Memory and Trauma in International Relations

Theories, Cases and Debates

Erica Resende, Dovile Budryte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415637268
• eBook ISBN: 9781134692958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

This work seeks to provide a comprehensive and accessible survey of the international dimension of trauma and memory and its manifestations in various cultural contexts.

Drawing together contributions and case studies from scholars around the globe, the book explores the international political dimension of feeling, suffering, forgetting, remembering and memorializing traumatic events and to investigate how they function as social practices for overcoming trauma and creating social change. Divided into two sections, the book maps out the different theoretical debates and then moves on to examine emerging themes such as ontological security, social change, gender, religion, foreign policy & natural disasters. Throughout the chapters, the editors consider the social, political and ethical implications of forgetting and remembering traumatic events in world politics

Showcasing how trauma and memory deepen our understanding of IR, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, memory and trauma studies and security studies.

Part I
Theoretical approaches and debates

1Memory, trauma and ontological security

Alexandria J. Innes and Brent J. Steele

Introduction

Ontological security is the seeking of a consistent self through time and space, and the desire to have that self recognized and affirmed by others. Applied to global politics, state and other forms of group behaviour, it is a form of securityseeking that is pursued regarding the ‘who’ or ‘what’ (ontologically) it is or desires to be. Insecurity develops in the ontological security-seeking process in a variety of ways, and trauma presents a radical form of that insecurity – a rupture of the consistent self through time and space. The aim of this chapter is to engage the growing literature on ontological security, and to connect it to issues of trauma and memory by showing how states secure their being by formulating their perceived cohesiveness through the discursive articulation of collective memories and traumatic experiences. This articulation can help to reduce the fundamental unpredictability of the surrounding environment and their own vulnerability vis-à-vis other states and political actors.

The chapter begins by providing a basic ‘sketch’ of ontological security. We discuss how ontological security treatments have located trauma and memory in the ontological security process. As we demonstrate, the ontological security literature is far from uniform on this location. We review the growing, robust, empirical engagements of ontological security in global politics, with a focus on how such studies treat trauma, memory and social change. The chapter concludes by considering the Arab Spring and what additional insight the rebuilding of order in Egypt can offer for ontological security theory. Egypt, during the revolution, came to be in a position of ontological insecurity as the social order that had been in place for several decades was overturned.

Ontological security theory

The field of international relations (IR) has conventionally been focused on security concerns. Traditionally, such concerns have centralized the physical security and insecurity of states as they exist in an anarchic international system. States are vulnerable in the anarchic realm of international politics to the actions of other states and political actors (Herz 1950; Jervis 1978; Morgenthau 1978; Waltz 1979). Insecurity results from uncertainty over the intentions of other states; thus states acquire power to protect themselves from the possible malicious actions of other states and actors. Yet, especially over the past two decades, this understanding of ‘security’ has been expanded and amended, and this chapter posits the assumption that, among other purposes of states, identity plays a fundamental role in state security practices. Potential state insecurity can be understood, then, as not only the possibility of physical threat from other actors and global entities, but also the prospective transformations and developments that call into question a state or group's identity.

The concept of ontological security comes from psychologist R. D. Laing, who:

… described the ontologically secure agent as someone who has ‘a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and in a temporal sense, a continuous person’ and noted that if ontological security is absent, ‘the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat’.

(Zarakol 2010: 6, citing Laing 1969: 39)

Ontological security theory was developed most extensively through Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory more than three decades ago. Structuration theory sees structures and agents as mutually constitutive. Put another way, rather than taking structure and agency as dichotomous concepts that operate independently from one another, structuration theory understands all agents to be a product of their structure, and all structures to be created and recreated by the (constrained) choices of agents (Giddens 1984). Structure is not a compelling force, but is the dynamic in which autonomous agents manage their actions. Thus, ‘ordinary day-to-day social life … involves an ontological security founded on autonomy of bodily control within predictable routines and encounters’ (Giddens 1984: 64). Ontological security is security that is internal to the individual and which represents the ability of an individual to exercise bodily autonomy within a given environment.

Certainty in the routines and practices of daily life, and a ‘futural sense’ of social life in which one can form predictable expectations, help to secure who we are as social beings (Giddens 1984: 62). Identity is constituted from experiences in social interactions. These interactions are founded in a body of subconscious knowledge that makes routines predictable and recognizable. This knowledge is ‘“mutual knowledge”, which refers to the interpretive schemes whereby actors constitute and understand social life as meaningful; … [and] “common sense”, which can be seen as comprising a more-or-less articulated body of theoretical knowledge’ (Giddens 1993: 21). If the mutual knowledge and theoretical knowledge are disrupted, and made irrelevant through unexpected change in quotidian life, then the individual has no foundation on which to base expectations and thus is left in a state of ontological insecurity. Social life becomes unpredictable, and the individual is vulnerable and experiences existential anxiety.

