Abstract
Ambivalence is widely regarded as a source of ontological insecurity and anxiety due to its close association with uncertainty, undecidability, and indeterminacy. While ontological security studies (OSS) has usefully engaged with the concept of ambivalence as an epistemic phenomenon and its manifestations in international politics such as ‘strangers’, almost no attention has been paid to ambivalence as a strategic choice, that is to strategic ambivalence. Building up on the extant OSS scholarship, this article first conceptualizes strategic ambivalence as strategization of affective ambivalence by state actors for ontological ends through narrative productions and discursive representations. It then deploys the Lacanian theorization of the lacking-desiring subject’s relations with the symbolic Other to investigate the question of how strategic ambivalence may operate as a vehicle for fulfillment of a fantasized Self and attainment of ontological security. It argues that strategic ambivalence speaks to a deeper Self-negating paradox at the heart of the split subject as it desires – and inevitably fails – to remedy its inherent division and ontological insecurity. Adopting a subjective-performative view of statehood as opposed to an essentialist ‘state as person’ framework, the article lastly proceeds to instantiate its theoretical propositions by interrogating the Islamic Republic of Iran’s controversial intervention in the Russia-Ukraine War on behalf of the Russian aggressor; an involvement Iran has, paradoxically, both confirmed and denied in a strategically ambivalent attempt to manage contradictions and anxieties of its anti-Western and anti-aggression identities.
Introduction
Those who follow international political and security developments in the news media are likely to come across occasions where politicians and spokespersons refuse to comment on certain subjects and their respective states’ relations to or involvement in them. This calculated silence that usually manifests itself in a ‘no comments’ policy and a tendency to ‘neither deny nor confirm’ engagement in an outcome or activity may signify efforts to eschew conflicts of interest but it also often speaks, more significantly, to a desire to placate a sense of affective unease about committing to contradictory practices and self-identities, of ‘ontological dissonance’ in other words. 1 Perhaps less common yet equally significant is when international actors choose to send ‘mixed signals’ about morally contentious or dubious courses of action and thus somehow both deny and confirm involvement in them, a type of foreign policy conduct partly captured by the term ‘plausible deniability’ as an instrument of statecraft. 2 The choice for mixed signals, of simultaneous narrative dismissal and confirmation, opposition and approval, indicates above all a preference for nestling in affective ambivalence.
A contemporary case in point is Iran’s representation of its controversial engagement in the Russia-Ukraine war to support the Russian aggressor against Western-allied Ukraine, boasting of close military cooperation with Moscow in congruence with its anti-Western identity 3 yet at the same time repudiating any involvement in it in defence of its anti-aggression self-concept. ‘Those who accuse Iran of providing weapons to one of the sides in the Ukraine war are doing so for political purposes’, former Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said on the second anniversary of the invasion in response to questions about Tehran’s military deliveries to Russia. ‘We have not given any drones [or missiles] to take part in that war’. 4
Due to its close association with uncertainty, undecidability, indeterminacy, and ‘strangeness’, ambivalence is typically regarded as a major source of ontological insecurity and anxiety. 5 Dwelling in epistemic ambivalence and developing what has been termed ‘the art of doubt’ 6 is thus hailed as a necessary and ineluctable mode of being, relating and acting in a globalized world fraught with risk, unpredictability, and vulnerability. 7 While ontological security studies (OSS) has usefully engaged with the phenomenon of epistemic ambivalence as such and its manifestations in international politics such as the position occupied by ‘strangers’, 8 almost no attention has been paid to deliberate instrumentalization and strategization of affective ambivalence by state actors in the form of narratives and discursive representations for ontological ends – what I dub strategic ambivalence here.
The present writing thus differentiates between two forms of often interconnected ambivalence for purposes of better analytical clarity: epistemic and affective. Epistemic (or epistemological) ambivalence is the kind of knowledge-related ambivalence encountered in the social world, which ontological security research in IR has concerned itself with for the most part. Affective ambivalence, on the other hand, is emotionally based and of particular interest to psychoanalysis and psychology proper. With this distinction in mind, strategic ambivalence, as will be unpacked later, is meant to refer to a state subject’s narrative renditions and discursive strategization of affective ambivalence at the service of ontological security ends. The primary question that arises here is, what does this affective ambivalence show about the political subjectivity of the state under consideration and its psychic underpinnings. In other words, what do foreign policy practices of strategic ambivalence reveal about the ‘I’ of the practicing state as socially-symbolically constructed, that is about the (fantasized/imagined) Self of the state, and how this ambivalence operates as a vehicle for pursuit of ontological security.
Inspired by Jacques Lacan’s 9 theorization of Self-Other relations in the dialectic of desire, the article argues that strategic ambivalence, represented by simultaneous narrative confirmation and denial of a certain deed or course of action, speaks to a deeper paradox at the heart of the split subject as they desire – and inevitably fail – to remedy their ontological lack, achieve the wholeness of their self-identity and become their full selves. Strategic ambivalence as an interesting phenomenon in international politics emerges when actors strive to accommodate self-contradictory patterns of behavior and uphold conflicting facets of the Self while mitigating anxieties and insecurities arising from ontological shame, autobiographical dissonance and behavioral self-contradiction. 10 Strategizing ambivalence or ‘straddling’ 11 in the practice of social interactions and especially in narrative representation of those practices is not only a political attempt to minimize material losses or maximize material gains, to have the cake and eat it too so to speak, but also exposes a fantasmatic operation to capture an elusive and illusory Self in the face of failure and insecurity that confrontation with the lacking (big) Other (“l’Autre”) in the symbolic realm entails.
This writing proceeds in three major sections. First, I will provide an investigative review of scholarship on ambivalence as a source of ontological insecurity in existing IR theory and OSS literature, tracing its roots back to the sociological thoughts of Zygmunt Bauman on modernity. 12 The next part will investigate the concept of strategic ambivalence through psychoanalytic lenses, relying primarily on Lacanian readings of desire and fantasy to illustrate how the practice is driven by an ontological security-seeking function. These theoretical propositions will inform, in the last section, the empirical analysis of Iran’s involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war to delineate what fantasies such contentious behavior upholds and simultaneously undermines. The main purpose is to show how engagement in strategic ambivalence signifies that the state subject’s path to realization of a fantasized Self inevitably goes through its negation and thus fails, keeping the desire flowing. Before reviewing the OSS literature on ambivalence, however, a note on metatheoretical and methodological aspects of the study, which pertains to the state subject, is necessary.
