Recent studies have made great strides looking at the implications that the human need for ontological security has for politics and International Relations. However, less attention has been paid to how actors might target this need. While Steele and Mattern both examine the possible manipulation of subjectivity, this article turns to the concept of information warfare (IW) to broaden the view of how, and to what end, this is pursued. Congruently, by elaborating upon how the digitalization of society has increased the potential to influence and manipulate cognition and emotion, OS strengthens current literature on IW. It argues that by covertly perverting the information landscape, IW can alter how events are connected to national narratives, influencing policy by making certain options appear more/less shameful, or it can unravel the bonds of society by polarizing domestic narrative debates, purposely sowing ontological insecurity. This provides a firmer understanding of the strategic implications interference can have generally and of Russia's interference into the 2016 U.S. election specifically. Therefore, by viewing facets of IW as part of a range of tactics employed to manipulate/ undermine subjectivity, a more nuanced understanding of interstate relations subsequently emerges.

Scholarship on Ontological Security (OS) 'the security of being', reveals how national narratives delineate communities within which individuals have OS and how the corresponding self-interest in upholding these narratives influence foreign policy. A heretounexplored implication of these works is how the desire to maintain national narratives influences decisions on balancing and bandwagoning. The article uses Aron's classical realism to develop an OS theory of balancing, drawing upon what it argues are his 'early OS intuitions'. Specifically, using Aron's concept of secular religion, the article shifts the analytical focus of current ideological approaches of balancing towards the 'secular religion' of nationalism. It argues decisions on balancing and bandwagoning are made in reference to perceived (in)compatibility between national narratives and the distribution of power. The case of North Korean responses to the Sino-Soviet split demonstrates the utility of an OS perspective of balancing compared to traditional balance of power formulations. IntroScholarship on ontological security (OS), the security of being, 1 reveals how national narratives delineate communities within which individuals have OS and how the corresponding self-interest in upholding these narratives influence foreign policy. 2 The research program, however, so far has not taken on one of the core theoretical questions in international relations (IR): Why do states balance and bandwagon? This article accordingly shows the power of an OS perspective by addressing the hard case of why small states decide 1

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While ontological security (OS) studies have gone through a recent evolution, shifting toward psychoanalytic and existential accounts of anxiety, this article argues there remains a deficient engagement with the affective environments within which actors operate. Specifically, focusing on shared emotions/affect allows for a thicker account of the mechanisms of OS – including the constitutive forces underpinning society/societal trust, the role/power of signifiers and narratives, and the basis upon which actors promote social change. Accordingly, it suggests Durkheim's social theory, his broader concept of ‘religion’ as an affective community constituted by faith in a moral order entwined with the sacred, offers a viable pathway to develop these insights and develop a new basis for the mechanisms of OS. The drive for OS thus becomes reconfigured as an effort to act faithfully toward a dynamic moral order, while ontological insecurity emerges from the unbearable lightness of being experienced within moral disorder. Following Durkheim's preliminary argument on nationalism representing the continuation of religion, we can then revise how/why nations are integral to OS and International Relations. Specifically, we can view foreign policy as informed by debates around how to act faithfully toward the moral order – a process interrelated with revitalization and renewal of the sacred.

Discourses and practices reproducing a world where a plurality of distinct civilizations clash or dialogue, rise or fall, color multiple facets of global politics today. How should we interpret this unexpected surge in civilizational politics, especially notable in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, China, and Russia? This paper argues that the growing turn to civilizations or, better, civilizationism should be understood as a counter-hegemonic ideological reaction to the globalization of the liberal international order. It theorizes the deepening and widening of the liberal international order in the aftermath of the Cold War as enabled by powerful constitutive ideological forces, which congeal into a distinctively modern, informal, universal standard of civilization. This liberal civilizational standard can be experienced by a particular category of non (fully) liberal actors within and beyond the West as ideologically entrapping them—through processes of socialization or stigmatization—in a state of symbolic disempowerment. The paper shows how civilizationism provides an ideological path for resisting and contesting the liberal standard of civilization by articulating a distinct and valued (essentialized) sense of collective belonging, and an alternative (generally illiberal) normative system and (broadly multipolar) vision of international order. Along with theorizing and exploring in original ways the drivers of civilizational politics in the current historical juncture, the paper makes two further contributions. It highlights and unpacks the key role of ideological dynamics in the making and contestation of international orders in general and the liberal one in particular. It suggests and shows why civilizations are best approached as ideological constructs rather than cultures, identities, or discourses.