Global injustice and the production of ontological insecurity

Abstract

This article argues that a renewed focus on how dominant international practices produce ontological insecurity can help better orient ontological security studies (OSS) to injustice in world politics, particularly as it affects structurally marginalized political actors at multiple levels. It makes this case by bringing the work of Iris Marion Young to bear on OSS, particularly her theory of justice as the elimination of domination and oppression. Drawing on Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression,” this paper argues that multiple injustices endemic to the international system should be understood as key producers of ontological insecurity in the international system, both in their direct ability to destabilize identities and in their undermining of disadvantaged actors’ ontological security-seeking practices. On international scales, these processes transcend levels of analysis, affecting individuals, social groups, and even states in differing ways. Incorporating Young’s work into OSS not only helps build a vital bridge between the oft estranged sub-disciplines of political theory and IR, but also can provide scholars a means of better theorizing how ontological insecurity is so often a product of the international system’s injustices. The paper thus concludes by proposing a normative turn within OSS, asking whether global justice should be understood as a precondition for ontological security-seeking among multiple co-existing actors.

Introduction

Over the past two decades, the concept of ontological security has developed within International Relations (IR) from an initial theoretical contribution to a vital research community—often referred to as ontological security studies (OSS) to emphasize its internal diversity (Von Essen and Danielson, 2023). Following pioneering initial work translating the concept from psychoanalyst RD Laing and sociologist Anthony Giddens to IR in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see Huysmans, 1998; Kinnvall, 2004; McSweeney, 1999), seminal contributions from Mitzen (2006b) and Steele (2008) demonstrated the centrality of identity’s securitization to international politics. In the years since, scholars have used the lens of ontological security to not only explain a wide variety of specific state behaviors, but also an impetus to reimagine the international system around the pursuit and preservation of identity, rather than purely physical security (Hom and Steele, 2020; Lerner, 2021; see also Lerner and O’Loughlin, 2023). This has led some to even ponder whether all security should be understood as ontological. Can scholars truly investigate security without foregrounding the identity of the referent?

While OSS has emerged as a potent critical community in IR and security studies, a few core concerns linger and undermine the breadth of its challenge to mainstream IR. Highlighting three together helps frame this article’s contribution. First, as Browning and Joenniemi (2017; see also Berenskötter, 2020; Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2020) note, OSS has exhibited a long-standing bias toward investigations of states’ quests for ontological continuity and stability, over the investigation of change, disruption, and destabilization. Indeed, oftentimes rather than emphasizing the difficulties inherent to “a constant quest for [ontological security] that will always, at every level . . . remain out of reach,” literature too often focuses on articulations of this unreachable ideal (Kinnvall and Mitzen, 2018: 825).

While problematic on its own, this tendency toward the status quo has had downstream affects as it interacts with a second concern—OSS’ Western theoretical and empirical biases (Bilgic and Pilcher, 2023; Shani, 2017). Despite multiple recent efforts to integrate OSS with post-colonial studies and apply the lens outside the West (see, for example, Nguitragool, 2020; Untalan, 2019; Vieira, 2016, 2018), OSS’ preference for stability can undermine these efforts by pushing scholarship toward analysis of more powerful actors’ quests for ontological stability rather than ontological destabilization imposed on weaker or more vulnerable actors. In practice, this often results in an empirical focus on powerful states and other established international actors’ ideal visions, while occluding the experiences of those individuals and groups most vulnerable to international political changes. For example, while the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the larger Global War on Terror are oft-invoked cases in OSS literature (see, for example, Eberle, 2019; Greve, 2018; Hall, 2022; Steele, 2008), far less work has examined the ontological insecurity inflicted upon the Iraqi people, who have suffered through decades of repression, disenfranchisement, and conflict (Gordon, 2012). If OSS were to give equal attention to ontological insecurity’s production as ontological security-seeking, the literature might be nudged from its empirical bias toward those actors with resources to pursue identity-related concerns and toward those whose identities and agency are so often destabilized by unjust international practices (Lerner, 2019b).

These two concerns contribute to a third that is, unfortunately, common across IR: a lack of normative reflection in OSS and engagement with literature on global justice. To be sure, IR scholars are understandably often reluctant to wade into debates in political theory and philosophy over the moral grounds undergirding divergent conceptualizations of global justice. Yet, while this type of reflection is beyond the scope of this article, I nonetheless am motivated by the empirical theoretical goals inherent to the study of justice—the belief that engagement with global justice literature is vital to understanding the normative dimensions and consequences of IR theories, as well as to bolstering critical challenges to mainstream security studies. What is the relationship between injustice and ontological security and in what ways do global oppression and domination undermine international actors’ identities? Though initial OSS scholarship criticized dominant rationalist approaches for their lack of explanatory power, global justice scholarship has similarly targeted IR’s mainstream for a lack of attention to the injustice embedded within the international system (Abdel-Nour, 2018; Belic and Bozac, 2022; Lu, 2011, 2017; Nuti, 2019; Srivastava and Muscott, 2021). These two literatures’ critical ambitions are, in many ways, complementary, yet engagement between them has been sparse.

To address these gaps, this article argues that a renewed focus on how dominant international practices produce ontological insecurity can help orient OSS to injustice in world politics, particularly as it affects structurally marginalized political actors, including disadvantaged individuals, states in the Global South, and disenfranchised transnational communities. More specifically, it argues that multiple injustices endemic to the international system should be understood as significant producers of ontological insecurity, destabilizing the identities of their victims. While global injustice is often understood solely through the lens of uneven distributions of resources, this article demonstrates how it also manifests as oppression and domination that destabilize the identities that constitute international political action (Young, 1990).

Beyond this initial contribution of orienting OSS to oft-neglected political actors, this article makes three additional contributions. First, to make its case, the article builds a new bridge between OSS and the work of Iris Marion Young. In multiple texts, Young offered a ground-breaking theoretical framework for understanding how injustice limits marginalized actors’ agency and undermines their ability to pursue their own identities. Her work thus resonates powerfully with both OSS and critical IR scholarship more broadly, though the sub-disciplinary divides between IR and political theory have left this intersection under-explored. Second, and relatedly, it extends Young’s five faces of oppression into a theoretical lens for OSS to understand how oppression and domination produce ontological insecurity. In turn, this framework provides an initial roadmap for empirical scholarship to examine diverse cases outside dominant Western states. Third and finally, by bridging critical security studies and political theory, this article suggests avenues for broader engagement between IR and normative political theory. Although much of this extension is suggestive, in the conclusion I consider head-on the converse of this article’s argument: if global injustice is understood to produce ontological insecurity, should global justice be understood as a precondition for ontological security-seeking among multiple co-existing actors? While I refrain from offering fully formed conclusions, this article’s arguments illuminate the potential of a richer dialogue between critical IR and global justice scholarship.