In congruence with its Lacanian framework that posits a negative ontology for the symbolic subject defined by ‘lack’, the article seeks to stay clear of the ‘state as person’ 13 approach to OSS analysis that builds on a positive ontology by assuming both the Self of the person and thence that of the state as givens waiting to be secured by the subject in question. This is what Epstein dismisses as ‘IR’s fallacy of composition’ in that the (Wendtian) ‘state person’, – deployed to extrapolate and ascribe human psychic dynamics and emotional states like ontological (in)security to collective entities – stems from a biological essentialist conception which assigns a ‘pre-social “rump materialist” self’ to the human person and then uses it as a premise to propose that the state unit too has a pre-social essential Self or identity. 14 In contrast, the present inquiry adopts a subjective-performative view of statehood and proceeds from the Lacanian notion of subjectivity that forms upon entry into the symbolic – the sphere of language, law, culture, and discourse – and interaction with the Other through a process marked by ‘misrecognition’ and ‘alienation’. 15 In Lacan’s words, it is ‘in the other that the subject first identifies himself and even experiences himself’. 16 More specifically, the primitive ‘I/me’ that emerges from the specular image of the ‘fragmented body’ (corps morcelé) 17 in the imaginary register – much like a nation or ‘body-national/social’ in its inception 18 – constitutes ‘the basic layer of identity, the first alienation in the mirror stage on top of which all further alienations through the signifier of the Other will be stacked’. 19 Insofar as subjectivity formation takes place by virtue of encounter with the symbolic Other, we may theoretically talk about the state subject forged in the symbolic order of the international society as well.
Pertinently, unlike Wendt’s pre-given ‘essential state’ as the main point of departure for state-level analysis, the subjective state has no a priori ontological status but comes into being and acquires a Self in a fantasized fashion – that is, as a fantasy – through pronouncements, performances, practices, and representations in the international sphere. 20 Such an anti-foundational perspective would enable us to apply affective and emotional dynamics to collective actors without the essentialist reduction of the social to the individual. Indeed, it is within the symbolic order, the sphere of the Other, of discourse and language, that the subject constitutes her (perpetually unfulfilled) Self through speaking, signification and symbolization. 21 The critical role of speaking in Self-making processes has led scholars like Epstein to call for a focus on discursively produced ‘subject-positions’ only, ‘while bracketing issues of subjectivity’ which implicate the ‘hyper-individualized’ category of desire. 22 Yet, this emphasis on discursive subject-positions for identity analysis at the state level only addresses the question of ‘who speaks’ and thus comes at the expense of leaving out the question of ‘who feels’ exactly because, as Epstein herself points out, ‘social actors, that is political subjectivities cannot be reduced to being discursive phenomena’. 23
In fact, feelings, emotions, and affects are an inherent part of any political subjectivity and ultimately manifest themselves in subject-positions. Metaphorically speaking, political subjectivity may be envisaged as an iceberg of which subject-position is the tip, and it is the tip that alerts us to the workings of what is underneath. We might not be able to determine ‘who feels’ as clearly as we are able to determine ‘who speaks’ at the state level, but since emotions are clearly implicated in the articulation of subject-positions, representations, practices, and performances that constitute the state, the latter hold the key to appraising those emotions and, by extension, its political subjectivity. When state X, for instance, announces that it is ‘outraged’ at a development, all those representing the state are taken in the symbolic field to espouse the feelings of outrage at that development regardless of how they might individually feel, and the audience realizes by observing the connection between X as a state and the discursively expressed emotions that if a certain policy decision or course of action ensues with respect to that development, those emotions are part of what has induced it. By the same token, an inquiry into ontological (in)security at the state level needs to draw out the emotions and affects that inform the political subjectivity and self-concept of a given state actor in order to make sense of related practices and what drives them. 24
Epistemic ambivalence as ontological insecurity
It is perhaps no coincidence that the first serious, albeit brief, engagement with the idea of ambivalence in International Relations theory appeared in an inquiry into the concept of security. In his seminal work on security and its discursive formation as a ‘thick signifier’, Huysmans draws attention to the ‘hermeneutic problem’ posed by the failure of the act of ordering itself when we face ‘undecidables’ in the social world such as ‘strangers’ who are neither friends nor enemies, neither insiders nor outsiders, but in fact somehow both. ‘They articulate ambivalence and therefore challenge the (modern) ordering activity which relies on reducing ambiguity and uncertainty by categorizing elements’. 25 These inherently ambivalent forces that resist discursive determinability and defy symbolic categorization are thus a source of ontological insecurity par excellence, exposing the limits of reflexivity and intelligibility as they do. 26 They threaten a stable, continuous, and bounded sense of Self as distinct from the other and ‘differentiated from the rest of the world’ yet ‘coextensive with the body’, which Laing 27 assumes to be core requirements of ontological security. In other words, as Giddens 28 maintains, what is destabilized and disrupted here is the unconscious sense of ‘confidence’ subjects are supposed to have both in the ‘continuity’ of Self or their internal identities and in the ‘constancy’ of others, or their external environment. In this sense, epistemic ambivalence embodied by strangers and foreigners, confounds our efforts to find, ‘on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, “answers” to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses’. 29
As noted earlier and as it will become more and more apparent moving forward, the extant OSS scholarship on ambivalence is to some extent grounded in a positive ontology, that is, a view of ontological (in)security that takes for granted the existence of a stable unitary Self – for the person and accordingly for the state – and directs its analytic scrutiny toward threats against this Self including that posed by epistemic ambivalence.
