Ontological Security

WWII and its consequences served to bring a new era of extensive cooperation between the United Kingdom and the United States, leading to the birth of the Anglo-American special relationship (AASR). However, the two countries’ global widespread interests led to inevitable conflicts of interest, mostly favoring the US. Here, the question arises: Why did postwar Britain maintain its attachment to the AASR in times of conflicting interest with America? The paper, motivated by Gidden’s definition of ontological security, discusses that the consequences of WWII not only generated for the UK physical security concerns, but also ontological insecurity. In this respect, postwar Britain, accepting an inferior role, sought a special relationship with the US to consolidate this mutual partnership in order to mitigate its ontological insecurity in the postwar world order. The paper then, by investigating two cases of British-American conflicting interests in Iran, and raising a material-ideational debate, aims to identify the advantages of ontological security theory in explaining Britain’s “mechanism of tolerance” in preserving the AASR. Otherwise stated, through the proposed conceptual framework, the paper explores the way in which ontological security needs shape the postwar UK’s behaviors to prioritize its close relations with the US, regardless of the costs.

The Middle East has witnessed many identity conflicts and rising violent extremist groups after 2003. The most prominent one has been the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has come to the sphere of politics, in the post Arab Spring era. The goal of this paper is to examine the roots of the emergence of violent extremist groups, principally with reference to ISIS rising in Iraq. To do this authors propose “the four-dimensional thick recognition” model that consists of four concepts i.e., 1) historical narratives, 2) self-esteem 3) ontological security, and 4) hubristic identity. This model highlights that historical narratives of conflict, along with lack of self-esteem leads to feeling of ontological insecurity. This, in turn, leads to a kind of hubristic identity crisis, which often paves the way through struggle for regaining it. By content analysis of major texts published by the ISIS through two major magazines, namely Dabiq and Rumiyah, we try to demonstrate how the rise of ISIS was rooted in the issue of thick recognition failure. The paper concludes that thick recognition failure in these four phases, led to the establishment of violent extremist groups particularly in regions with memories of conflict.