereign anxiety—a generalised condition of unease over the security of one's political community—to account for how the BRI generates not only the hard materials of infrastructure (e.g., roads, dams, and pipelines), but also the social practices of affect and emotion. Sovereign anxiety, we argue, is heightened by the absence of transparency over China’s infrastructure investments in Myanmar. In this paper, we trace how sovereign anxiety is variously experienced and grounded in peoples’ observations, personal biographies, social histories, and sense of community belonging. We also identify three themes by which fears of the BRI are articulated: relations, roads, and resources. This article contributes an emotional geopolitics perspective to grounded studies of the BRI, while demonstrating the geopolitical significance of attending to the emotional lives of infrastructure, both in relation to the BRI and beyond.
This article makes a twofold contribution on the relationship between self/other securitisation, ambiguous threat constructions, and anxiety at the intersection of Securitisation Theory (ST) and Ontological Security Studies (OSS). First, we develop the concept topos of threat (TT) as a potent linguistic anchor in securitisation processes. TTs depict an entire self/other threat situation that warrants escape, serving identity needs while staying flexible and ambiguous. However, their frequent rhetorical deployment can blur the threat construction and increase anxiety: this challenges the classical scholarly assumption that antagonism necessarily alleviates anxiety. Second, we theorise metapolitics as an anxiety mediation strategy. Metapolitics is a mode of interpretation – a relentless analysis of surface clues to expose a deceptive, powerful adversary – which in the final event fails to alleviate anxiety. The dual practice of nurturing topoi of threat and metapolitics drives conflict because it sets in motion a vicious securitisation spiral that entrenches rigid patterns of self/other representation and fosters a bias of anticipating hostility. We employ abductive theorising: working with established theory alongside empirical discovery through a discourse analysis of Russia’s official rhetoric on NATO and the use of the TT ‘colour revolution’ since the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014.
Observers have noted that world politics is replete with shame. Whether they observe this concerning the apologies regarding past atrocities, the felt necessity for revenge after a humiliating defeat, the feelings that populist leaders find antithetical to the greatness of their nation, or the affective responses to the latter's election, shame seems to be ubiquitous. Vital to understanding the particular politics of this emotion is the concept of state shame. However, the origins, divergent effects, and social and moral roles of state shame are left obscure in International Relations (IR) scholarship, making the concept undertheorized and in need of further elaboration. The primary goal of this research is to (re)conceptualize state shame as a narrative on the social position of the state by building on insights developed by IR theory, sociology, and social psychology. Moreover, the article proposes four types of state shame narratives, namely situational shame, narcissistic shame, aggressive shame, and deferential shame, that can separately account for the divergent effects and social and moral roles that the emotion can be attributed with. These four types, and the politics that characterize them, aim to capture and explain lived practices and meanings that state shame can come to hold.
The concept of cognitive warfare is currently gaining ground in the policy discussion and in academic research as a way of conceptualizing the ‘weaponization of the neurosciences’. Introducing the Science and Technology Studies-inspired concept of ‘neuropolitical imaginaries’ and assessing discussions on cognitive warfare launched by the NATO Innovation Hub in 2017, this article explores how the contemporary turn to the brain sciences in defense and security reimagines politics. The article argues that seeing the human mind as increasingly vulnerable to external interference redefines the nature of human agency by giving precedence to the skilful ‘cartographer’ employing neuroscientific techniques and methods for persuasion. This emerging vulnerability of the human mind reshapes security into a zero-sum game for ‘cognitive superiority’, making brain science scholars authorities in security. Finally, speaking to the literature on security expertise and science in security, the article argues that the envisaged arms race for cognitive superiority gives rise to a neurosecurity dilemma: as the neurosciences becomes entangled with security, neuroscientific practices simultaneously arise as a core vulnerability, making their work conditional upon compliance with security practices.
The paper offers a critical reading of the dominant ways we frame and understand anxiety in adolescence. These centre on the individual and for the most part limit attention to external and social influences operating at a close scale to the individual. The paper sets out to explore what including perspectives from macro-scale contemporary cultural contexts might reveal and add to how we understand adolescent anxiety. The paper draws on three themes in research on adolescent anxiety: socialisation and development, gender and pressure, environment and uncertainty. Expanding the frame to cultural contexts situates young people's experiences in complex processes from individual to global scales, includes less tangible aspects such as discourse or values, and recognises the importance of experiences of inequalities. The paper proposes that bringing cultural contexts into view reveals a pervasive encounter with paradox, ambivalence and disjuncture in everyday experience through which contemporary adolescent anxiety may be generated and which warrants greater attention. Furthermore, these indicate that some of our most cherished developmental concepts may need a more nuanced understanding of the work they do within the specificities of different cultural contexts.
The paper develops a conceptual framework for the analysis of crises. It rests on the central argument that crises cannot be restricted to exceptional occurrences or temporarily delimited events, but we approach crisis as ontologically constitutive for our everyday lives. The concept of “discursive dislocation” is the cornerstone of this endeavor, as it grasps multiple aspects of sociopolitical instability, including societal deficiencies, fragilities, and political failures. Through theoretically advancing the concept of dislocation, we systematize three dimensions of crisis as permanent, recurring, and ephemeral dislocation. This allows us to analyze crises not only in their immediate environment but also makes it possible to understand them in their broader sociopolitical context. The conceptual framework is illustrated with the example of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, which reveals how the construction of the pandemic as a crisis is embedded in the historically ingrained self-portrayal of the United States, and how crisis responses are invoked to serve particular sociopolitical purposes in retaining an established American identity.