From stigmatized other to liminal stranger
In light of this strong linkage between ambivalence and ontological insecurity, the former has been insightfully spotted in collective identification processes and explored in the OSS literature in various ways. In her groundbreaking work on stigma in IR, Zarakol 30 teases out Norbert Elias’s ‘established-outsider’ figuration 31 in the historical context of East-West relations, demonstrating how occupying the ‘ambivalent’ position of non-Western status while aspiring for Western standards of civilization has caused post-imperial Eastern states – Turkey, Japan, and Russia in the study – to be stigmatized as ‘outsiders’ by the ‘established’ Western states in the modern international system. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s conceptualization of stigma – as an internalized mark of discredit imposed from outside 32 – and Bauman’s sociology of the stranger as an ‘excluded Other’, 33 she contends that ‘states which fall short of the normative ideals of international society at any given time can be (and have been) stigmatized – in other words, tainted and discounted, both in the minds of others and their own’. 34 Even though Zaraol does not directly delve into the concept of ambivalence, her stigmatization thesis connects it with the affect of ‘shame’ and ontological insecurity at the collective level in that being stigmatized ‘as an outsider’, she points out, ‘has serious costs and leaves a permanent mark on the national habitus’. 35 A similar line of argument could be tracked in Çapan and Zarakol’s work 36 on ontological insecurities of the ‘non-Western Self’ where Turkey’s ‘ambivalent’ identity and liminal sense of place as a bridge between East and West is scrutinized in terms of spatial/‘structural insecurity’ and ‘temporal insecurity’ by contrasting ‘Kemalist’ and ‘Erdoganist’ responses to them.
Picking up on these theoretical cues about anxieties of divided Selves, Vieira 37 sets out to theorize postcolonial subjectivity from a Lacanian perspective, zooming in on the ontological lack at the core of the ‘ambivalent/hybrid’ subject who is torn by an ‘ever-present desire to emulate but also resist the “ego-ideal”’ of the Western Other. Vieira’s analysis of Brazil’s postcolonial ontological (in)security has significant implications for our understanding of ambivalence as he uniquely uses the phenomenon to instantiate Lacan’s theory of the split subject and the lack of a core of identity caused by its entrance into the symbolic (colonizer-dominated international) order. For him, the ambivalence ‘between being and not being Western/modern’ constitutes postcolonial states’ autobiographical narratives and is embedded into their foreign policy practices. 38 Accordingly, one may posit, ambivalence generates affective unease and ontological insecurity not only because it troubles our tendency to order, structure, and categorize external reality, as represented by strangers or foreigners, but also because it implies division, fissure, and splitting within the ambivalent subject itself. What arises from such a theoretical consideration is a broader understanding of the concept, that is, both as indeterminacy and as dividedness. 39 Pertinently, in the latter sense in particular, ambivalence also connotes a state of overlap or, more precisely, liminality as an in-between and threshold space of ambiguity, blurriness and hybridity where ‘established structures are dislocated, hierarchies reversed, and traditional settings of authority possibly endangered’. 40 The ambiguous and disconcerting nature of ambivalent states thus understood is due to the fact that they do not lend themselves to the network of sociopolitical and cultural designations since ‘liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. 41
The IR literature on epistemic ambivalence encompasses almost all these conceptual dimensions of the term as the most elaborate theoretical treatment of it to date, with special focus on the figure of ‘the Stranger’, demonstrates. In their astute effort to turn the analytical spotlight on the concept, ‘understood as a figure representing ambiguity and triggering feelings of ambivalence’, Berenskötter and Nymalm 42 primarily concentrate on how state subjects may construe each other as strangers and how they may respond to such encounters and interpretations. Differentiating between sociological and phenomenological readings of the Stranger, as the epitome of ambivalence that defies familiar friend-enemy classifications and as an evasive ‘uncanny experience more generally’, they delineate three expressions of strangerhood in interstate relations: the encounter with ‘rising powers’ in the eyes of the hegemon, the disappearance of enmity between actors who used to have an antagonistic relationship and the fading of friendship between close allies. 43 In all three scenarios, they contend, it is the experience of ambivalence as a consequence of facing a so-far-familiar and ‘close’ other who then moves to an unfamiliar and ‘distant’ zone that spawns sentiments of ontological insecurity for the Self. 44
The inescapability of epistemic ambivalence
The ontological (in)security approach to ambivalence as a categorically ‘disordering’, hence psychologically unsettling, phenomenon derives for the most part from the sociological theory of modernity developed by Zygmunt Bauman who defines it primarily in terms of an intrinsic and natural linguistic (mal)function:
Ambivalence, the possibility of assigning an object or an event to more than one category, is a language-specific disorder: a failure of the naming (segregating) function that language is meant to perform. The main symptom of disorder is the acute discomfort we feel when we are unable to read the situation properly and to choose between alternative actions. It is because of the anxiety that accompanies it and the indecision which follows that we experience ambivalence as a disorder . . . Ambivalence is therefore the alter ego of language, and its permanent companion—indeed, its normal condition.
