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"Agius, Christine"
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Drawing the discourses of ontological security
The controversy of the Danish cartoon crisis in 2006 overshadowed a similar one that took place in Sweden a year later. The crises have broadly been framed as a clash of values but both cases reveal differences worthy of investigation, namely for the complex tensions and convergences between the two states on questions of immigration, Nordic solidarity and national identity. This article aims to explore the intersubjective discourses of identity that were threaded through the debates on the cartoon crises, looking to the overlapping discourses that have constructed ideas of identity in terms of ontological security, or security of the self. It argues that both cartoon crises represent a complex discursive performance of identity that speaks to a broader set of ontological security concerns which intersect at the international, regional and national levels. Even in their differences, Swedish and Danish discourses show the tensions associated with the desire for a stable and consistent idea of self when contrasted with the Muslim ‘other’, explored in the context of discourses of modernity and tolerance, which operate as key sites that work to reiterate, reclaim and reinstate the idea of the progressive state.
Journal Article
The politics of identity
In what ways can we think through the complexities of identity? Identity is a contested concept, but it is more than a thing possessed by agents. Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. In this edited book, identity is explored through a range of unique interdisciplinary case studies from around the world. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. This combination showcases in particular the political implications of identity, how it is constituted, and the effects it produces. This edited collection will be of particular interest to students of international relations theory, migration studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and policy-making at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
eBook
‘This is not who we are’: Gendered bordering practices, ontological insecurity, and lines of continuity under the Trump presidency
The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised to return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.
Journal Article
The politics of identity
In what ways can we think through the complexities of identity? Identity is a contested concept, but it is more than a thing possessed by agents. Identity is contingent and dynamic, constituting and reconstituting subjects with political effects. In this edited book, identity is explored through a range of unique interdisciplinary case studies from around the world. Questions of citizenship, belonging, migration, conflict, security, peace and subjectivity are examined through social construction, post-colonialism, and gendered lenses from an interdisciplinary perspective. This combination showcases in particular the political implications of identity, how it is constituted, and the effects it produces. This edited collection will be of particular interest to students of international relations theory, migration studies, gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and policy-making at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
eBook
Lessons from the Viral Body Politic: Borders and the Possibilities of a More-than-Human Worldmaking
Bordering practices have been a central and controversial feature of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Closed borders, lockdowns, and restrictions on movement and individual “freedoms” have revived concepts of the biopolitical “state of exception” and state control. In this article, we argue that biopolitical critiques of responses to the pandemic fail to grasp the opportunity to rethink worldmaking and instead base their critiques on a desired “return to normal” which foregrounds human-centric individualism at the expense of alternative worldmaking that accounts for the more-than-human. To do so, we bring the virus and the virome into our discussion to rethink bordering practices and how the SARS-CoV-2 virus affects bodies, worlds, and politics. We focus primarily on the Australian case, where the pandemic response began with lockdowns and then gave way to a militarized and individualistic approach. Responses to the pandemic have failed to produce a reimagining of human and more-than-human relations. Opportunities for ethical engagement have been missed, resulting in limited responses that stem from the failure of state capacity and entrenched modes of inequality that are harmful to vulnerable others, both human and more-than-human. This requires an ontological reframing of how we relate to a complex world from a more-than-human perspective.
Journal Article
Social construction of Swedish neutrality
Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly in the post-9/11 international environment, neutrality has been conceptualised as a problematic subject. With the end of bipolarity, neutrality as a foreign and security policy lost much of its justification, and in the ongoing ‘War on Terror’, no state, according to the Bush Administration, can be neutral. However, much of this debate has gone unnoticed in IR literature. This book, newly available in paperback, examines the conceptualisation of neutrality from the Peloponnesian War to the present day, uncovering how neutrality has been a neglected and misunderstood subject in IR theory and politics. By rethinking neutrality through constructivism, this book argues that neutrality is intrinsically linked to identity. Using Sweden as a case study, it links identity, sovereignty, internationalism and solidarity to the debates about Swedish neutrality today and how neutrality has been central to Swedish identity and its world-view.
eBook
Performing identity: The Danish cartoon crisis and discourses of identity and security
The Danish cartoon crisis, which attracted international media attention in 2006, has largely been debated as an issue of freedom of speech, feeding into broader debates about the 'clash of civilizations'. This article aims to explore the dominant discourses that performed a seemingly stable and consistent Danish identity at the domestic and external levels. Domestically, the discourse of a progressive Danish identity under threat from unmodern others was performed via discourses of a 'culture struggle' and a restrictive immigration policy designed to keep intact a narrow definition of Danishness. Externally, Danish identity and security was performed and defended via participation in the 'war on terror', democracy promotion and overseas development assistance, which became tools that were not simply associated with security in the liberal sense but also contained a spatial dimension designed to keep consistent the image of the complete nation-state. By adopting a discursive approach, the article aims to explore the performance of Danish identity that animated the cartoon crisis in order to highlight the complexities and contestations that animate ideas of self.
Journal Article
Transformed beyond recognition? The politics of post-neutrality
The transition from neutrality to post-neutrality has been debated by constructivists and rationalists alike as a seemingly logical and unproblen itic move: the end of the Cold War and the widening of the security agenda in a globalizing world nave meant that a state-centric approach to security is no longer viable or desirable. The former neutrals are subsequently reconfiguring their security policies to reflect this development and contributing to European and NATO security initiatives, and at the same time contributing their own unique 'soft security' experiences and practices. This article aims to problematize this seemingly smooth move from neutrality to postneutrality by examining the discourses deployed to facilitate this change. Arguing that there is a politics of post-neutrality at work, it draws attention to how identity is being reconstituted in the process of European integration and identity-formation, and how discourses on changing forms of security cooperation are facilitating the discursive dissemination of an inevitable logic that neutrality in any form will eventually be abandoned.
Journal Article