This article explores the emergence of new military-strategic rationalities in relation to conceptions of hybrid warfare in the grey zone through a case study of Sweden’s reinstatement of total defence since 2015. Through a governmentality-inspired approach, I analyse what it means for the organisation of a new total defence when one of the main threats to be dealt with is daily antagonistic but highly ambiguous hybrid attacks. I illustrate how conceptions of an ambiguous strategic non-peace entails a move beyond war preparedness into urgent demands for an everyday active total defence that hinges on a ‘martialisation’ of civilian life. This in turn run the risk of challenging fundamental democratic principles and civil liberties. The analysis contributes to an increased understanding and uncovering of the politics made possible by a military-strategic rationality geared towards hybrid threats in the grey zone – which in the Swedish case has resulted in a historically specific version of total defence that builds on a highly diffused and rather extreme form of decentralised defence.
In the current digital transformation to Industry 4.0, the demands on the ability of countries to react responsibly and effectively to threats in the field of cyber security (CS) are increasing. Cyber safety is one of the pillars and concepts of Industry 4.0, as digitization brings convergence and integration of information technologies (IT) and operational technologies (OT), IT/OT systems, and data. Collecting and connecting a large amount of data in smart factories and cities poses risks, in a broader context for the entire state. The authors focus attention on the issue of CS, where, despite all digitization, the human factor plays a key role—an actor of risk as well as strengthening the sustainability and resilience of CS. It is obvious that in accordance with how the individuals (decision-makers) perceive the risk, thus they subsequently evaluate the situation and countermeasures. Perceiving cyber threats/risks in their complexity as a part of hybrid threats (HT) helps decision-makers prevent and manage them. Due to the growing trend of HT, the need for research focused on the perception of threats by individuals and companies is increasing. Moreover, the literature review points out a lack of methodology and evaluation strategy. This study presents the results of the research aimed at the mathematical modelling of risk perception of threats to the state and industry through the disruption of CS. The authors provide the developed factor model of cyber security (FMCS), i.e., the model of CS threat risk perception. When creating the FMCS, the researchers applied SEM (structural equation modelling) and confirmatory factor analysis to the data obtained by the implementation of the research tool (a questionnaire designed by the authors). The pillars and sub-pillars of CS defined within the questionnaire enable quantification in the perception of the level of risk of CS as well as differentiation and comparison between the analyzed groups of respondents (students of considered universities in SK and CZ). The convergent and discriminant validity of the research instrument is verified, and its reliability is confirmed (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.95047). The influence of the individual pillars is demonstrated as significant at the significance level of α = 5%. For the entire research set N = 964, the highest share of risk perception of CS threats is achieved by the DISRIT pillar (disruption or reduction of the resistance of IT infrastructure).
This chapter concludes the argument of the book by sketching out an explicitly normative alternative to the politics of ‘hybrid warfare’, one that is driven by the desire to reclaim democratic politics from the uncompromising logic of war. In the first section, we directly address the HW discourse and offer three key counter-arguments, suggesting that ‘hybrid warfare’ should be dismantled, language de-weaponised and East/West thinking abandoned. Adopting these three principles, we argue, would enable us to lead a more productive debate on security, as well as mitigate the adverse side-effects of the logic of war for democracy and society at large. As taking these suggestions seriously may require a more profound shift in thinking about politics and society, we also sketch the contours of such broader political imagination in the second part. Given the hyper-masculine character of ‘war’ discourses, we anchor the argument, among others, also in the work based on or aligned with feminist theory—most explicitly that of Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe. We start by returning to the subversive potential of liminality and continue by presenting slowness, vulnerability and democratic conflict as central for our project of politics that resists geopoliticisation and warification.
In this chapter, we complement our interest in the proliferation of ‘hybrid warfare’ by probing the disputes about the boundaries of the HW assemblage and the expertise that the assemblage is based on. We specifically ask what kinds of expertise—understood as authoritative and socially recognised knowledge—make HW known and how the limits of such expertise are set in the public debate. The chapter focuses on three moments of contestation, through which the boundaries of the assemblage were being renegotiated by questioning certain forms of its expertise. First, we discuss the Annual Reports of the Czech counterintelligence agency, the Security Information Service (BIS). We zoom on a controversy concerning BIS’s suggestion to transform history education curricula in schools so as to enhance resilience against HW. Second, we explore journalistic expertise on HW as one of the key sources of the authority of the assemblage. Specifically, we focus on the controversy surrounding the so-called Ricin Affair of 2020, in which the media brought forward unsubstantiated claims about an alleged Russian plot to poison several Czech politicians. Finally, we unpack critical engagement with the HW discourse from the side of academics who attempted to push back against warification.
This chapter focuses on the conditions of possibility that enabled the rise of the ‘hybrid warfare’ (HW) discourse in Czechia after 2014. We show that it emerged following a series of crises happening between 2008 and 2013, which produced a sense of social unease and created discursive space that could be filled by new political projects, of which HW was just one contingent possibility. We bring in the concepts of liminality and ontological security to theorise this process. Liminality is a condition of dwelling in an insecure ‘in-between zone’, not belonging fully to categories through which social life is ordered, while ontological security denotes the maintenance of a stable sense of identity through narratives and routines. We suggest that the HW discourse emerged as an attempt to seek ontological security by utilising two more general discursive strategies that aim at ‘resolving’ Czechia’s dual liminality (between East and West, and war and peace): geopoliticisation and warification. In these strategies, ontological security is sought by identifying with ‘the West’ and rejecting anything ‘Eastern’ (geopoliticisation) and/or conceptualising increasing number of social issues as part of ongoing ‘war’ rather than ‘peacetime’ matters (warification). These two strategies then constituted the key pillars of the HW discourse.