If ontological security is a sense of certainty of one's way of being in the world, then the state can be theorized at two levels. At the first level, the state is the body that provides the community identification and institutional framework that guarantees certainty, order and predictability for society (Kinnvall 2004; Skey 2010). At the second level, the state itself is an actor that exists within a given environment and which strives to maintain ontological security. In that sense, the state's way of being in the world depends on its place in the international community as well as its internal identity. Therefore ontological security at the state level relies on the state's biographical narrative and the perceptions of the social community of which the state is a part (Mitzen 2006; Steele 2005, 2008a; Zarakol 2010). The state seeks out a continuous collective identity in which it understands itself to be a real entity. It must have a basis on which to manage behaviour within a body of mutual knowledge that is shared by the social community. One of the ways in which states attempt to secure their Selves is to provide meaning for their past and current actions. This is accomplished through the discursive articulation of a(n) (auto)biographical identity narrative that informs state behaviour in the international system. State or group behaviour thus can be considered a series of active attempts to underwrite, and narrate, a sense of what it is as a state or group act.

Ontological security refers to the desire and urge of a social actor to survive and surpass not only as a physical entity, but also as a certain sort of (social) being. Actors craft such being by assessing their Selves within ordered environments, for an entity cannot know what or who it is within chaos. The importance of ontological security can be seen most clearly in situations of ontological insecurity. Issues of memory and trauma are implicated because states secure their perceived cohesiveness through the discursive articulation of collective memories and traumatic experiences in order to reduce the unpredictability of the surrounding environment and their own vulnerability vis-às-vis other states and political actors. Trauma can be understood as an instance that, when experienced, creates radical ontological insecurity – calling into question the Self as it is conceived and conceptualized. Trauma can also serve as a springboard to political contestation, creating space for a biographical narrative to be reaffirmed or rewritten through political action (Steele 2008a). Put another way, some ‘chosen’ traumas can serve as a resource for crafting and shaping the present and future group Self (Kinnvall 2004: 755), ‘used by agents to synthesize’ their narratives regarding who or what they wish to become in light of who or what they do not (Steele 2008a: 57).

The contributions of ontological security in international relations

Like individuals, the state or other groups are social actors, constructing a sense of Self against, with and amongst others. Ontological security depends on the order that states maintain through institutional arrangements (Huysmans 1998; McSweeney 1999). Because such routines are created within a social environment not firmly within an actor's control, these changes can be fluid and frequent. Further, this interactive environment includes other actors who can manipulate or insecuritize a targeted actor's sense of Self with actions, intended or otherwise, which call that Self, and its narratives, into question. Social movements, for instance, frequently seek to revise and undermine a given institutional order. This then creates a space of ontological insecurity whereby order must be re-established and the identity narrative rewritten or reaffirmed according to the new order.

Thus, the need for ontological security, and therefore the process of seeking ontological security, can be seen most clearly where it is absent: in situations in which traumatic events make ontological security and insecurity legible. Jennifer Mitzen describes one such situation via the example of a rape victim, who:

… might ask herself how could this happen to me – which becomes who am I, what kind of person am I that this could happen? A survivor of 9/11 might ask why he survived and not his partner, which becomes who am I without her?

(Mitzen 2006: 348)

Thus identity is implicated when the routines of existence in which identity is practised are ruptured.

Ontological security is a burgeoning theoretical approach in the critical security literature, associated with the broadening and deepening of security studies. The first studies by Jef Huysmans and Bill McSweeney, appearing in the late 1990s, introduced the term to explain ‘the mediation of chaos and order’ that constitutes political communities and other social communities (Huysmans 1998). Security thus is broadened, for rather than identifying objective threats, a threat becomes something that the state normatively recognizes as posing a danger to social order. Therefore the social collective intersubjectively determines the characteristics of threat in order to exist in a secure social environment.

McSweeney's study suggested that ‘we can only do security, or do identity, if there is a body of typified actions, mediated by structure, from which to draw in order to make sense’ (McSweeney 1999: 166). Thus security is positioned within the experiences of humans in building communities. McSweeney adopts ontological security as a method of creating boundaries in which a positive security can remain analytically narrow enough to be coherent, yet allow security to be conceived of as broader than statecentric military concerns or the physical negative security of the state. Security can be analysed via a core of ontological security that ‘locate[s] the meaning of security in the common experience of individuals’ (McSweeney 1999: 154).

One might organize the work since those pioneering studies on ontological security via the apt observation made by Ayse Zarakol, in a recent study, that ‘this concept within IR has come to be marked by the same tension that demarcates psychology and sociology. In other words, the budding scholarship on ontological security has run into its own version of the agent-structure problem.’ Zarakol (2010: 6) summarizes this problem in the form of a succinct question: ‘Are interactions and the international environment the main source of ontological anxiety for a state, or are the insecure interactions merely a consequence of the state's own uncertainty about its own identity?’