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To instantiate ambivalence, characterized by undecidability and indetermination, Bauman 46 cites a number of linguistic examples from Jacques Derrida such as pharmakon (a generic Greek term that denotes both remedy and poison), hymen (another Greek word standing for ‘both membrane and marriage’), and supplement (a French term meaning both an addition and a replacement), which all share the position of neither the inside nor the outside. ‘Undecidables are all neither/nor, that is, simultaneously, either/or’, he asserts. ‘They bring the outside into the inside, and poison the comfort of order with suspicion of chaos. This is exactly what the strangers do’. 47
It is crucial to point out, however, that ambivalence is not solely a socially constructed phenomenon. Unlike the native who is born ‘into’ a community setting, the stranger does not, by default, enjoy the state of ‘being situated’ or ‘tuned’. The stranger, in this sense, is ‘his own problem’, self-constructed as such: regardless of being alien to the graduated knowledge of the community shared by the natives and no matter how hard she strives to assimilate the native knowledge, her ‘incongruent existential constitution . . . as neither included nor excluded’ makes her escape from strangerhood impossible, a process of which she, of course, actively and inevitably so, partakes. 48 A stranger is defined a priori as a stranger rather than becoming one a posteriori or after being defined. Put otherwise, one does not become a stranger but is one, thanks to her inescapable ontological and existential position. ‘One cannot knock on a door’, in Bauman’s words, ‘unless one is outside; and it is the act of knocking on the door which alerts the residents to the fact that one who knocks is indeed outside’. 49
In response to encounters with ambivalence as a wellspring of psychological discomfort, scholars have proposed strategies that share the common denominator of treating strangeness, liminality, and ambiguity as an all-encompassing universal ‘condition of the social’, 50 as an opportunity for, rather than a threat to, identity formation which thereby steers clear of dualist friend-enemy frameworks. Along these lines, Cash 51 draws on Ulrich Beck’s conceptualization of ‘reflexive doubt’ versus ‘linear doubt’ and John Keats’ notion of ‘negative capability’ to invite us ‘to dwell in ambivalence’ as a ‘capacity to resist the lure of ready-made certainties’. For Beck, reflexive doubt in particular is about ‘break[ing] the energy of truth, which drives doubt to despair’ and thus his ‘art of doubt’ consists primarily in developing the ability to not only accept doubt as ‘an element of life like air and water’ but also to learn to doubt doubt itself: ‘To doubt completely, doubting down even the supreme doubt, is to be able to discover that doubts empower us . . . They force the doubter to decide, and design himself’. 52
These calls for openness to ambivalence, strangeness and doubt are underpinned, from a psychoanalytic perspective, by Kristeva’s 53 transformative proposition that the stranger or foreigner, indeed the ambivalent other, resides within us and is already part of our unconscious Selves. Kinnvall 54 aptly adopts this critical insight in her ontological security study of Self-Other conflicts triggered by globalization to eschew the pitfalls of essentialism in analyses of collective identity formation. Influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva suggests that in our desirous struggle for self-sameness, wholeness, unity, and integrity, we as split and ailing subjects marked by ontological lack and divide, seek to remedy the ailment by projecting it onto the foreigner and protecting ourselves against her—what Kinnvall refers to as ‘securitization of subjectivity’. 55 ‘A symptom that precisely turns “we” into a problem, perhaps makes it impossible’, Kristeva asserts. ‘The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises . . .’. 56 The ‘strange’ truth that we fail to grasp, however, is that ‘the foreigner lives within us, he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode’ and yet this ruinous foreigner starts to vanish as soon as ‘we acknowledge ourselves as foreigners . . .’. 57 She therefore urges us to recognize the ambivalent other within ourselves while refusing to give it a ‘permanent structure’, and to seek to ‘lighten that otherness by constantly coming back to it’ rather than ‘solidify [it] . . . into a thing’. 58 For Kristeva, the absence of such recognition and the attendant solidification of the stranger’s otherness into a burden inclines us toward ‘abjection’ and ‘abject’ creation, that is, threat construction with reference to a ‘jettisoned object’ from which one cannot escape or separate oneself as ‘the abject does not cease challenging its master’. 59 More specifically, abject is the ‘imaginary uncanniness’ that menaces the Self from within, ‘something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object’. 60
Having discussed the concept of ambivalence and its manifestations from socio-psychological viewpoints, I have so far illustrated how the phenomenon may engender ontological insecurity and what implications this might hold for Self’s relations with the other. I will now proceed in the next section to delineate the question of strategic ambivalence and how it functions as part of the state subject’s desire to secure a Self and thus achieve ontological security.
Affective ambivalence and the split subject
Whether one subscribes to the view that ambivalence emanates from the other and the onus of resolution is on her or that it originates in the unconscious Self and is intrinsic to it, there seems to be consensus over the idea that it does pose a challenge to the subject’s psychological integrity and ontological security. This ambivalence, embodied by the figure of the stranger, alien, or any other unknown and uncategorizable entity for that matter, is something the subject encounters in the social world, fails to categorize as good/friendly/safe or bad/hostile/threatening, and consequently feels disordered, discomforted, and unsettled by it. For the sake of analytical clarity, we may label this phenomenon epistemic ambivalence, which as Kristeva contends, may ultimately be rooted in the unconscious. Yet, it is the kind of encounter the subject experiences in the course of interacting with external social reality but does not necessarily feel ambivalent about. Rather, the feeling such encounters generate is often one of ontological unease and existential anxiety, as the above review reveals. That epistemic ambivalence is experienced as a disorder, as per Bauman, does not necessarily mean that we simultaneously love and hate it. An object is ambivalent – or carries ambivalence – not because the subject feels ambivalent, that is simultaneously good and bad, about it but because it does not lend itself to the subject’s epistemological ordering and categorizing attempt who thereby fails to classify it as good or bad. In other words, epistemic ambivalence is to be theoretically distinguished from affective ambivalence, a feeling of concurrent positivity and negativity about something, which the subject might experience upon encountering an object.
Affective ambivalence strategized
In psychology and psychoanalysis, ambivalence was first introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler in a lecture in 1910 where he differentiated between voluntary ambivalence or that of the will, 61 of the intellect (intellectual), and of the emotions or emotional ambivalence. 62 The third iteration was later picked up by Freud in his psychoanalytic study of obsessional neurosis – exhibited by the so called ‘rat man’ in this particular case – and generally described as a ‘battle between love and hate’ within the subject about an object of interest. 63 In this dynamic, the simultaneous existence of opposing feelings or affects toward the same object signifies a conflict in the psyche between sexual drives and ego instincts as the subject seeks to achieve satisfaction and pleasure through love and avoid frustration and pain through hatred. In the later stages of his psychoanalytic work, Freud seems to understand ambivalence far more broadly than before in terms of any conflicting pairs of instinctual tendencies that cover ‘such polarities as activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity, sadism and masochism . . . expulsion and retention, control and submission’. 64 Lastly, in what appears to be a conceptual shift after the introduction of life and death instincts in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 65 he argues that affective ambivalence appears to result from an arrested convergence and integration of these opposing instincts rather than their divergence and separation. In Freud’s words, it is ‘such a fundamental phenomenon that it more probably represents an instinctual fusion that has not been completed’. 66
When identity dynamics are brought into play and significantly implicated due to contentious engagements that undermine an agent’s self-narrative, create a ‘critical situation’ 67 or prompt ontological dissonance, affective ambivalence might be discursively strategized through concurrent positive/affirmative and negative/dismissive narrative representations in order to shield the imagined Self against pressures of ontological insecurity and anxiety. This is when affective ambivalence acquires Self-identity or ontological dimensions and becomes strategic. In other words, strategic ambivalence is nothing more than the discursive deployment and strategization of affective ambivalence, namely simultaneous approval/confirmation and dismissal/denial of a problematic action, through the use of narratives for purposes of ontological security attainment. It is thus a strategy of ‘discursive damage control’ that relies in important part on ‘framing and rhetorical packaging’ of Self-damaging commissions 68 and involves ‘doublespeak’ 69 to project ambiguity about an agent’s actual involvement in morally reprehensible or ontologically disruptive deeds. Strategic ambivalence bears strong resemblances to what Ruth Wodak refers to, in the context of populism and fascism studies, as ‘calculated ambivalence’: representations, statements, and ‘utterances . . . formulated in a way which allows for possible ambiguous interpretations and is open for at least two opposing meanings’. 70 In strategic ambivalence as conceptualized in the framework of ontological security dynamics, however, the emphasis falls on the instrumentalization of affective ambivalence for ontological ends, suggesting that the subject herself feels ambivalent about her controversial role and unconsciously desires that the Other attribute to her the identity she has thereby violated (More on this below).