This article is concerned with the Lacanian subject of cyberwar and how the Real of network communication in the post-Trump era is experienced as horror. The centrality of the technological sublime and practices of self-divination to the American political imaginary give this moment of the Real a properly cosmic and spiritual scale. What returns are techno-horrors of intersubjective dread and the capitalist Real of the network in which we are fragmented and manipulated by occulted forces. The generalization of cyberwar shapes the liberal/populist entanglement between the hysteria of the disinformation expert and the perversion of the QAnon digital soldier.
“Digital sovereignty” has emerged as a hot topic in European politics. But although true European digital sovereignty seems unattainable, analysing the digital sovereignty discourse is still useful since it tells us much about European politics. We examine three “projects” which are part of the broader digital sovereignty initiative: 5G, Gaia-X, and the semiconductor industry. This empirical perspective allows for a better understanding of how imaginaries about digital sovereignty play out in these specific tech projects and how these then help to affirm a particular European identity. Methodologically, we focus on how particular geopolitical imaginaries appear in these digital sovereignty projects. Our empirical analysis reveals that Europe’s comparatively weak digital industries are considered a security issue. China and, to a lesser degree, the United States are not only seen as economic rivals but also security threats when it comes to issues such as espionage and data protection. Based on this, we argue that digital sovereignty projects, despite being full of contradictions and tensions, contribute to a distinct EU identity of an agile, future-oriented global player in the digitised economy. This, while not entirely new, is a powerful imaginary even if the proposed idea of “sovereignty” might never be enacted.
The growing literature on ontological security theory (OST) in international relations, ontological security studies (OSS), is characterized by great internal diversity. This internal pluralism is one of its greatest strengths, but it is also potentially confusing, for example, when different works using an ontological security lens arrive at contradictory conclusions without it being obvious why. In order to make sense of this diversity, this article traces two interrelated conceptual divergences related to the notion of anxiety. The first one concerns the observation that anxiety is seemingly both debilitating and an impediment to action, as well as a call to action, inspiring adaptation and change. The second divergence centers on whether ontological security is at all attainable, which is largely a matter of whether anxiety is best understood as an extraordinary and temporally limited condition or as an ever-present and normal part of life. This article argues that the divergent answers to these questions, and the problems they give rise to, are primarily the result of ambiguity with regard to the key concept of anxiety. The malleable nature of the concept of anxiety engenders deviating interpretations and applications among scholars. While awareness of these issues already goes a long way toward making sense of some of the diversity within OSS, this article further suggests ways to increase the conceptual clarity of anxiety and to address the two issues of change and attainability. Doing so increases our conceptual understanding of OST.
Research on ontological security in International Relations (IR) has grown significantly in recent years. However, this scholarship is marked by conceptual ambiguity concerning the meaning of and relationship between the key concepts of ontological insecurity and anxiety. In addition, ontological security scholarship has been criticized for applying a concept that was originally developed for understanding individuals to states, and for being excessively concerned with continuity while largely ignoring change or seeing it as a negative force to be avoided. Despite such issues, however, reflection on the theoretical origins of ontological security remains limited. Based on such reflection, the present article argues that these issues can be circumvented if we return to one of the theoretical precursors of ontological security studies, the existentialist literature on anxiety. R.D. Laing, who coined the term ontological security, was strongly influenced by the existentialist anxiety theorists. Anthony Giddens, however, who drew on Laing and whose understanding of ontological security permeates IR scholarship, explicitly rejected the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety, which was central to the work of existentialists like Rollo May. This article reintroduces this distinction. Doing so is useful, the article argues, both for providing conceptual clarity and for moving beyond the criticisms of ontological security mentioned above. More generally, the article suggests that ontological security studies has much to gain from drawing on the insights of the existentialist literature on anxiety to a greater extent than has hitherto been the case.
Within the emerging body of critical security research on expertise, most contributions have focused on reconstructing the risk governance regime that the expert professionals embody, including the anxious, neurotic subject that expert security practices reproduce. Through French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan’s Hysteric Discourse, the article advances the study of the neurotic subject to include the security policy expert. By introducing and applying a ‘hysteric reading strategy’ to the processes through which US cyber defence experts identify as policy experts, the article suggests that the constantly changing demands for policy change produced by these experts suggest a desire not simply for new policies that promise cyber defence but for desire itself. From this, the article argues that these experts occupy a social position in which desire is perpetually sliding from one object to the next, always placing cyber defence out of reach, and hence, reproducing ‘cyber’ as an insecurity in the present. The article sees this dynamic play out both in the evolving cache of policy recommendations on cyber deterrence produced by the cyber policy experts, and in the revolving doors between government and this expert community.
The article describes EU cross-sectoral policy work on online information threats, focusing on the intersection between values and 'referent objects'. Examining discussions on strategic communication, censorship, media literacy and media pluralism, two value-perspectives were identified: while abstract procedural values of efficiency and coherence guide content management in the security/defence/internet communities, media/education communities highlight the end-goals of content pluralism and enhanced citizen judgement. In implementation, the former’s lack of substantive goals, coupled with an outsourcing of content management, may give rise to hybrid values. The findings highlight the danger of neglecting substance in favor of efficient management of an online ‘battlespace’.