On the more structural, sociological or ‘social’ end of the spectrum is Jennifer Mitzen's iconic 2006 article. Here, ontological insecurity is attended to by participation in a community in which routines can be structured according to the social relations and the order of that community. The state seeks identity security in social relations in addition to physical security, understanding the state as a coherent actor in possession of an identity. Thus state relations, to the extent that they are routinized, might provide a sense of ontological security. This can effectively explain the endurance of security dilemmas in that states become attached to the routine and identity of being in conflict. Thus it is not uncertainty that prohibits the end of a security dilemma conflict, but identity (Mitzen 2006).

As Zarakol (2010: 6) notes, Brent Steele's work emphasizes the agentic focus of ontological security, emphasizing ways in which agents seek out ontological security. The ‘environment’ here sees the Self as the source for its own ‘sociality’: ‘our inner Selves are an environment of their own – a dialectical community’ (Steele 2008a: 34). This environment is both spatial and historical-temporal. In this way, Steele emphasizes how agents engage past Selves as sources of positive and negative models for current and future actions.

Much of the literature remains concerned with ontological security at the level of the common experience of individuals, frequently engaging the unit of the state, but also focusing on collectives within states. These more ‘middle ground’ studies focus both on the need to narrate the collective Self and on how those narrations develop in a context of relations with others (Zarakol 2010: 7). Caterina Kinnvall's work explains the rise of religious identifications and nationalist identifications as a means of reaffirming ontological security in the face of the increasing uncertainty of globalization (Kinnvall 2004). Globalization represents social change in terms of the economic, political and social linkages between societies. Globalization contests who society members are and where social boundaries lie (Held et al. 1999; Kinnvall 2004). Thus changes brought by globalization can be understood as social change. For Kinnvall (2004: 743), globalization provokes ‘increasing rootlessness and loss of stability as people experience the effects of capitalist development, media overflow, structural adjustment policies, privatization, urbanization, unemployment, forced migration, and other similar transformative forces’. Such a social dislocation provokes an ontological insecurity and a desire to form stronger social community bonds to overcome such insecurity.

Understanding trauma through ontological security

Memory proves central to ontological security. It is used, and even manipulated, to create the basis for action – a practice that Giddens titles ‘historicity’: the ‘use of history to make history’ (Giddens 1990: 243). Trauma occurs when something cannot be easily located into that collective memory, because it poses a threat either to how the state sees itself or to how the state is perceived by others in its behaviour in the international environment. Trauma can then be understood as resulting from a particular disturbing or shocking event proving difficult to narrate collectively. Trauma is relevant to understanding ontological security in two main ways. The first is specific to collective memory. A particular traumatic event for a nation that becomes important in the creation and reproduction of ontological security tends to be one that upsets a nation's idea of itself – that is, it upsets a certain understanding of the collective biographical narrative. In this way, trauma produces ontological insecurity, and state actions can be understood as ways in which to bolster national identity and to recreate ontological security. On the other hand, a particular trauma might be narrated in such a way in the collective memory as to be formative of the collective identity of a nation. One of the criteria of nationhood, according to nationalist scholar Dan Smith (2000), is the will to ‘walk through blood’; hence the trauma of a war of independence or secession is understood as contributing to the right of territorial autonomy for a national group and is formative of the group in question.

Social change comes about in the ontological security-seeking process through a variety of practices. A first occurs when the routine of an ontologically securityseeking actor is ruptured by a ‘critical situation’ – an unpredictable situation that an actor finds threatening to its sense of Self. Facing the possibility of ontological insecurity, the actor revises or updates its routine in light of such a situation. Another way in which ontological security-seeking actors seek out social change regards the biographical narratives used to create meaning for their past, current and future Selves. Social change may represent rupture or revision of that biographical narrative that affects ontological security, forcing a state to rewrite how it sees itself. When a collective is exposed to ontological insecurity and unpredictability, there is a need to revise the collective narrative that helps discipline memory and understanding of the Self.

Although it has not been a primary focus in the ontological security literature, several studies foreground the role of trauma in the ontological security process and have applied ontological security to understanding a variety of processes. Steele (2008a: 56) discusses the role of trauma in disrupting collective memories: ‘History in a collection of experiences and memory is the conduit through which we recall those experiences, but traumatic experiences disrupt the ability to channel certain events into a coherent narrative.’ Since the biographical narrative of the state that constitutes state identity can be understood as collective memory, trauma can destabilize that memory and consequently the biographical narrative can either be contested or reinstalled through narration, which is a political act (Edkins 2003; Steele 2008a).

Zarakol (2010) shifts consideration of the identit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Theoretical approaches and debates
• Part II Cases
• Bibliography
• Index