Research on ontological security in International Relations (IR) has grown significantly in recent years. However, this scholarship is marked by conceptual ambiguity concerning the meaning of and relationship between the key concepts of ontological insecurity and anxiety. In addition, ontological security scholarship has been criticized for applying a concept that was originally developed for understanding individuals to states, and for being excessively concerned with continuity while largely ignoring change or seeing it as a negative force to be avoided. Despite such issues, however, reflection on the theoretical origins of ontological security remains limited. Based on such reflection, the present article argues that these issues can be circumvented if we return to one of the theoretical precursors of ontological security studies, the existentialist literature on anxiety. R.D. Laing, who coined the term ontological security, was strongly influenced by the existentialist anxiety theorists. Anthony Giddens, however, who drew on Laing and whose understanding of ontological security permeates IR scholarship, explicitly rejected the distinction between normal and neurotic anxiety, which was central to the work of existentialists like Rollo May. This article reintroduces this distinction. Doing so is useful, the article argues, both for providing conceptual clarity and for moving beyond the criticisms of ontological security mentioned above. More generally, the article suggests that ontological security studies has much to gain from drawing on the insights of the existentialist literature on anxiety to a greater extent than has hitherto been the case.

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The growing literature on ontological security theory (OST) in international relations, ontological security studies (OSS), is characterized by great internal diversity. This internal pluralism is one of its greatest strengths, but it is also potentially confusing, for example, when different works using an ontological security lens arrive at contradictory conclusions without it being obvious why. In order to make sense of this diversity, this article traces two interrelated conceptual divergences related to the notion of anxiety. The first one concerns the observation that anxiety is seemingly both debilitating and an impediment to action, as well as a call to action, inspiring adaptation and change. The second divergence centers on whether ontological security is at all attainable, which is largely a matter of whether anxiety is best understood as an extraordinary and temporally limited condition or as an ever-present and normal part of life. This article argues that the divergent answers to these questions, and the problems they give rise to, are primarily the result of ambiguity with regard to the key concept of anxiety. The malleable nature of the concept of anxiety engenders deviating interpretations and applications among scholars. While awareness of these issues already goes a long way toward making sense of some of the diversity within OSS, this article further suggests ways to increase the conceptual clarity of anxiety and to address the two issues of change and attainability. Doing so increases our conceptual understanding of OST.

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