This article proceeds in four sections, followed by a conclusion. The first highlights the challenge that ontological insecurity poses for OSS, especially when insecurity is considered something produced through international interaction, rather than a default condition stemming from a backdrop of existential anxiety. This shift highlights how dominant international practices can destabilize the identity of vulnerable actors on multiple levels. Second, I highlight the relationship between justice and ontological security. Although justice is a term most common in normative political theory, this section demonstrates how incorporating Iris Marion Young’s understanding of injustice as oppression and domination can shed enormous light for IR scholars interested in the production of ontological insecurity, as well as ontological security-seeking’s ethical consequences. The third section elaborates the second by adapting Iris Marion Young’s (1990) “five faces of oppression” (pp. 39–65) to the study of ontological security, arguing that these faces reveal themselves as mechanisms that perpetuate ontological insecurity in the international system. Following Young, the purpose of this adaptation is not meant to comprehensively catalog all injustices in the international system. Rather, this initial typology simply offers avenues for future scholarship to understand the overlapping ways varied injustices can produce and reinforce ontological insecurity. A fourth, concluding section steps back and reflects on how deeper normative engagement in IR can not only build greater dialogue with political theory and philosophy, but also encourage reflection on the substantial role of (in)justice in structuring the international system.

OSS and the problem of insecurity

In its early articulations, the concept of ontological security was incorporated into IR to address a specific dilemma: explaining state action that mainstream scholarship’s focus on physical security labeled anomalous or irrational. In this sense, it constituted a key extension of early constructivist IR to security studies, demonstrating how the securitization of identity could yield outcomes poorly accounted for by mainstream scholarship. Steele (2005), for example, used the lens of ontological security to help explain Britain’s poorly understood neutrality during the US Civil War, while Zarakol (2010) used the concept to help explain Turkey and Japan’s denial of historical crimes, despite material incentives to apologize. Mitzen (2006a, 2006b), likewise, used the lens of ontological security to explain intractable conflicts and, subsequently, relations between European Union (EU) member states. In these contributions, ontological security was understood primarily as something states pursued or maintained through international routines (Mitzen, 2006b), cultivated internally through autobiographical narratives (Berenskoetter, 2014; Steele, 2008), or some combination of the two. Crucially, in each case, ontological security was understood as a distinct consideration for actors with sufficient resources to choose between multiple viable possible foreign policies.

As OSS developed beyond initial cases, two tensions within initial theorizations have received greater attention and, indeed, exposed areas for potential theoretical innovation. The first relates to anxiety—the force that most OSS scholarship treats as the primary motivation for ontological security-seeking. As Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi (2020) lucidly argue, foundational OSS texts reflect a specific, yet limited understanding of the role of anxiety in international politics—one with roots in Giddens’ narrow reading of psychoanalyst RD Laing. Although Laing’s scholarly interest was primarily in pathological neurotic anxiety among individuals experiencing mental disorders, he also recognized the distinct importance of normal existential anxiety in structuring quotidian life. This distinction disappears in Giddens (2009 [1991]: 45), who views “[a]ll anxiety [a]s both normal and neurotic.” For Giddens (2009 [1991]), ontological security-seeking is a natural and ongoing response to the “chaos [that] lurks” (p. 36) in destabilization. Whereas for Laing neurotic anxiety was acute and pathological—stemming from a true disruption of individuals’ psychic stability—Giddens recognizes that the possibility for chaos lurks behind all quests for identity and thus treated acute neuroses as merely a manifestation of quotidian processes (Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi, 2020). Taken to its logical extreme, Giddens’ formulation of ontological security-seeking as an omnipresent background condition raises the question of what, precisely, the concept should be used to explain. Are all actors condemned to forever seek ontological security—oftentimes in exclusionary, punitive, and violent ways—but nonetheless never obtain it (Krickel-Choi, 2022a, 2022b; Rossdale, 2015)? If so, what variations can it help scholarship analyze?

The second tension relates to ontological security’s implied relationality. Initial scholarship’s emphasis on anxiety-reduction often made ontological security-seeking appear a primarily internal, subjective phenomenon. ¹ However, if ontological insecurity stems not solely from the constant presence of background existential anxiety but is shaped and, indeed, produced by the sorts of social dislocations that foster acute anxiety, then questions arise as to the nature and content of these social relations. Too often, however, empirical OSS scholarship focuses on individual actors’ self-representations, rather than ontological security’s social-relational dimensions. As Pratt (2016) has argued, this tendency creates both methodological and conceptual dilemmas. By highlighting subjective experiences of anxiety, scholarship often creates a foolhardy empirical quest for “authentic” representations of internal states that may be impossible to reliably access (see Lerner, 2021: 267, 269). Furthermore, while self-representations certainly provide one type of relevant data, focusing too much on them can inspire neglect of the inherently social dimensions of both ontological security and identity—including the way they intertwine with relationships of power and inequality. To be sure, ample scholarship has made efforts to increasingly “socialize” ontological security, including by drawing on relational sociology (Pratt, 2016) or English School accounts of states’ uneven incorporation into international society (Zarakol, 2010). Nevertheless, greater theoretical work is required, particularly if OSS is to pay greater attention not only to marginalized actors, but also processes of marginalization.

To help address these tensions, this article begins with a problematizing redescription (Shapiro, 2002) that redirects scholarship squarely to the social production of ontological insecurity. While prior work has made clear progress in understanding international actors’ quests for stability, this approach asks, what happens when we flip this dominant approach on its head and instead focus on IR, processes, and practices that surface the oftentimes dormant chaos that lies beneath? Identity may be an inherently unstable phenomenon over the long term, but certain forces nonetheless destabilize it more acutely, disrupting quests for coherence. What happens when we focus our attention deliberately on the structures, processes, and practices that make identities unstable and their uneven distribution in the international system?