This article analyses the ascent of ‘Russian hybrid warfare’ (RHW) as a notion that transformed the understanding of national security in the Czech Republic in the short period of 2014–2016. It argues that the emergence of RHW as a specifically understood prime security threat was the result of contingent and often unruly social interactions across different settings, rather than a linear and centralised response to Russia’s actions. To capture this process, the concept of ‘assemblage’ is introduced and then defined as a temporary constellation of a variety of different actors, both public and private. Building on research interviews and documents produced in the RHW field, the authors then proceed in three steps. First, they chronologically trace the gradual emergence of the Czech RHW assemblage from a variety of different actors—bureaucrats, NGOs, academics, journalists—after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014. Second, they unpack the inner workings of the assemblage by identifying the key actors and asking who did the assembling and how. Third, they look at how different actors were able to reinforce and/or transform their identities by being part of the assemblage, with an emphasis on the effects this had for the distinction between the public and the private.
This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey’s policies and practices concerning the Syrian war and Syrian refugees, our project asks: What are the affective dimensions of encountering Syrians in Turkey and how do these encounters unfold an embodied geopolitics on the street and in neighborhoods? Our analysis of focus group conversations (conducted between 2014 and 2016 in Istanbul, Konya, and Malatya) centers on three dimensions of the affective geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey. First, we draw out feelings of threatening proximity, in which the denigration of Syrian bodies and lives converges with the desire for a spatial organization of bodies that would put literal boundaries between “us” and “them.” Second, we present how the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi’s geopolitical orientation towards leadership in the Muslim Middle East and official rhetoric regarding Turkey’s obligation to the Syrians as part of Muslim unity do not preclude the anxiety citizens express about the embodied presence of displaced Syrians in their daily lives. And finally, we address the politics of pain and the problems of translation in the encounter with the other. Here, we argue that the imminent, embodied, and affective challenge posed by the arrival of more than three million Syrians in Turkey concerns the ethics of how to hear, understand, and respond to the pain of others.
The notion of 'the West' is commonly used in politics, the media, and in the academic world. To date, our idea of 'the West' has been largely assumed and effective, but has not been examined in detail from a theoretical perspective. Uses of 'the West' combines a range of original and topical approaches to evaluate what 'the West' really does, and how the idea is being used in everyday political practice. This book examines a range of uses of 'the West', and traces how 'the West' works in a broad array of conceptual and empirical contexts, ranging from the return of geopolitics - via a critical review of the debates surrounding Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilization thesis - to the question of the future of 'the West'. Analysis extends further to the repercussions of the war on terror on Western democracy and the processes of delineating the Western from the non-Western, as well as observations of the institutional transformations of Western order.
This paper explores the reconstitution and repetition of threat imaginaries in security discourse, with particular focus on the War on Terror era. Upon vanquishing the enemy (whether an individual militant or militant group) no tangible increase in ‘security’ is claimed by securitising actors. Instead, the security apparatus turns away and reconstructs the figuration of insecurity elsewhere. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS replace each other as signifiers for the most profound threat to international order. The article positions this compulsive refiguration of enemies within an aversion to attaining a state of ‘security’. The paper uses psychoanalytic concepts of drive and jouissance to argue that security imaginaries play out fantasies of insecurity to suture the symbiotic relationship between subjectivity and power. If enmity was permanently ended or victory attained, society would need to confront the continued experience of ‘lack’ (ontological insecurity) – something promised to disappear upon the resolution of hostilities. The fantasy of interpellation would collapse at this point. The article contributes to Critical Security Studies by explicitly addressing the repetitive constitution of terrorist threats. It goes beyond constructivist understandings of othering to explain why the resolution of insecurity is disavowed and why enmity is continually restaged.
Modern political reality is increasingly permeated with testimonies and representations of social and personal anxieties. Most often these narratives are accompanied with a desire to identify and implement a ‘cure’ that will either heal or eradicate the source of discomfort. In the political everyday such a ‘cure’ is disguised as a policy or a new law. Thus it comes as a little surprise that the term anxiety is increasingly used by politicians, policy-makers, legal and medical experts as well as scholars to explain an allegedly new social phenomenon. Relying on psychoanalysis and critical theory the contributions in this special issue tackle modern anxieties in the realms of politics and law, and in particular look into how anxiety is manifested in relation to resistance, immigration, nationalism and austerity measures. This introduction firstly, unpacks the idea of anxiety conceptually and offers different ways in which anxiety can be read politically, legally as well as theoretically; and secondly introduces the arguments put forward in individual contributions.
Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy.
This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: (1) the importance of definitions; (2) the role of the body; (3) questions of representation; and (4) the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.
The protracted crisis in Ukraine has exposed fundamental political differences between leaders in western Europe and their counterparts in Russia. The very existence of the European Union was meant to have refuted geopolitics as a useful theoretical lens through which to view power relations in Europe. After all, the European project is based on the idea that boundaries no longer matter and that national sovereignty is obsolete. And yet, geopolitics remains critically important—certainly for Europe's potential enemies, but also for Europe itself. It is poignant that to advance our understanding of this new constellation we are well served to turn to the insights of a classic, if hugely controversial, German political thinker: Carl Schmitt. Schmitt's political philosophy is relevant in three aspects. First, as a source of inspiration—even if only indirectly—for the contemporary Russian political establishment. Second, the behaviour of Putin's Russia, particularly since 2008, can be best understood through some of the key concepts that preoccupied Schmitt: sovereignty, the political and geopolitics. Third, Schmitt's philosophy can serve as a point of departure for reflecting on the possibility of a more robust response by Europe to the Russian intervention in Ukraine. What Europe needs is a more hard-nosed realist approach, which recognizes that Russia's expansionist ambitions can only be constrained by its own readiness and willingness to deploy power both politically and, if necessary, even militarily.
