Marina Vulović’s research while affiliated with Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, German Institute for International and Security Affairs and other places

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.

Prompted by recent scholarly debates on the distinction between populism and nationalism, we elaborate on the Laclaudian understanding of populism as an antagonistic form of us‐building/community‐making that relies on the extension of equivalential chains between demands. From this heuristic perspective, populism can be understood as an empty form to be filled with different contents, such as nationalism. Our radically anti‐essentialist stance combines Laclau's formalist conceptualisation of populism and Brubaker's work on nationalism. We highlight the ontological dimension of populism, as a form of us‐building, and the ontic dimension, as an array of discursive repertoires that fill the form, such as ‘the people’ for peopleism. We explore the ontological–ontic distinction through the case of Narodism in Serbia. Conceptualising populism two‐dimensionally contributes both to debates on the ‘core’ of populism and to cases where articulations of ‘the people’ coincide with expressions of nationhood, civilisationalism and culturalism, rather than being entirely the same.

This article focuses on the re-articulation of the Kosovo myth, specifically Serbia's claim to the territory of Kosovo, within the so-called internal dialogue on Kosovo initiated in 2017 by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. It asks what elements are re-articulated and through which practices, in an effort to institute a counter-hegemonic project of partitioning Northern Kosovo from the rest of the territory. This is mainly achieved through de-mythologizing, de-emotionalizing/rationalizing and economizing Serbia's approach to Kosovo. Within this counter-hegemonic project, Vučić is constituted as an empty signifier, incarnating a solution to the Kosovo-Serbia dispute, whatever content it might take on. Re-articulation of the Kosovo myth involves both transposing Serbia's claim to the territory from Southern and Central to Northern Kosovo, and dis-articulating the Kosovo discourse from the sedimented affects of love and pride that constitute it. The article offers a deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth, conceptualizing it as a discourse in poststructuralist terms and focusing on citationality and re-articulation of its elements in other discursive constellations. Such a reading has implications for re-thinking national myths as bounded narratives of the past, by examining how their elements can constitute even counter-hegemonic projects aimed at the future.

Since Serbia and Kosovo began their political and technical dialogue mediated by the European Union in 2011, numerous agreements were signed, but few of them implemented. In addition, since 2018 the idea of partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines has entered public debates. This article asks why that is the case and argues that Northern Kosovo – specifically, who has the right to claim statehood over this area – lies at the heart of why partition was suggested as a viable option and why so few agreements have been implemented. In order to demonstrate this, the article adopts a performative view of statehood, particularly suitable for states ‘in-becoming’, such as Kosovo. As only externally performed statehood has been examined so far, that is, efforts for international recognition, this article extends performativity to internally negotiated statehood, against the background of two political systems competing for legitimacy in the long run. This is the case with Northern Kosovo, conceptualized as an area of overlapping limited statehood. The developed analytical framework can be extended to other cases of territorial disputes, such as Crimea or Palestine. The framework can also be expanded to explore performativity of statehood in areas where statehood is not institutionally disputed, but rather symbolically.