Such a problematizing redescription brings three advantages to OSS. First and foremost, shifting analysis from ontological security-seeking to the production of ontological insecurity can draw attention to the experiences of many subaltern actors who lack the resources to shape the international arena or their unequal place within it. Often, OSS has understood anxiety-motivated ontological security-seeking—the process of striving for stable identity—as its primary object of study, rather than how ontological insecurity is generated, surfaced, or maintained. An alternative emphasis on ontological insecurity and its causes reveals that insecurity is not solely a stable background condition, but also often the product of dominant political forces, ebbing and flowing over time in response to political shifts. The utility of this perspective is perhaps best illustrated by returning to the example of Iraq. Scholarship focused on ontological security-seeking would likely focus on efforts to establish routines or build autobiographical narratives in the face of unprecedented violence. Alternatively, a focus on ontological insecurity would instead inspire questions about the ways the ebbing and flowing of violence over multiple traumatic decades can lead to ongoing shocks that destabilize already chimerical identities (Krickel-Choi, 2022; Lerner, 2022a).

Second, if, as Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi (2020) have argued, OSS often relies on Giddens’ problematic conflation of neurotic and everyday anxiety, this problematizing redescription suggests that it is Laing’s concept of neurotic anxiety that should form a primary object of OSS, rather than the everyday (see also Krickel-Choi, 2022). To be clear, my intention here is not to insinuate that victims of violence and injustice are somehow neurotic or to pathologize people struggling in unstable political contexts—the pejorative connotation of the term “neurotic” is an unfortunate relic of long-standing stigma surrounding mental health and normal, deeply human reactions to what should be considered abnormal conditions of violence (Lerner, 2020a). ² Rather, I simply wish to emphasize that better theorizing acute anxiety-based responses to international shocks that Laing identifies as “neurotic” might better steer analysis toward those actors who experience the traumatic mass violence inherent to international politics. Indeed, whereas Giddens’ (2009 [1991], 2015) understanding of anxiety refers primarily to individuals’ quotidian quest for stable identity in the context of modernity, understanding the destabilization of identity in the context of recurring political violence and vulnerability might require a lens better attuned to vulnerability and instability (Lerner, 2019a, 2022). While I refrain here from explicitly endorsing Laing’s psychoanalytic terminology, which is contested in the contemporary psy-disciplines, this point can alternatively be expressed by flipping the question toward Giddens: why would we expect the anxieties of those suffering from acute violence and dislocation to be the same as the normal anxieties of those in more comfortable and prosperous contexts? I thus suggest it is worthwhile to build on the distinction between neurotic and normal anxiety to recognize a more complex spectrum of anxieties in the face of differing socio-political conditions.

Third and finally, this problematizing redescription’s emphasis on how a diverse array of violent conditions produce ontological insecurity opens OSS to an initial productive distinction from Iris Marion Young’s work—that between interactional and structural injustice—with which to begin this article’s normative turn. Young’s (1990, 2006a, 2006b) insights into this distinction began with her seminal Justice and the Politics of Difference and were subsequently expanded in her later work, including her posthumous Responsibility for Justice. For Young, interactional injustices stem from agents intentionally harming one another, whereas structural injustices emerge as a byproduct of many agents acting in accordance with prevailing social norms, yet nonetheless reinforcing unfair conditions. Following Young’s (2011: 105) own example of the housing market, interactional injustice might consist of a predatory lender specifically deceiving a vulnerable family, whereas structural injustice stems from how the larger forces of the real estate market push vulnerable individuals into homelessness. Young argued that these distinct types of injustice produce distinct types of responsibility for repair—liability and political responsibility, respectively.

The distinction between interactional and structural injustice provides a useful initial framework for discussing the multiplicity of ways ontological insecurity is produced, perpetuated, and reinforced in the international system. Ontological insecurity can result from the deliberate actions of agents—be they soldiers who inflict violence on civilians or state agents deciding to unjustly invade another country—as well from the ability of structural injustices like global inequality and neo-colonialism to erode everyday stability for disadvantaged actors. Though, as Giddens writes, ontological insecurity may be inevitable due to the “chaos” lurking behind modern life, we can nonetheless recognize how different types of injustices, including both violent interactions and structural injustice, can make ontological insecurity more acute or foster conditions that surface this anxiety. Thus, instead of focusing on ontological security-seeking as an inevitable (and nonetheless futile) condition of modern life, OSS might instead focus on the ways in which the varieties of injustice inherent to international politics produce different forms of ontological insecurity. The next sections delve more deeply into this relationship.

(In)justice and ontological (in)security

Normative political theory and constructivist IR—the broader traditions in which global justice scholarship and OSS emerged, respectively—have long had an uncertain relationship. The constructivist research program in IR developed in part to demonstrate “that moral norms matter in world politics” (Price, 2008: 3). However, because mainstream constructivism endeavored to operate as a middle-ground that translated critical insights to the positivist social science research tradition advocated by mainstream IR (Adler, 1997), most constructivist scholars have adopted what Snyder and Vinjamuri (2012) refer to as a “strong firewall between the explanatory and prescriptive role of norms” (p. 435) This has resulted in a relative discomfort among IR scholars with engaging debates in normative political theory over the relative merits and applicability of alternative normative principles, including principles of global justice. ³ Because OSS emerged predominantly within the constructivist IR research program, it has largely maintained this ambivalence toward normative theory. For this reason, it is unsurprising that the concept of justice is relatively absent from existing OSS scholarship (cf. Browning, 2016; Mälksoo, 2019; Naude, 2019).

This article is premised on the idea that, when appropriately theorized, the normative concept of justice can offer immense benefit to OSS, helping address the gaps identified in prior sections. Justice is a central, yet highly contested concept political theory, though one with applicability across scholarly communities. An oft-cited potential starting point for defining the term comes from the 6th century AD Institutes of Justinian’s definition of justice as “the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due” (cited in Miller, 2021). The implication is that justice refers to a form of social balance, inspiring the oft-reproduced image of Lady Justice holding scales. This depiction leaves open questions regarding what this social balance requires politically. John Rawls (1958, 1999: 3) built on this tradition by defining “justice as fairness” and, in his Theory of Justice, he referred to justice as “the first virtue of social institutions.” Following Rawls, much political theory has thus interpreted justice as distributive (Risse, 2012: 4), accounting for how institutions allocate some distribuenda, be it opportunities, material goods, or even capabilities (see Sen, 2009). Applied to OSS, this distributive account of justice raises important downstream questions surrounding, for example, how individuals and groups denied capabilities, opportunities, or material resources might be vulnerable to identity crises or might find their security-seeking practices curtailed.