This paper argues for the re-conceptualization of geopolitics using the concept of discourse. Geopolitics is defined as a discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft ‘spatialize’ international politics and represent it as a ‘world’ characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas. Four theses explicating this re-conceptualization are outlined including the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘practical’ geopolitics. These arguments are illustrated by a general discussion of practical geopolitical reasoning in US foreign policy which includes an analysis of George Kennan's ‘Long Telegram’ and ‘Mr X’ article representations of the USSR. The irony of such practical geopolitical representations of place is that they necessitate the abrogation of genuine geographical knowledge about the diversity and complexity of places as social entities. Geopolitical reasoning, it is concluded, ironically works by being anti-geographical.
This article addresses the question why Germany invested in what became the European Union's Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), a potential competitor to NATO. In addition to highlighting Germany's role in the development of ESDP, the paper offers a social constructivist explanation for this investment based on the concepts of friendship, estrangement, and emancipation. It develops the argument that (1) states gain ontological security by investing in international institutions to negotiate and pursue ideas of order with friends; (2) deep and enduring dissonance between friends signifies a process of estrangement and poses a threat to ontological security; and (3) if states cannot restore resonance with the old friend-institution configuration, they choose a strategy of emancipation by investing in an alternative. Applied to an analysis of German strategic adjustments between 1990 and 2009 in the context of U.S.-led interventions in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, the article suggests that Germany invested in ESDP to offset enduring dissonance with the United States and NATO about appropriate mandate, missions, and means, with France and ESDP emerging as a suitable alternative. With this, the article offers valuable insights into the parameters guiding German security policy and the structure of transatlantic relations and also provides a theoretical alternative to the realist balancing proposition.
This article proposes that in addition to physical security, states also seek ontological security, or security of the self. Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. Like its physical counterpart, the ontological security motive is a constant. But states may adhere to routines rigidly or reflexively, and variation in attachment style has implications for security-seeking. This article conceptualizes the individual-level need for ontological security, scales it up to states, and applies the ontological security-seeking assumption to the security dilemma. Realists argue that states want to escape security dilemmas but uncertainty prevents them. Ontological security-seeking suggests that states may not want to escape dilemmatic conflict. Because even dangerous routines provide ontological security, rational security-seekers could become attached to conflict. Ontological security-seeking sheds new light on seemingly irrational conflict, and suggests lines of research into the stability of other outcomes in world politics.
The end of the Cold War demonstrated the historical possibility of peaceful change and seemingly showed the superiority of non-realist approaches in International Relations. Yet in the post-Cold War period many European countries have experienced a resurgence of a distinctively realist tradition: geopolitics. Geopolitics is an approach which emphasizes the relationship between politics and power on the one hand; and territory, location and environment on the other. This comparative study shows how the revival of geopolitics came not despite, but because of, the end of the Cold War. Disoriented in their self-understandings and conception of external roles by the events of 1989, many European foreign policy actors used the determinism of geopolitical thought to find their place in world politics quickly. The book develops a constructivist methodology to study causal mechanisms and its comparative approach allows for a broad assessment of some of the fundamental dynamics of European security.
What do we speak of when we speak of ‘hybrid warfare’, a notion that has become prominent in discussions of European security? The article shows that this question is difficult to answer, as the hybrid warfare discourse is not only vague, but also consists of multiple, and at times contradictory, narratives. While talking and writing about supposedly the same thing, participants in the hybrid warfare debate often suggest markedly different ideas about the precise nature and target of the threat, offer different responses and draw upon different expertise. Grounding our argument in critical scholarship on narratives, security knowledge and hybrid warfare, we build a framework for studying security narratives around the four elements of threat, threatened value, response and underlying knowledge. This framework is utilised in a case study of Czechia, a country that has played a pioneering and outsized role in European hybrid warfare debates. We identify three narratives of hybrid warfare – defence, counterinfluence and education – which present markedly different understandings of ‘hybrid warfare’, and ways to defend against it. Our intervention hopes to contribute to disentangling the contradictions of the hybrid warfare discourse, itself a necessary precondition for both sound state policy and an informed public debate.
Critical and poststructural theories were introduced to global politics in early to mid-1990s. Since then there has been a proliferation of critical thinking in global politics with Derridean and Foucauldian approaches being the most popular. While psychoanalysis made its appearance and gained in popularity alongside other critical approaches to international politics in mid-1995, it has never become one of the “go to” theories. However, since 2010 psychoanalysis has been slowly reemerging on the global politics scene. If initially psychoanalytic approaches focused on a number of different theorists such as Castoriadis, Jung, Freud, and Lacan, the most recent thinking draws most significantly on the contribution of Lacanian psychoanalysis and thinkers such as Žižek, Butler, or Kristeva, all of whom heavily rely on Lacan. In postcolonial studies a distinct psychoanalytic account was also developed by Frantz Fanon. This contribution provides an overview of psychoanalytic approaches in the study of global politics with a focus on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and its derivatives (Žižek, Fanon, Butler, and Kristeva). The reason for the selected focus is simple—this has been the most popular approach since the introduction of this thinking to the discipline. Lacanian theory revolves around concepts such as desire, jouissance (radical/excess enjoyment), fantasy, and drive, and is concerned with explaining the social bond—that is how the subject comes to existence and what social factors determine the subject’s existence in society. Its distinct contribution to the field of global politics is its focus on conscious and unconscious factors. In other words, it focuses on that which can be represented and that which remains unrepresented but still impacts the world. Affects, symptoms, or unconscious material impact the way the subject (and society) behaves. While the theory’s foundations are in psychiatry (and many critiques of psychoanalysis point that out vehemently), psychoanalysis is not a theory of the individual and neither is it concerned with the individual psyche. It is a theory of society; Lacan even characterized it as antiphilosophy. Psychoanalysis has appeared in a number of different contexts in global politics. The presented selection is not exhaustive though the aim was to include the most significant contributions the theory has made to the discipline’s different subfields. Key areas include the state, sovereignty, ontology, Political Subjectivity, law and foreign policy; and subdisciplines such as postcolonialism (the theories of Frantz Fanon), racism, affect, Radical Politics and Cultural Criticism, and development and aid, as well as trauma, populism and nationalism.
Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, hybrid warfare has become a widely used yet ambiguous term to describe Russia's hostile activities. In academic publications and policy documents, there have been a plethora of different definitions and concepts to make sense of hybrid warfare. This article takes a bottom-up approach and analyzes the discourse of political and military representatives in the United Kingdom to explore how they understand hybrid warfare by Russia and what the implications are for defense policy. Using qualitative content analysis with quantitative aspects, the results show not only a range of different terms used to describe Russia's hostile activities, but also that the discussed topics do not reflect one particular definition of hybrid warfare. The analysis further reveals that representatives highlight non-military aspects of hybrid warfare over the military ones and consider the role of defense policy dependent on the nature of a particular hybrid threat.
Hybrid warfare has been a popular term that refers to contemporary warfare. Despite the increasing number of critiques, NATO has used the term in its strategic documents and summit declarations. Since concepts are important in shaping our understanding and the way that our forces fight, NATO’s use of a controversial concept has raised some questions. In this context, this paper aims to explore the meaning of the hybrid warfare from the viewpoint of NATO, based on in-depth interviews with NATO officials who have sufficient expertise and experience about the concept. The authors conclude that hybrid warfare is an ambiguous concept which clouds NATO’s strategic thinking and leads NATO to forget the difference between war and peace. Further analysis has revealed that NATO uses this concept as a tool for the strategic communication rather than a military concept.
Research on ontological security in world politics has mushroomed since the early 2000s but seems to have reached an impasse. Ontological security is a conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the management of anxiety in self-constitution. Building especially on Giddens, IR scholars have emphasized how this translates to a need for cognitive consistency and biographical continuity – a security of ‘being.’ A criticism has been its so-called ‘status quo bias,’ a perceived tilt toward theorizing investment in the existing social order. To some, an ontological security lens both offers social theoretic foundations for a realist worldview and lacks resources to conceptualize alternatives. We disagree. Through this symposium, we address that critique and suggest pathways forward by focusing on the thematic of anxiety. Distinguishing between anxiety and fear, we note that anxiety manifests in different emotions and leaves room for a range of political possibilities. Early ontological security scholarship relied heavily on readings of Giddens, which potentially accounts for its bias. This symposium re-opens the question of the relationship between anxiety and subjectivity from the perspective of ontological security, thinking with and beyond Giddens. Three contributions re-think anxiety in ontological security drawing on existentialist philosophy; two address limitations of Giddens' approach.
When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.
This article draws on Hobbes and existentialist philosophy to contend that anxiety needs to be integrated into international relations (IR) theory as a constitutive condition, and proposes theoretical avenues for doing so. While IR scholars routinely base their assumptions regarding the centrality of fear and self-help behavior on the Hobbesian state of nature, they overlook the Hobbesian emphasis on anxiety as the human condition that gives rise to the state of nature. The first section of the article turns to existentialist philosophy to explicate anxiety's relation to fear, multiple forms, and link to agency. The second section draws on some recent interpretations to outline the role that anxiety plays in Hobbesian thought. Finally, I argue that an ontological security (OS) perspective that is enriched by insights from existentialism provides the most appropriate theoretical venue for integrating anxiety into IR theory and discuss the contributions of this approach to OS studies and IR theory.
Fake News, dis- and misinformation campaigns are a core concern for current democratic societies. Whereas most academic interventions have focused on the epistemological and political implication, this paper provides an empirically informed analysis of the fake news controversies. Through an empirical analysis of the German fake news controversy, this paper advances two points: It first gives insights into how the fake news controversy unfolded in Germany. The article shows how multiple issues such as racism, social media and the geopolitical threat of Russia were bound together. Second, on a conceptual level, this article argues for analysing security controversies as a valuable tool to understand new security anxieties. In the context of fake news, studying the controversy reveals how anxieties concerning fake news are produced and reinforced by linking them through a multiplicity of issues. (In)security emerges in controversies where threats in and through new media are linked with the problem of fake news. As a result, ‘fake news’ becomes part of the broader security landscape of contemporary societies.
For Leave voters the Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016 was invested with hopes and dreams, of refound sovereignty and control, freedom and liberty, subjectivity and agency. Brexit was an opportunity for both new beginnings and a reclamation of British essences. Winning, however, has not provided the closure promised, and today Leave supporters often appear decidedly anxious and angry. Bringing together literature on ontological security with Lacanian understandings of the (always incomplete) nature of subjectivity, this paper provides an explanation of how it is that ’Brexit’ became invested with such high hopes of fulfilment, but also why the populist ’fantasies’ underpinning Brexit have inevitably fallen short. However, while closure around ontological security and subjectivity is impossible, the paper shows how the promise of fulfilment (and its inevitable failure) can be politically seductive and mobilizing, is a central strategy of populist politics, but as such is also one that is only likely to exacerbate the ontological anxieties and insecurities upon which populist politics preys.
Since the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, the idea that the EU and Russia are engaged in a geopolitical contest over their common neighbourhood and that the Eastern Partnership (EaP) is Brussels’ instrument in this context appears ‘common sense’. Yet, the reality of the EaP as a policy programme hardly corresponds to such representation, whether in its original purpose, actual content or effects on the ground. To unpack this discrepancy, this article presents a genealogy of what is conceptualised here as the geopoliticisation of the EaP, a notion set forth to designate the discursive construction of an issue as a geopolitical problem. While Russia’s actions in Ukraine certainly contributed to deepen and reinforce this dynamic, the article shows that the geopoliticisation of the EaP was neither merely exogenous nor simply reactive. It was also carried forward from within the European policy community by a discourse coalition which, based on its own political subjectivities and policy agenda, came to frame the EaP as an endeavour aimed at ‘winning over’ countries of the Eastern neighbourhood and ‘rolling back’ Russia’s influence.