With this formulation in mind, the theoretical significance of affective ambivalence from an OSS perspective rests partly in its insightful potential to shed light on how actors may deal with ontological consequences of disconnects in their autobiographical identity narratives 71 as well as of dissonances between multiple self-identities and contradictory practices to uphold them. 72 As Steele has abundantly demonstrated, agents are prone to feelings of ontological remorse and shame when an action or type of behavior they engage in is perceived to contradict how they view and narrate themselves, that is ‘when there exists too much distance between this biographical narrative and self-identity’. 73 In these and other ‘critical situations’ where ‘fundamental questions’ arise about an agent’s ontological status, 74 they are likely to brave materially costly scenarios or take extraordinary actions that may jeapordize their physical security, all to make sure that their sense of ontological security remains intact and experiences of shame and anxiety at bay. Along similar lines, as Lupovici contends, collective actors may resort to avoidance or ontologically defensive measures that enable them to ‘separate the threatened self from the source of the threat’ when efforts to safeguard an identity run counter to other identities and breed ‘ontological dissonance’. 75 Yet, rather than adopting measures of survival-menacing nature or of psychological avoidance or even ceasing participation in a controversial course of action altogether, an actor may opt to put her affective ambivalence about such anxiety-inducing engagements to strategic use by both dismissing involvement and confirming it at the same time.
Strategic ambivalence: desire for ontological security
But how does strategic ambivalence as a mechanism of ontological security pursuit function and what psychological processes does it involve? At face value, due to ample semantic-conceptual overlap between ambivalence and ambiguity, it might appear rather intuitively that strategic ambivalence achieves its ontological aims through cultivating ambiguity about commission of an autobiographically disruptive deed. While this type of ambiguity creation might help defer getting fully to grips with an unsettling situation, it does not seem psychologically durable and is not how strategic ambivalence operates as a vehicle for ontological security. To answer the above question, therefore, we need to dissect strategic ambivalence into its major constituent parts: the affirmative aspect where the subject feels affectively positive about a deed and confirms involvement in it accordingly, and the dismissive aspect where the subject feels affectively negative about an action and denies partaking of it. In fact, repetitions of concurrent dismissal and approval in practices of strategic ambivalence signify an unconscious longing for something which may best be delineated by bringing the Lacanian theory of desire in the analytical framework of Self-Other relations to bear on this apparently paradoxical dynamic.
As suggested in the introductory section, the key entry point here is the Lacanian argument that subjectivity, or the ‘I’ of the subject more specifically, takes form and acquires meaning in the symbolic order, the field of the (big) Other (‘l’Autre’). It is in this realm of signifiers that the unconscious is structured through ‘a hoard of words, names, and sentences out of which collective utterances are made’ and which ‘accounts for my own singularity, thanks to the agency of the specific condensation of signifiers that appears as a symptom, that is, my symptom’. 76 By this token, as Lacan asserts, ‘the I is not a substance . . . [but] a relation’ 77 to the Other as the locus of the signifier ‘in which is constituted the I who speaks along with he who hears . . .’ 78 In other words, since ‘no subject can be his own cause [cause de soi]’ 79 due to his dependence on the Other for any kind of signification and meaning, he ventures out into the symbolic in search of an ontological cause or substance to create a Self, become whole, and feel full, that is to feel ontologically secure, to achieve ontologically security.
For Lacan, the quest for an ontology raises the question of desire which is inextricably entangled with the subject’s ontological ‘lack’ that originates from the inner split generated by her entry into a pre-existing symbolic order. It is this ‘constitutive lack’ of a core of identity and fullness that renders the divided subject’s search for ontology relevant in the first place.
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The ontological quest for wholeness and unity, however, knows no end and never reaches a final destination as the lacking subject is a ‘manque-à-être’ (‘want-to-be’, ‘want of being’, or ‘lack of being’) indefinitely trapped in the process of becoming through the operations of desire and fantasy.
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This is why Lacan defines desire primarily in relation to lack:
Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists. This lack is beyond anything which can represent it . . . Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation . . . Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire.