Yet, a justice-based critique of OSS can also extend beyond distributions among pre-existing agents. Indeed, Iris Marion Young offers an alternative account of justice that makes the concept far more urgent for OSS. For Young (1990: 10), focusing solely on the distribution of society’s benefits and burdens can reify limited atomistic accounts of identity and agency, resulting in an account of justice that neglects the content of social relations and institutional processes. By focusing solely on end-state holdings, a distributive account of justice treats the individual primarily as a “client-consumer” (Young, 1990: 71). However, individuals are much more than that—they are also active participants in social life with identities shaped by multiple overlapping group memberships and institutional relations. For this reason, Young regards a proper distribution of material goods as only one aspect of justice. Though distributions might lend themselves to facile quantification and comparison, a more complete account of social justice entails a relational component, which Young (1990) identifies as “the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression” (p. 15). In other words, for Young, injustice consists primarily of domination and oppression, and not merely the unfair distributions that often result from them. She thus refers to hers as “an enabling conception of justice.” This account considers whether a society contains “the institutional conditions necessary for the development and exercise of individual capacities and collective communication and cooperation” (Young, 1990: 39). Building on this enabling conception, Young pays particular attention to how certain social groups—namely, minoritized groups in the United States—face distinct barriers and disadvantages in social institutions that expose their members to oppression and domination.

The distinction between domination and oppression—the two manifestations of injustice Young highlights—is instructive in uncovering the intimate relationship between identity and justice. Of the two, domination is the more straight-forward, though, in a later text, Young (2005) recognizes the complexities of extending the concept to international politics to understand national groups’ aspirations to self-determination. Domination refers to “institutional conditions which inhibit or prevent people from participating in determining their actions or the conditions of their actions” (Krause, 2013: 200–201; Young, 1990: 38, 37, 38). Domination inhibits certain forms of agency that individuals or groups would otherwise be able to exercise. By contrast, oppression is more foundational, referring to “the institutional constraint on self-development.” Whereas domination provides constraints on agency’s exercise, oppression can undermine agency itself. Oppression destabilizes individual and group identities such that these agents are inhibited from imagining what opportunities are possible, whereas domination forecloses these possibilities to members of certain social groups.

This distinction is best understood as ideal typical—it affords theoretical leverage, though, in practice, domination and oppression are often overlapping conditions for disadvantaged groups. Young (1990) writes that “[o]ppression usually includes or entails domination” (p. 38) and histories of domination often manifest in the present as ongoing oppression. As Young illuminates in her discussion of the evolution of racism in the US context, even after societies dismantle forms of explicit domination like chattel slavery and Jim Crow, their legacy often remains in varied forms of oppression, including cultural imperialism, exploitation, and vulnerability to violence. In turn, this violence can serve as an ongoing form of domination. Indeed, Young outlines how oppression itself is a multifaceted phenomenon, revealed through what she labels five overlapping “faces”—normative, institutional, and cultural practices that disadvantage certain individuals and privilege others.

In building an initial bridge between Young’s work and OSS, what is notable about oppression and domination is the way these two forms of injustice compound one another with regards to identity. Identity—particularly when it is understood in the ontological, constitutive sense implied by much OSS—is intimately related to agency. A sense of self results from understanding oneself relationally as a stable actor across time and space, able to make decisions for oneself in response to social opportunities and constraints. ⁴ Indeed, even for marginalized groups who find their agency undermined by domination and oppression, identities often form through resistance—finding alternative ways to recover agency in the face of injustice. Here, the example of how African American cultural and political identity formed in response to the injustices of chattel slavery and Jim Crow proves instructive (Eyerman, 2001). Slaves and their descendants found their agency significantly constrained through horrific violence and legalized discrimination, but they nonetheless cultivated an identity distinct from that imposed on them by pushing back and pursuing their own understandings of self.

Given this relationship, oppression’s undermining of agency will necessarily inspire ontological insecurity—a diminished ability to achieve a sense of stable identity over time. Oppression can undermine actors’ ability to establish routines or cultivate autobiographical narratives that allow them to create a sense of stability across time and space. By contrast, domination’s constraints on self-determination can precipitate, reinforce, and deepen this ontological insecurity. By preventing agents from defining and pursuing their interests—including establishing routines and cultivating autobiographical narratives—domination will inhibit efforts to build or recover a sense of continuous identity, rendering ontological insecurity a more pernicious and intractable condition. Indeed, because oppression so often “includes or entails” domination, domination’s constraints on self-determination will often render ontologically insecure individuals unable to seek ontological security, deepening the condition’s effects.

This synergy between Young’s theory of justice and OSS is reinforced by her own more limited invocation of Giddens’ structuration theory in a chapter on “The Scaling of Bodies and the Politics of Identity” (Young, 1990: 122–155). Here, Young cites Giddens’ reading of ontological security—which she alternatively refers to as “ontological integrity”—in a specific examination of how, even in liberal democratic societies, unconscious differential treatment of individuals from marginalized groups can constitute a subtle form of oppression, even when these responses are not vocalized as discriminatory comments or formalized in systems of explicit domination (Young, 1990: 131). Indeed, Young (1990: 131–134) argues that, in contemporary liberal societies, norms against overt racism and sexism make this form of cultural imperialism a particularly pernicious manufacturer of ontological insecurity:

[A]lthough public etiquette may forbid discursively conscious racism and sexism, in the privacy of the living room or locker room people are often more frank about their prejudices and preferences. Self-conscious racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and ableism are fueled by unconscious meanings and reactions that take place at the levels Giddens calls practical consciousness and the basic security system. In a society committed to formal equality for all groups, these unconscious reactions are more widespread than discursive prejudice and devaluation, and do not need the latter to reproduce relations of privilege and oppression. Judgments of beauty or ugliness, attraction or aversion, cleverness or stupidity, competence or ineptness, and so on are made unconsciously in interactive contexts and in generalized media culture, and these judgments often mark, stereotype, devalue, or degrade some groups. (Young, 1990: 133)

In this way, Young articulates oppression as a corrosive force that erodes identity and undermines agency, even after substantial progress ridding society of unjust dominating legal structures like Jim Crow. To better capture this erosion, at multiple points Young (1990: 60) draws on W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea of the double consciousness Black Americans cultivate in response to discrimination. In Du Bois (2007) words,

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (p. 8)

Du Bois’ image of “measuring one’s soul” by a contemptuous “tape,” as well as his reference to “two unreconciled strivings,” captures well both ontological insecurity’s inherent relationality, as well as oppression’s ability to produce ontological insecurity through the divergent interpretations of identity cultivated by oneself and judged by another.