A succession of media scandals and policy arguments in the UK in recent years has been integral to the construction of a so-called ‘Muslim Problem’. Media and political attention paid to Muslims in British public life, across a vast and varied range of issues, suggests a social preoccupation that exceeds the security framing the ‘War on Terror’ once imposed. In this article, we develop and apply Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology to produce an original conceptual and analytic framework centred on the social functions served by, as well as the co-constitution of, anxiety and fantasy. We then apply this framework to explore three scandals relating to child sexual exploitation, halal meat and education. We show that the representations of British Muslims that these scandals entail are best understood as ideological fantasies, mobilized to suture traumatic gaps and conceal contradictions in wider social practices around such issues. We argue that the unrelenting media and political focus on myriad aspects of British Muslims’ imagined lives is symptomatic of what Žižek calls an ‘unbearable anxiety’: Islamophobic ideological fantasies conjure a ‘conceptual Muslim’ to sidestep confrontation with the Lacanian ‘Real’ – antagonistic and anxiety-inducing structures and practices underpinning British society, of which we do not speak.
What are the ethical pitfalls of countering hybrid warfare? This article proposes an ontological security-inspired reading of the EU and NATO’s engagement with hybrid threats. It illustrates how hybrid threat management collapses their daily security struggles into ontological security management exercise. This has major consequences for defining the threshold of an Article 5 attack and the related response for NATO, and the maintenance of a particular symbolic order and identity narrative for the EU. The institutionalisation of hybrid threat counteraction emerges as a routinisation strategy to cope with the “known unknowns”. Fostering resilience points at the problematic prospect of compromising the fuzzy distinction between politics and war: the logic of hybrid conflicts presumes that all politics could be reduced to a potential build-up phase for a full-blown confrontation. Efficient hybrid threat management faces the central paradox of militant democracy whereby the very attempt to defend democracy might harm it.
In times when notions of political facts and objective truth are significantly challenged and undermined, this paper seeks to re-examine “old” questions of ideology by paying attention to economies of knowledge deemed fake and (officially) discredited. Using the “docu-fiction” film “Houston, We Have a Problem!” as a grounding point for examining the topological relationship between reason and fantasy inherent in geopolitics, I explore the contradictions within the film's production and reception, as it offers a powerful and complex account of illusion and reality that form our geopolitical worlds. The paper argues for geopolitics as a fantasy, where the fantasy is conceived as a material process, one placed firmly within the field of social practice and productive of social reality itself. The emotional grip of the fantasy is explored through humor, fun and laughter as forms of emotional purchase of geopolitics. To that end, this paper seeks to expand the field of popular geopolitics by offering a psychoanalytically-informed account of the emotional and affective economies involved in the production of geopolitical ideologies, and proceeds to explore how such fantasies of geopolitics continue to inform our contemporary social reality of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” politics.
The article analyses the effects of the migration crisis and the parallel rise of right wing parties on national and regional identities in Slovakia and the broader subregion of the Visegrad Four. It argues that the recent right wing political discourse around migration has been reshaping the meaning of ‘Central Europe’ as a normative project and an identity shared by the V4 countries. The post-Cold War narrative of Central Europe was a story of ‘returning to the West’, which in practice meant that normative conformity with the West was a precondition of membership in key Western institution. The situation has changed visibly after the migrant crisis, as the V4 political elites have now been constructing new identities, in partial juxtaposition with Western European liberalism. These new identities favour a culturalist, conservative interpretation of the nation and reject humanitarian universalism, epitomized by the European Union’s decision to welcome the refugees. This arguably devaluates the previous notion of ‘Central Europe’ as a region that seeks to identify itself firmly with the West. Slovakia is chosen as a case study because of the recent success of the radical right in the 2016 parliamentary elections. The article concludes that although the situation of being structurally locked into the EU does not allow the V4 countries to openly challenge its main principles, the V4 political elites pursue a counter-hegemonic strategy, subverting and resignifying some of its key political notions. One should, therefore, speak not of an end of ‘Central Europe’ but rather of its evolution into a new, hybrid stage, where normative conformity and identification with the West will only be partial. The article makes use of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of discourse and related concepts as well as insights from constructivist geopolitics literature to track articulatory practices of the regional establishments. The study relies on evidence from recent political campaigning in Slovakia as well as official Visegrad Group documents from 2015 to 2016.
The article discusses postracial society as social fantasy. It opens with a discussion of the lived experience of Americans and their attitude towards racism and social and political inequality. Drawing on the studies of public attitude, the article points towards a persisting racism the postracial society aimed to overcome and to the effect recent Black activism had on dismantling the fantasy. The article shows how on the one hand, racism is grounded in the unconscious and in the way a subject becomes politicized, while on the other hand, racism already permeates political categories such as rights or citizenship, concluding that a Black subject cannot exist politically as a Black subject. There is always something that a Black subject has in the excess and that mis-fits with White political categories. The article turns to Lacan's psychoanalysis and his ideas of identification to address the relationship between the subject and the form of authority. Further, the article draws on the postcolonial psychoanalytically inspired ideas of Franz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois to frame the relationship between the White master and the Black subject and to present the impossibility the Black subject faces when met with the implicitly racially biased White political categories.
