Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State

by Brent J. Steele

This volume demonstrates that ontological security is a major motivating rationale for state action and inaction, challenging and complementing realist, liberal and constructivist accounts to international politics.

Genres: Politics

218 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Brent J. Steele is the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He is the author of four books, including Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence (2012). He is the co-editor of six books, has edited four journal special issues or symposia, and has published numerous journal articles, most recently in the European Journal of International Relations and the Journal of Global Security Studies.

Reviews

[Mayim de Vries · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting thoughts scattered across a very theoretical quagmire. While Steele guides you around, he sinks in his own deliberations.

[Lukas Mozdeika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A much-needed fresh look into IR theory offering a counter stance to the dominant realist/rational choice, liberalist and constructivist schools of thought. Brent Steele’s work falls somewhere within the so called reflectivism approach and, as such, is more nuanced and indeed reflexive than the scholarship modelling itself after the natural science.

"He sinks in his own deliberations" is a symptomatic response to a thought that evades simplification. Steele challenges the reader to take up nuance and invites to question and extend theoretical pressupositions instead of trying to squeze in reality itself to fit the frame of a theoretical model, as is often the case with the positivist IR scholarship.

The three case studies on England‘s neutrality of the American Civil war, Belgium‘s will to take up arms against Germany during the WW1 and NATO intervention in Kosovo conflict make up for an interesting read which finely illustrates the ontological security approach and its superior, at least in these cases, explanatory capacity.

My only and very slight remark to Brent J. Steele‘s work would be his framing of the ontological security in terms of 'needs'. Such pragmatic guise feels unnecessary for an otherwise interesting drawal of existentialism into international politics.

Highly appreciated