Incorporating the insights of Du Bois, who wrote eloquently on how injustice for Black Americans manifested as both domination and oppression, provides a valuable avenue for expanding Young’s limited engagement with Giddens to international politics. While Young’s references to ontological integrity relate specifically to unconscious reactions to minoritized peoples in liberal welfare capitalist societies, the same undermining of identity occurs more acutely with other forms of oppression and domination. Indeed, Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness emerges not solely from unconscious prejudice experienced in liberal contexts, but also due to other forms of oppression and systems of legal domination like Jim Crow prevalent during the time of his writing. While Du Bois recognized double consciousness emerging through such cultural imperialism, he also understood its more violent production through systems like segregation and state-imposed white supremacy.

Building on this idea, the next section elaborates this article’s argument that multiple forms of oppression and domination in the international systems should be understood as key producers of ontological insecurity—in other words, ontological insecurity is often interwoven with experiences of injustice. This extension to the scale of international politics constitutes a natural next step, as Young herself recognized the limitations of focusing her argument on elite segments of US society. In the epilogue of her book, she recommends extending and adapting her ideas to a more global perspective, which she began doing in her later writings (Young, 1990: 257–260, 2005, 2006a). Developing her conceptualization of injustice to address ontological insecurity across time and space helps reveal the diverse ways identity can be undermined and challenged in global politics. Indeed, oftentimes, the injustice embedded in the international system compounds the effects Young identified, making this extension even more vital.

Five faces of ontological insecurity

Young defines justice as the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression. However, given Young’s focus on the US context, the bulk of her Justice and the Politics of Difference focuses on how multiple “faces of oppression,” rather than domination, manifest for disadvantaged groups in the context of contemporary American liberal welfare capitalism. This focus makes sense, as oppression is arguably more widespread and pernicious than domination in contexts where explicit legal domination has largely been abolished. Her primary intellectual target in the book is American analytic political theory’s tendency to view justice in distributive terms and its atomistic, assimilationist approach to group difference, as well as the downstream affects this approach has on US policy debates. The text thus leaves open questions about how both historical and contemporary systems of global domination reverberate in forms of oppression, particularly outside the US context, as well as how the two types of injustice compound one another to produce ontological insecurity. Though her subsequent work, including the posthumous Responsibility for Justice, offers a theorization of structural injustice more readily applicable to international politics (see Lu, 2017), it too begins from the context of American academia and liberal welfare capitalism and expands outwards (Young, 2006a, 2011).

This section extends Young’s insights more directly to the international arena, demonstrating her work’s immense potential for OSS. By connecting her discussion of “five faces of oppression”—violence, exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism ⁵ —with her discussion of domination in multiple subsequent writings (see Young, 2003, 2005, 2006a), I demonstrate how forms of oppression and domination produce and reinforce ontological insecurity in the international system. Each of these faces transcends the US domestic political context and scales to the international arena, disrupting actors’ identities and preventing them from pursuing stable routines and self-narratives. Though, in Young’s formulation, these faces constitute primarily forms of oppression, their ability to produce ontological insecurity is compounded and reinforced by the ways they entangle with systems of domination, both contemporary and historical. In this way, theorizing these five faces’ production of ontological insecurity in international politics is also revealing of multiple aspects of global domination, as well as how oppression and domination interweave to affect identity. Indeed, though framing this discussion around multiple levels of analysis adds a degree of complexity, by highlighting how these faces transcend individual experiences to shape macro-scale politics and rebound back to individuals, this section highlights a core argument of recent years’ OSS research—the degree to which identity-related anxieties reverberate between individuals and groups (Innes, 2023; Lerner, 2021).

A word of caution is required before entering this discussion: each of these faces represent immense forms of injustice in the international system, worthy of sustained attention beyond the scope of this article. Presenting them together risks both dissolving distinctions and overwhelming the reader with the immensity of global injustice under analysis. My goal in outlining them is thus not to present a detailed or nuanced portrait of global injustice and its impacts. Rather, much like Young, I endeavor to begin sketching “criteria” for future scholarship to investigate how the perpetuation of global injustice furthers ontological insecurity, as well as to aid imagination of novel mechanisms for reconciliation and repair. Each should thus be understood as illuminating one avenue through which injustice produces ontological insecurity, rather than a discrete causal mechanism or isolatable international practice.

Violence

Considering how Young’s five faces of oppression present unique difficulties in scaling to international politics, I begin with a discussion of violence—perhaps injustice’s most recognizable, yet often misunderstood face in the international arena (Lerner, 2022; Thomas, 2011). In its most direct applications, political violence is a tool of domination, inhibiting actors from exercising their agency through coercion and pure destruction. Political violence’s role in allowing certain actors to dominate others is a core assumption across IR research, though one that is often overlooked in OSS due to initial efforts to draw a contrast with traditional security studies’ focus on physical violence (Krickel-Choi, 2022; Mitzen, 2006b; Steele, 2008). However, the role of political violence in regulating identities need not be seen as an ancillary aspect of its functioning, but rather central to its perverse logics.

In practice, political violence’s immediate physical impact of inflicting harm on bodies often works in conjunction with its symbolic and regulatory aspects, making violence simultaneously a tool of domination and oppression (Fujii et al., 2021). On an individual level, coercive violence enacted by both the state and non-state actors prevents individuals and groups from living how they choose. It can prevent freedom of expression, curtail religious and cultural practices, and punitively control the expression of minoritized gender and sexual identities. In this way, violence’s direct dominating effects radiate beyond individual victims—as violence spreads from individual interactions to larger populations, it can shape the conduct of groups and even states. Violence in the form of imperialism and warfare limits self-determination, constrains international action, and circumscribes actors’ agency on the world stage. So long as violent domination remains a central tool in the international arena, its effects—direct and indirect, short term, and long term—will remain foundational to international life (Lerner, 2022, 2023).