This article unpacks the fantasy of the Russian online bride and its striking contamination with geopolitical language. Drawing on critical geopolitics and psychoanalysis, it explores the economy of desire and anxiety that accompanies British men's quest for sexually available ‘traditional’ housewives that are still untouched by ‘modern’ feminism. The paper argues that these men desire the slippery substance of Easternness – an ideal object of desire which is too elusive to be conquered or held. The paper thereby inverts existing accounts of the sexualised nature of the geopolitical gaze to expose the traces of geopolitics in sexual fantasies themselves. In doing so, it formulates the basis for a triadic understanding of otherness.
Resilience discourses resignify uncertainty and insecurity as the means to attain security. Security failure is resignified as productive and becomes part of the story about security learning and improvements in anticipatory capability. In this article, I explore questions of failure mediation and ‘securing through insecurity’. If resilience policies suggest that failure and insecurity can be mediated and redeployed in the cause of success, what becomes of visceral sites of security failure such as the terrorist bombsite? This article focuses on a site where security agencies failed to prevent the bombing of a packed nightclub in Bali, in order to explore ambiguity of failure in the resilience era. It considers the efforts of politicians and activists to perform the site as resilient, and the spatial and temporal excess which eludes this performance. The article contributes to critical literatures on resilience by showing, through the ambiguities of resilience at the bombsite, that resilience is a chimera with regards to its supposed incorporation of insecurity.
While the recent IR “narrative turn” has greatly improved our understanding of how narratives influence state policy choices, we need to deepen our understanding of how narratives explain policy change. If state “autobiographies” provide such powerful explanations of why states do what they do, how can they change their policies and practices? To understand the relationship between policy change and state narrative continuity, I build on existing scholarship on narrative analysis and ontological security to examine ways in which state autobiographical narratives are used by political actors to confront state insecurities. My principal argument is that at times of great crises and threats to multiple state securities (physical, social, and ontological), narratives are selectively activated to provide a cognitive bridge between policy change that resolves the physical security challenge, while also preserving state ontological security through offering autobiographical continuity, a sense of routine, familiarity, and calm. I illustrate the argument with an analysis of Serbia's changing foreign policy behavior regarding the disputed status of Kosovo.
This short and hopefully provocative paper serves as both a retrospective of the past twenty years of critical work on so-called popular geopolitics and also an impetus for a more theoretical connection to related areas within cultural studies, such as fan studies. An overarching theme of the history of popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse, which is only now beginning to shift towards audience interpretation, consumption and attachment. This shift in focus parallels a similar move in cultural studies made several years prior. Therefore, this paper advocates combining theories from cultural studies with empirical studies of concern to popular geopolitics to further our understanding. Specifically outlined as a possibility in this paper is the viewing of nationalism and religion as forms of fan-based identities, in that both can be understood as adherence to serial narratives. This perspective carries several corollaries regarding methodology and object of study, most notably a concern with the making of geopolitical meaning by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts.
Focusing on the debates on energy security in Germany, this paper analyzes the structure, logic, and circulation of the “new Cold War” as a geopolitical narrative. We use the literature in critical geopolitics to analyze the conceptual implications of an apparent dissociation between the media and governmental stance toward the new Cold War and its embedded geopolitical logic. The relationship between the “kind” of geopolitics inherent in the new Cold War and the different “forms” in which it circulates suggests a blurring of boundaries between all such geopolitical forms, through multiple crossings-over between institutions, textual genres, and circulating actors. The media presence of the New Cold War also highlights the ambiguity of the “popular” in popular geopolitics, which is further refracted on other geopolitical forms which share its characteristics. This not only makes imperative the more precise formulation of key conceptual categories such as popular or banal geopolitics, but also calls into question the link between the state and particular geopolitical logics, as well as the relationship between the mass media and geopolitics.
While the recent interest in affects and emotions in world politics is encouraging, the crucial relationships between affect, emotion, and discourse have remained largely under-examined. This article offers a framework for understanding the relations between affect and discourse by drawing upon the theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan conceptualises affect as an experience which lies beyond the realm of discourse, yet nevertheless has an effect upon discourse. Emotion results when affects are articulated within discourse as recognisable signifiers. In addition, Lacanian theory conceptualises affect and discourse as overlapping yet not as coextensive, allowing analyses to theoretically distinguish between discourses which become sites of affective investment for audiences and those that do not. Thus, analysing the mutual infusion of affect and discourse can shed light on why some discourses are more politically efficacious than others. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of American affective reactions to 11 September 2001.
The globalization of economics, politics, and human affairs has made individuals and groups more ontologically insecure and existentially uncertain. One main response to such insecurity is to seek reaffirmation of one's self identity by drawing closer to any collective that is perceived as being able to reduce insecurity and existential anxiety. The combination of religion and nationalism is a particularly powerful response (“identity-signifier”) in times of rapid change and uncertain futures, and is therefore more likely than other identity constructions to arise during crises of ontological insecurity.
This paper questions the recent recasting of fear within critical geopolitics. It identifies a widespread metanarrative, `globalized fear', analysis of which lacks grounding and is remote, disembodied and curiously unemotional. A hierarchical scaling of emotions, politics and place overlooks agency, resistance and action. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I call for an emotional geopolitics of fear which connects political processes and everyday emotional topographies in a less hierarchical, more enabling relationship. I employ conscientization as a tool to inform the reconceptualization of global fears within critical geopolitics, and to move forward epistemological practice and our relationship as scholars with social change.
For want of not: Lacan's conception of anxiety
- Burgess
Postmodern geopolitics? The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond
- Ó Tuathail
Putinovi agenti: Jak ruští špioni kradou naše tajemství
- Kundra