82
To adequately grasp the psychic dynamics of strategic ambivalence as an expression of unconscious desire for an ontology, it is also crucial to take onboard Lacan’s axiomatic formula that ‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’, 83 a defining proposition of Lacanian psychoanalysis which, in his words, ‘basically means that we are always asking the Other what he desires’ pretty much like a religious person striving to know and fulfill what God fancies. 84 An inescapable condition of the symbolic order, desire as a subjective structure functions in a ‘trans-individual’ rather than ‘intra-psychic’ fashion, necessarily taking form via mediation ‘in the field of the Other’ which constitutes ‘the very medium of symbolic pronouncement, the symbolic means through which our communications to others – and indeed, to ourselves (our ‘own’ thoughts, ideas) – are possible’. 85
But very much like the lacking and desiring subject, the Other, too, lacks and desires, hence unsatisfying and alienating by definition. And crucially, Stavrakakis asserts, ‘it is exactly this impossibility, this lack in the Other, which keeps desire—and history—alive’, that we as desiring subjects ‘never get what we have been promised, what we were expecting from the Other, but that’s exactly why we keep longing for it’. 86 So the object of one’s desire, which according to Lacan is ‘essentially an object desired by someone else’, never crystallizes, causing the desire to keep sliding from object to object and the subject to keep desiring on and on in an endless process that ‘tends to diminish the special significance of any one particular object, but at the same time . . . brings into view the existence of objects without number’. 87 Lastly, what makes reproduction of desire possible and keeps desire from fading away is fantasy. The ‘fundamental use’ of fantasy, according to Lacan, is to enable the subject to maintain himself ‘at the level of his vanishing desire, vanishing inasmuch as the very satisfaction of demand deprives him of his object’. 88 Thus fantasy is a schema or story that connects the subject to sociopolitical reality and serves to particularize and concretize his irreparable ontological lack into the absence of a certain empirical object, such as a sexual partner, a national victory, an ideological objective, and so on, whose imaginary or real recapture then falsely yet usefully promises accomplishment of wholeness. 89
In light of this formulation, practices of strategic ambivalence represented by paradoxical endorsement and denunciation of an event/action/object, indicate pursuit of a special kind of fantasy that bifurcates along the signifying chain into ‘beatific’ and ‘horrific’ parts 90 which yet functionally converge into the same flow of desire for fullness. In this sense, strategic ambivalence may be conceived of as a more forceful, hence tortured, quest for ontological security as the subject keeps oscillating between the illusion of fulfillment, generated by the relation to the object in the field of the Other, and its negation in the same breath. The singularity of strategic ambivalence, therefore, rests in its double-sided resort to the symbolic Other to grant the subject what she lacks, an appeal that necessarily backfires upon inception not only because the Other is also ultimately ‘lacking’ but more immediately because the ambivalent subject’s approach to the object in the field of the Other in pursuit of a Self involves, by default and definition, the very negation of that Self. Without such negation, no Self would start to emerge, and when it finally does, the negation negates it.
This causes the strategic ambivalence-practicing subject to experience her split or void every time she engages in strategic ambivalence while chasing the illusion of fulfillment, thus infusing her with a sense of tormented and transgressive enjoyment (jouissance) that goes beyond the pleasure principle at the level of desire. In sum, from a Lacanian OSS perspective, strategic ambivalence exemplifies a fantasmatic activation of desire for ontological security that paradoxically passes through its own negation, that is, through the experience of ontological insecurity. And it is riding this anxious and illusionary loop, of failure inevitably, that produces jouissance for the strategically ambivalent subject: ‘a form of transgression or enjoyment whose paradoxical (but highly significant) effect is the maintenance, even buttressing, of the (potentially oppressive) order it transgresses’. 91
In the following section, I will rely on the above theoretical framework to interrogate the Islamic Republic of Iran’s (IRI) controversial involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war on behalf of the Russian invader, illustrating why Tehran has adopted a strategically ambivalent approach to the conflict and how such an approach betrays a search for ontological security by the anti-Western revolutionary state subject. More specifically and as a useful reminder, the empirical puzzle in view of our Lacanian theorization is, why does the Iranian state both want to be seen (by the Other including the international society) as siding with the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine war and not want it at the same time? And what does this paradoxical want tell us about its subjectivity?
Iran and the Russia-Ukraine war in context
When Russia occupied the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine for annexation in February 2014 in the wake of popular protests, known as the ‘Maidan Revolution’, Iran was in the throes of marathon negotiations with world powers – UN Security Council permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia, United States plus Germany – to reach a resolution over its nuclear program. Beware of the adverse implications of rekindled Russian-Ukrainian tensions for the nuclear talks, including the possible siding of Moscow with Tehran’s Western nemeses or its decision to throw a wrench into the diplomatic process, 92 the IRI opted for a practically neutral stance on the Crimea question. For one, Iranian representatives to the United Nations did not show up for a vote in the UN General Assembly on Resolution 68/39 that declared the Crimean referendum to secede from Ukraine invalid. 93 ‘We are not without opinions on the [Ukraine] dispute but there is no reason to comment on and enter into every issue’, Iran’s then parliament speaker Ali Larijani stated at the time, adding that ‘we should [wait and] see where things end up’. 94 Those ‘opinions’ however were largely against Russia’s military occupation and annexation of Crimea, in important part because Tehran considered herself a historical victim of imperial land grab and foreign aggression, not least by Tsarist Russia in the 19th century (more on this below) and later on as a consequence of Iraqi invasion of post-revolutionary Iran in 1980s by the Saddam Hussein regime which, incidentally, received substantial military and political support from Soviet Russia in its war effort. 95 Also anxious about secessionist tendencies and separatist sentiments of ethnic origins inside Iran as a multiethnic nation, the Islamic Republic refused to endorse secession of Crimea from Ukraine or recognize its annexation into the Russian Federation. ‘Today . . . separatism is a [serious] threat against Ukraine and the security of the Caucasus region . . . must receive special attention’, Ali Akbar Velayati, senior foreign policy advisor to the Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned about the occasion. 96 A combination of political considerations and historical factors thus informed Iran’s neutrality policy and hands-off approach to the Crimean crisis, underpinned by silent disapproval of territorial revisions it involved.
Fast forward to February 2022, when Russia launched a full-fledged military invasion of Ukraine, this expedient neutrality came under enormous pressure. For the preceding 4 years since the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the nuclear accord – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – and reinstatement of crippling sanctions against Tehran under a signature ‘maximum pressure’ policy, the IRI had been struggling to break out of its splendid isolation while at the same time maintaining its anti-Western revolutionary self-identity home and abroad through the exercise mainly of ‘maximum resistance’. 97 Surely, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s ‘heroic flexibility’ rhetoric 98 which paved the way for major nuclear concessions during the talks in the first place had failed, questioning the revolutionary credentials of the Iranian leadership. For a ‘revisionist’ state whose foundational self-concept was premised on postcolonial resistance against Western imperialism or ‘global arrogance’, showing further flexibility and compromise in the face of what was perceived as an uncompromising West was out of the question. 99 From an ontological security perspective in particular, the Islamic Republic was stuck between two states of self-eroding anxiety: on the one hand, it had to sustain an anti-Western revisionist identity despite growing domestic discontent and on the other it had to manage the consequences, ontological and physical, of its mounting ‘strategic loneliness’ 100 as a direct corollary of practicing a contrarian foreign policy in congruence with pursuit of a revolutionary Self.