It is here—in highlighting how violence’s direct impacts spread beyond individual interactions to the scale international politics—where re-engaging Young’s understanding of violence as a face of oppression allows for a more complete understanding of its challenge to ontological security. Young addresses violence primarily in its “systematic” form and thus focuses less on its direct destructive impacts and more on how it indirectly manifests as oppression. Members of certain groups—whether these groups are marginalized communities or states—live with “fear [of] random, unprovoked attacks on their persons or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person” (Young, 1990: 61, 62, 63). Whereas violence as domination directly affects the identities of its victims, violence as oppression has a more “systematic character.” She writes, “It is always at the horizon of social imagination, even for those who do not perpetrate it.” Systematic violence thus regulates understandings of selfhood, inspiring ongoing “unconscious fears” that manifest as ontological insecurity.

When violence occurs beyond isolated incidents and becomes a systematic force threatening particular groups—as in the case of war, imperialism, and ethnic violence—it proves an ongoing and acute source of identity-related anxieties for both direct and indirect victims, even after the immediate threat of violence dissipates. Though he refrains from considering normative concepts like injustice, Sean Kay (2012: 241) captures this dynamic well in interviews with political and governmental officials, activists, and former paramilitaries, conducted in Northern Ireland in 2010. He finds that, even more than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement dramatically reduced violent incidents, “endemic fear of violence, and other manifestations of ‘danger’” contribute to ongoing ontological insecurity. Indeed, violence historically has been a core mechanism for producing and regulating identities on the world stage over the long-term, eroding ontological security and compelling actors to establish new routines and self-understandings in its wake. Though, over time, violence’s impacts often result in the formation of new identities, this process of translating trauma into identity can be fraught and, indeed, often entails political processes of wrestling with lingering ontological insecurity (Lerner, 2020b, 2022).

Exploitation

Young’s theorization of exploitation as oppression invokes a Marxist understanding of global labor relations that proves readily adaptable to global scales. “Through private ownership of the means of production, and through markets that allocate labor and the ability to buy goods, capitalism systematically transfers the powers of some persons to others, thereby augmenting the power of the latter” (Young, 1990: 49). For Young, this systematic “ability to extract benefits from workers” not only redistributes resources towards the privileged, but also structures unequal social relations between labor and capital. Indeed, Young highlights gender exploitation—the systematic devaluing and extraction of caring labor from women, for the advantage of men—as one way in which exploitation destabilizes social identities (see also Delphy, 2016). This dynamic of extricating value from certain actors’ labor and appropriating it to others exists in both the home and the workplace, as well as within and across borders.

As with violence, this face can be understood in its direct manifestations as a form of domination—especially as exploitation intertwines with violence—as well as more diffusely, as a form of oppression. In both cases, it proves an ongoing source of ontological insecurity for those individuals, groups, and even states that are exploited. As domination, exploitation is an active process, seen in the practice of modern slavery, as well as more commonplace forms of punitive workplace domination, as when factory managers or landlords compel vulnerable workers to persist in dangerous conditions for unfair wages, regulating their lives inside and outside the workplace (Kiss and Zimmerman, 2019). However, in more dispersed global economic relations, exploitation commonly manifests as oppression. In liberal welfare capitalist societies like that Young analyzes, formal legal distinctions between classes might have disappeared, but class oppression nonetheless persists as a structure enabling certain privileged actors and constraining disadvantaged ones. To explain this form of oppression, Young (1990: 52) refers to “the category of menial labor”—certain jobs that “entail a transfer of energies whereby the servers enhance the status of the served.” Indeed, this service need not be direct—just as the gardener bolsters the social standing of the property owner without direct interaction, the workers that stitch luxury clothing across the globe enhance the status of its eventual wearer thousands of miles away. Exploitation thus entails a direct transfer of labor power and, in many ways, an indirect transfer of ontological security—supporting the identities of some and diminishing those of others.

Neo-Marxist IR theory has continually demonstrated that the injustice Young highlights among individuals in domestic politics is not simply inherent to the structure of liberal welfare capitalist states, but rather integrated into a world system, regulating identities at multiple levels (Wallerstein, 2004). Indeed, taking this step back from labor relations within the United States to global labor relations reveals how the bulk of oppression and domination inherent to capitalist exploitation is woven into global supply chains. If, as Young argues, exploitation informs unjust social relations and undermines the status of the exploited, then we must understand exploitation as a core producer of ontological insecurity in the international arena. Just as those in more prosperous and powerful positions leverage resources afforded by global capitalism to seek ontological security through what might otherwise be labeled costly and irrational actions (Steele, 2008), those in disadvantaged social positions suffer vulnerability and ontological insecurity due to their diminished status and inability to pursue such actions. Those workers at the “menial” end of global supply chains will find themselves politically disempowered, unable to pursue their identities, while those states in what Wallerstein identifies as the “periphery” will find their agency curtailed in the international arena, unable to meaningfully shape the global economic relations that shape their fate. As exploitative relations extract wealth and status from certain global actors and give it to others, they return ontological insecurity to the exploited and ongoing constraints on agency.

Marginalization

Marginalization is, in many ways, both a byproduct of and necessary condition for global exploitation. Young (1990) defines marginals as “people the system of labor cannot or will not use” (p. 53). Disproportionately, these people come from already disadvantaged groups and live in the Global South, though Young focuses on those marginalized people living as an underclass in liberal capitalist societies. Stepping back, however, marginalization must be understood as the inevitable result of an interconnected global capitalist economic system built upon extraction, exclusion, and exploitation (Young, 2006a). The threat of marginalization helps push laborers into exploitative conditions and reinforces the instability of disadvantaged lives. Indeed, marginalization also reinforces the effects of mass violence and resulting collective trauma, as physical destruction so often inhibits individuals’ ability to engage in global markets (Lerner, 2019a).

Beyond material deprivation, which can, in theory, be addressed in certain contexts through redistribution, marginalization constitutes a form of oppression as it undermines identity. In liberal capitalist societies, even those marginalized individuals able to survive on welfare suffer from dependency that inhibits agency and “blocks the opportunity to exercise capacities in socially defined and recognized ways” (Young, 1990: 54). In political contexts without such safety nets, this undermining of agency is even more acute. Indeed, across political contexts, marginalized individuals find their rights curtailed. They are subject to excessive monitoring and punishment by the state and sub-state institutions, they have their freedom of choice inhibited, and they are not afforded basic respect. In a variety of political and social decision-making processes, marginalized people’s voices are silenced.