In these critical circumstances, Iran sought the way forward in a strategy described as ‘Look East’, characterized by fostering strategic partnerships and building grand alliances with two chief rivals of the West, namely China and Russia. 101 A paramount step in the direction of this pivot to the East was a 25-year cooperation agreement which Tehran clinched with Beijing under President Hassan Rouhani in the hope of integrating more systematically into the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and neutralizing growing economic pressure by the US and the EU. 102 While China was hoped, in the face of Western economic embargoes against Iran, to serve as a reliable market for Iranian oil exports and trade ties in general as well as a source of access to modern infrastructural technologies, Russia was mostly reserved for procurement of military hardware and defence capabilities. Having far more at stake in their relations with Western powers, however, neither Beijing nor Moscow took Tehran seriously as a strategic partner, much less an ally, and more often than not ended up treating it as a bargaining chip to secure concessions from the US on various issue-areas of strategic import.
Iran’s strategic ambivalence toward the war
Thus when the Ukraine war broke out in 2022, even though the Islamic Republic blamed NATO provocations and eastward expansion for the conflict, it was initially opposed to the Russian aggression and inclined to preserve its hands-off neutrality. ‘[While] the Ukraine crisis is rooted in NATO’s provocative measures, we do not regard engagement in war as a solution’, then Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian wrote on 24 February, emphasizing the ‘necessity of ceasefire and concentration on a political solution’. 103 Yet, during President Vladimir Putin’s state trip to Tehran a few months later in July, Iranian Supreme Leader sounded a confirmatory tone, blasting NATO as a ‘dangerous creature’ and endorsing Russia’s ‘initiative-taking’ under Putin in standing up against it. ‘If the road ahead of NATO remains open, it will not know any limits and bounds, so if [NATO’s path] were not blocked in Ukraine, it would wage this very war [against Russia] on the pretext of Crimea after a while’, Khamenei stressed. 104 Iranian attitude toward the Russian invasion of a Western ally was one of affective ambivalence, with the IRI drawing satisfaction from its role in making the West, its principal other, pay a price for its presumably imperial advances, but at the same time feeling unsettled by the notion that it was siding with the aggressor-occupier in the Ukraine war.
Backing the Russian aggressor-occupier did not align at all with the collective memory of Iranians as a nation-state that had historically lost vast expanses of its northern territories in the Caucasus to the Russian empire through the infamous treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmenchay in 1828. 105 This unequivocal disregard for collective memory as ‘the carrier of [national-statal] identity’ over time instigated strong feelings of ontological insecurity for the state subject. 106 Support for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine also violated post-revolutionary Iran’s collective self-identity as a victim, hence vehement opponent, of foreign aggression as the nascent revolutionary state had to repel Baathist Iraqi invasion of its own territory under Saddam Hussein in what Tehran has since glorified as 8 years of ‘sacred defence’ from 1980 to 1988. Indeed, support for the Russian aggressor was in this sense nothing less than sacrilege against a fantasized Self. Lastly, endorsing the use of force by a militarily superior great power against a far weaker and smaller neighbor did not sit well with the historical Shia narrative of standing up for the underdog, which the Islamic Republic ideologically invokes to vindicate support for ‘resistance’ groups including Palestinians and which has also been enshrined in the Iranian Constitution. Article 3 of the Constitution stipulates that the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy be based, inter alia, on ‘uninhibited support for the weakened of the world’ while Article 154 takes this ideological doctrine even further, accentuating that Iran will ‘back right-seeking struggles of the weakened against the arrogant anywhere in the world’. 107
This affective sense of ambivalence had to be discursively strategized in the form of simultaneous narrative confirmation/approval and denial/dismissal of involvement in the Ukraine war when Tehran indulged Russian outreach for military help after Moscow’s initial offensive to capture Kiev and conquer the entire Ukrainian territory failed. This is how Iran’s strategic ambivalence toward the Russia-Ukraine war emerged. While Iranian military support for the Russian aggressor materialized with the transfer of thousands of kamikaze Shahed drones and even Fateh-110 surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missiles, 108 it ultimately proved half-hearted and curtailed at best. There is not only no evidence so far of the Russian use of Iranian missiles in the Ukrainian battlefield, but the fact that Moscow had to turn to North Korea later to bolster its war effort suggests it did not get the support it was seeking from Tehran. The arrested nature of the Islamic Republic’s military help to Russia also manifested itself narratively, in the concurrent confirmation and denunciation of it, rendering the relation strategically ambivalent.
In a highly significant address to science students in October 2022, which was later suspiciously removed from state-affiliated news platforms, Supreme Leader Khamenei confirmed the sales of Iranian UAVs to Moscow, albeit without explicit mention of Russia or its war against Ukraine. ‘A few years ago when photos of advanced Iranian drones and missiles were published, they used to say it is photoshop!’, he pointed out, quipping ‘now they say Iranian drones are very dangerous; why do you sell them to this or that person? Why do you give them to this or that person?’ 109 Khamenei’s veiled confirmation of drone transfers to Russia was later reiterated when the head of IRGC aerospace division General Amirali Hajizadeh boasted ahead of a visit to Tehran by Russian defence minister Sergey Shoigu in September 2023 that ‘superpowers with whom we could not interact even through third parties are now reaching out to purchase’ advanced military equipment from Iran. 110 This positive/affirmative dimension of strategic ambivalence reflects, from a Lacanian (OSS) standpoint, the state subject’s desire to remedy its ontological lack by tapping into the beatific content of a fantasy that involvement in a Russian-Western conflict on behalf of the anti-Western side will enable it to accomplish a full revolutionary Self. Such a fantasmatic quest for ontological security clearly takes place in the symbolic plane of the international society, the field of the Other, simply because Iran’s fantasized revolutionary Self has come into being through a (oppositional) relation to a potent signifier of the Other, ‘the West’ in the first place. Put otherwise, the revolution in the revolutionary, which the subject aspires to become in pursuit of ontological Self-realization and security, has always been against something which is basically a signifier afforded to the subject by the symbolic Other. Interestingly, this opposition included Russia or ‘the East’ as the erstwhile leader of the eastern bloc in world politics as well in the early years of the 1979 Iranian/Islamic Revolution, and it was only later, in late 1990s and afterwards more explicitly, that, for instance, the revolutionary slogan ‘Neither East, nor West, [but only] the Islamic Republic’ was dropped from the state’s political discourse and practice – paving the way for today’s ‘Look East’ turn.