From the perspective of OSS, the undermining of agency and exclusion from social systems marginalized individuals face should be understood as reinforcing ontological insecurity, compounding the initial experience of marginalization through an ongoing usurpation of agency. Vaquera et al. (2017) capture this dynamic well in interviews with young undocumented immigrants in Florida, whose citizenship often prevents them from taking jobs for which they are qualified. They cite the example of Mario, a 24-year-old undocumented immigrant, who has been offered jobs but had these opportunities rescinded due to his legal status. “This leads to frustration at feeling legally restrained from accomplishing what he knows he can do,” they write, and the result is ontological security (Vaquera et al., 2017: 304). Furthermore, marginalized individuals like Mario often lack the resources, networks, and social positions necessary for ontological security-seeking. To be sure, these actors often pursue new identities in the face of marginalization, cultivating new routines and narratives of self. Nevertheless, this process should not be assumed as it often requires significant resistance and struggle.

While marginalization in international politics can be understood at the level of the individual who is excluded from global economic systems, it can also be scaled up to the level of national groups and states. While some states are stuck in adverse positions of exploitation in global capitalism, other states and non-state actors are cut off entirely. They remain stateless groups or are isolated as “rogue” or “failed” states, subjected to sanctions and blockades. The international system prohibits these stateless people and rogue states from taking part in international negotiations and thus, even if they achieve an equitable distribution of resources through humanitarian aid or an alternative mechanism, they are denied the collective agency of self-determination and international recognition. Though sanctions, blockades, and refusals of recognition may serve worthy purposes in the abstract—for example, punishing brutal tyrants or condemning conflictual practices—international marginalization often comes with consequences that scale from the level of states to individuals. A lack of recognition for a state or national group on the world stage can thus have immense consequences for the ontological security of those within them.

Here, returning to the example of Iraq proves instructive. Following the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq faced harsh sanctions and punitive reparations that shrank the country’s per capita gross domestic profit (GDP; in 2022 USD) from 3800 prior to the invasion to less than 23. As Hans-Christof von Sponeck (2006), the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, writes, Iraqis living under the sanction regime were forced to subsist on meager humanitarian aid that was continually curtailed, threatened, and lessened for capricious reasons (see also Gordon, 2012). Though certain sanctions might have served the purpose of limiting Saddam Hussein’s offensive capabilities or compensating refugees of the war, their sheer volume and duration resulted in a stunting of political agency among Iraqis, with consequences that continue to emerge to this day. Iraq was made marginal to the international system, undermining the ontological security of both its despotic leaders and most disadvantaged citizens.

Powerlessness

Powerlessness refers to a condition overlapping with exploitation and marginalization, but focused on its political manifestations, rather than economic. As Young (1990) writes, powerless individuals “do not regularly participate in making decisions that affect the conditions of their lives and actions, and in this sense most people lack significant power” (p. 56). While written in the context of US liberal welfare capitalism, this insight maps perhaps even more readily onto international than domestic politics. If disempowered individuals find themselves with weakened political impact in the context of liberal welfare capitalism, this dynamic is magnified on international scales, where representation is more indirect and corrupted. Just as the IR discipline has traditionally focused on “great power politics,” the international system has traditionally empowered solely great powers and the elite (predominantly White, Western, male) officials that represent them.

Again, powerlessness erodes ontological security in international politics at multiple levels. On an individual level, most people find their identities shaped to a significant degree by international political practices in which they have little direct say. Average Iraqis living under Saddam Hussein’s regime had almost no power to affect their state’s decision to wage war against Kuwait, but nonetheless found their lives and identities significantly affected by the decision and its global consequences. Indeed, even outside tyrannical dictatorships in liberal democratic contexts individuals still find themselves poorly represented on the world stage due to the elitism of international diplomacy and the White, Western, and male biases of diplomats and their negotiations (Denman, 2011). In practice, most individuals find themselves with little power in the international arena—unable to influence decisions over war and peace, unable to migrate due to restrictive visa regimes, and even, in many contexts, unable to voice their dissent in a way that can help stabilize identities in response to international shifts. Given the degree to which international politics shapes individuals’ lives but remains outside their control, a degree of ontological insecurity regarding international identity is unsurprising.

Likewise, scaling to the level of national groups and states, most international actors find themselves relatively powerless on the world stage, particularly when it comes to matters of war and peace. Hans Morgenthau (1948: 29–30) made this point explicit when he defined international politics as a “struggle for power” and wrote that “not all nations are at all times to the same extend involved in international politics.” Although Morgenthau recognized that multiple spheres of economic, cultural, and legal international activity were more readily accessible for smaller and militarily weaker states, the ability of more powerful states to initiate conflicts that reverberate across the international system can render the relatively powerless even more ontologically insecure. Smaller and weaker states may find themselves unable to pursue a consistent autobiographical narrative or stable routines when these practices can be upended by the whims of larger powers. For example, Germany’s initiation of the Second World War created an initial conflict between major European powers, but its impacts reverberated across continents, destabilizing identities across the international system, including in the colonized world (Lerner, 2019b). The injustice of aggressive war thus echoes in ontological insecurity across the international system, affecting even those states that avoid direct invasion.

Cultural imperialism

Individuals experience cultural imperialism when “the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other” (Young, 1990: 58–59). Cultural imperialism occurs when a given set of norms reflect the experiences, preferences, and practices of a dominant group and other groups must comply with this foreign standard or risk being marginalized. Though Young articulates this definition to illuminate the experience of minoritized groups in the United States, her definition resonates deeply with long-standing insights of post-colonial IR scholarship, which has continually noted the Orientalist biases of both the international system and the IR discipline that developed to analyze it (Chowdhry, 2007). As Sankaran Krishna (2001) writes,

the emergence of a modern, territorially sovereign state system in Europe was coterminous with, and indissociable from, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the “new” world, the enslavement of the natives of the African continent, and the colonization of the societies of Asia. (p. 401)

Though many of these practices have ceased, they continue to inform dominant international norms—including the crucial structuring norm of state sovereignty—eroding the ontological security of groups that were not participants in these norms’ creation that may pursue alternative self-understandings.