Simultaneously, also the Iranian state has kept denying extension of military support to Russia or any involvement in the Ukraine war for that matter by recourse to three overlapping narratives: outright rejection of claims about Iranian military engagement in the conflict as ‘absolute lies’ or ‘mere storytelling’ 111 ; qualified acceptance of those claims by insisting that military support for Russia through drone shipments took place ‘months before’ the invasion 112 ; and finally admitting to the transfers but stressing that the weapons ‘were not supposed to be used in the Ukraine war’. 113 Reflective of attempts to manage a state of ‘ontological dissonance’ and deal with feelings of national shame as a result, the negative/dismissive facet of Iran’s strategic ambivalence thus finds expression. Denial of involvement and denunciation of support suggest, first and foremost, that the signifier of the Other – the Russian state in this case – has failed to give the (revolutionary) subject what it wants to get the ontological job done and capture the fullness of its Self, a failure due fundamentally to the ‘lack in the Symbolic Other’. 114 Indeed, the Other is lacking too. The dismissive aspect, expressed via denial and reflective of the horrific content of the subject’s fantasy, also brings into center another signifier in the symbolic, ‘the West’, as an object of desire through which the false yet helpful promise of accomplishing a full (revolutionary) Self is sustained. ‘Countering shared challenges, including US unilateralism, is among the most important and strategic issues in our joint efforts’, Iranian defence minister Mohammad Reza Ashtiani told his Russian peer Shoigu during the latter’s tour of Iranian missiles and drones in Tehran. 115
The state subject’s fantasy here is that involvement in the East-West conflict on behalf of the Eastern Other will consummate its revolutionarity and complete its (anti-Western) revolutionary Self, but since that Self is primordially built, inter alia, on a postcolonial anti-aggression/anti-oppression identity – Iran as a historical victim of conquest, aggression and dispossession, including in the post-revolutionary years when both East and West sided with the Iraqi aggressor during the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) – the fantasy aborts itself the moment it takes off. The involvement in the conflict is, after all, one in favor of the aggressor (Russia) and against the victim (Ukraine), rendering the subject the opposite of what it desires to become and accomplish. The struggle toward realization of a fantasized revolutionary Self thus includes its own negation, which the subject faces every time it attempts to achieve Self-unity. And it is this Self-negation that drives the repeated denials, dismissals, and denunciations of involvement, that is, the negative dimension of strategic ambivalence.
In a key speech symptomatic of this sense of ontological insecurity as a consequence of Self-negation (on the desirous path of Self-realization), the IRI leader Khamenei commiserated with the ‘defenceless’ Ukrainian nation, attributing its predicament to the West. ‘They are willing to victimize a nation like the desperate and defenceless nation of Ukraine in order to fill the pockets of American arms manufacturing companies’, he asserted, adding that ‘the heart of the matter in Ukraine’ is Americans want that ‘Ukrainians fight and Ukrainians get killed so that they can sell weapons’, 116 as if Iran itself has not sided with the aggressor-occupier and never contributed to Ukrainian victimization through its military assistance to Russia. Correspondingly in remarks that foregrounded the IRI’s strategic ambivalence and the ontological split underpinning it, then Iranian foreign minister Amirabdollahian reiterated in January 2023 that ‘we oppose the war and the displacement of people in Ukraine’ and that ‘despite excellent relations between Tehran and Moscow’, Iran has refused to recognize Russian-occupied Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk. 117
Conclusion
Distinguishing between different types of ambivalence along with sociological and psychoanalytic approaches to it, this article has shown that whereas epistemic ambivalence spells disorder and spawns ontological insecurity, affective ambivalence may be discursively strategized in the form of strategic ambivalence, which represents a quest for ontological security. It draws on the Lacanian theory of the lacking-desiring subject and its relations to the symbolic Other to unpack how this ontological search operates and what it reveals about the strategic ambivalence-practicing actor’s subjectivity. The inquiry proposes that the ambivalent subject relies on a fantasy with both beatific and horrific contents where the desire for fullness and oneness remains unmet by virtue both of the ‘lack in the Symbolic Other’ and, perhaps more consequentially, of Self-negation, keeping the subject oscillating between the illusion of fulfillment and the tragedy of failure, indeed between the prospect of ontological security and the experience of ontological insecurity. These insights are empirically instantiated in the case of Iran which, it is contended, has adopted a policy of strategic ambivalence toward the Russia-Ukraine war in terms of its half-hearted involvement in the conflict on behalf of the Russian aggressor-occupier and simultaneous confirmation/glorification and denial/denunciation of it.
While ambivalence may be interpreted and understood in various ways, it has generally not received adequate theoretical or empirical attention in IR theory and political science. The conceptual-theoretical framework laid out in this writing suggests that strategic ambivalence is a highly politicized form of ambivalence which makes it likely to be employed not only in the realm of foreign policy but also as a methodology of governance at large. More specifically, given the discursive elements of strategic ambivalence and its psychic underpinnings, a promising avenue of research could probably be to study it as a mechanism of ‘emotional governance’ in an age of political polarization, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy theories where politics consists, inter alia, of ‘emotional labor’. 118 And needless to say, Ontological Security Studies and psychological-psychoanalytic approaches to IR theory in general would stand to both gain from and contribute substantively to such interdisciplinary issue-areas of academic research.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to specially thank Professor Ali Bilgic of Loughborough University for his exceptionally insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript and Professor Catarina Kinnvall of Lund University for her patient support throughout the research process. I am immensely grateful to the journal editors and four anonymous reviewers as well for their rigorous feedback on the manuscirpt at various stages of its consideration for publication.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I would like to acknowlege the financial support of Stiftelsen Siamon in Stockholm, Sweden, for presentation of this research at EISA’s 2024 annual conference in Lille, France.