In some contexts, including under historical relationships of empire, cultural imperialism is imposed as a form of domination. Dominant groups restrict certain cultural practices and individuals are thus forced to practice new religions, speak non-native languages, and partake in dominant groups’ rituals and ceremonies. Scaled up to the level of group interactions, violent force can curtail indigenous groups’ agency, stealing land, exiling people, and destroying ways of life. In contemporary international practices, however, cultural imperialism on the world stage is perhaps more prevalent as a form of oppression—a limitation on certain individuals and groups self-actualization due to standards and meanings being determined by a dominant group. Rather than certain languages being banned outright, individuals find that a lack of fluency in English or lack of familiarity with Western cultural, educational, and professional standards limit their opportunities to gain employment, form relationships, or migrate. Likewise, for indigenous groups to gain recognition, they must comport with the political institutions and procedures of colonizers and, even then, find themselves disadvantaged participants (Coulthard, 2014; De Leon, 2020). Indeed, even at the level of states, many post-colonial states gained independence only to find a foreign Westphalian model imposed upon diverse indigenous political practices and communities. Western norms were established without their input and these states often wrestle with the consequences of maintaining a political system that is a poor fit for their populations.

Ontological insecurity is an inevitable result of cultural imperialism, echoing between the individual, group, and state levels of analysis. Individuals encountering cultural imperialism are forced to develop what Du Bois referred to as a double consciousness—ever aware of how foreign standards judge them, while also striving to maintain authenticity. Marginalized groups must alter practices to gain recognition, while also working to maintain cultural meanings and traditions. Though many individuals manage these challenges, this double consciousness can split identity and make the pursuit of a cohesive self-image more difficult. Likewise, post-colonial states wrestle with what Sudipta Kaviraj (2010) refers to as the “contradictory inheritance” (p. 222) of the colonizers—the often conflicting mandates of maintaining authenticity to their domestic audience and conforming to a foreign imposed political standards. Cultural imperialism thus creates a tilted international arena, in which those individuals, groups, and states from non-dominant groups find their identities undermined by dominant norms, as well as their ability to seek new forms of ontological security to assuage this situation made more difficult (see, for example, Lerner, 2022).

Conclusion: achieving global justice, achieving ontological security?

The concept of ontological security has made an invaluable contribution to IR by highlighting the primacy of identity in international politics. Mainstream IR scholarship has traditionally begun with materialist assumptions about pre-existing territorial state actors and rationalist assumptions about their pursuit of physical security. Though initially constructivist scholarship attempted to carve room out within this schema for ideational factors, OSS has launched a bolder challenge. It has flipped this dominant framework on its head, demonstrating how an understanding of selfhood should be understood as prior to any association of security with physical attributes like territory, militaries, and resources. Discussions of security thus must begin with an understanding of how identities inform how actors understand these resources, while threats to identity must be understood as fundamental threats to security.

In many ways, however, the success of OSS’ challenge to mainstream security studies has also contributed to its long-standing blind spots. By pitching itself deliberately as an alternative explanation to mainstream accounts, early OSS scholarship often reproduced security studies’ oversights—including its status quo, Western, and anti-normative biases. Indeed, though early OSS scholarship sought to explain why states partake in moral action (Steele, 2008), the normative assumptions motivating this research agenda often remained unstated and under-explored. As Christopher Browning (2016) wrote more than a decade after the publication of initial OSS contributions cited in this article, most OSS scholarship continues to retain facile assumptions that ontological insecurity is stems from inevitable existential anxiety and, therefore, ontological security-seeking is ceteris paribus “ethically . . . unproblematic.” In practice, however, actions taken in pursuit of ontological security are often manifestly violent and unjust, used to bolster the referent’s identity at the expense of a marginalized actor or group. Again, the US invasion of Iraq, a common case in early OSS scholarship, serves as a potent example. So long as OSS remains adrift from normative theory, the normative tensions between abstract understandings of ontological security’s merits and its ethically problematic pursuit in real-world politics will remain under-examined.

This paper has argued that, by focusing on how forms of domination and oppression endemic to the international system produce ontological insecurity, scholarship can develop a better understanding of how injustice informs identity in international politics, as well as a better normative framework to parse the tensions identified in the prior paragraph. Adapting Iris Marion Young’s conceptualization of justice as “elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression,” the paper has shined a spotlight on how unjust practices of domination and oppression do not solely lead to material deprivation, but also reverberate as ontological insecurity. A primary result of injustice is often ontological insecurity, and, in turn, domination and oppression can foreclose ontological security-seeking practices for many of injustice’s victims. The paper has thus expanded and adapted Young’s typology of “five faces of oppression” to reveal how injustice endemic to the international system remains an ongoing producer of ontological insecurity for many actors that have thus far been overlooked by OSS.

Beginning with this examination of injustice and ontological insecurity provides an initial avenue for bridging OSS and normative political theory, but also raises a more foundational question for future scholarship, best expressed by asking the converse of this article’s argument: is global justice a pre-condition for co-existing actors pursuing ontological security? If we are to aspire to a world in which multiple actors can pursue self-understandings without undermining the identities of others, must global justice be its basis? Can such a world possibly take hold without fundamentally overturning the injustices endemic to international politics? Though utopian when phrased purely in the abstract, articulating such questions highlights the degree to which the prescriptive goals embedded in global justice scholarship and a more systemic vision of OSS may overlap.

Though this paper leaves open such bold questions, it has highlighted how certain actors’ ontological security-seeking too often creates injustice and, in turn, ontological insecurity among others—a dynamic Akchurina and Della Sala (2018) refer to as the “ontological security dilemma.” Just as the colonizer may believe they are partaking in a self-affirming moral crusade, those who are colonized often find their identities eroded through colonialism’s domination and oppression. Indeed, this injustice of destabilized identity can persist long after the colonizer has been removed. If global justice is understood in Iris Marion Young’s terms, as international politics without domination and oppression, then perhaps we could imagine a better world in which differently positioned actors seek ontological security without imposing insecurity on others. Here, I refrain from any definitive statements here about whether such a utopia is realistic or the merits of its imperfect pursuit. However, I will conclude by suggesting an avenue for future scholarship that understands global justice and ontological security not solely as two banal abstract positives nor solely two interrelated phenomena, but rather as potentially mutually constitutive. Both ontological security among multiple co-existing actors and global justice may be unobtainable ideals, yet achieving one seems integral to achieving the other.