International Relations (IR) has had a series of recurring debates over state personhood for almost two decades now. These debates centered on the analytical and political concerns of metaphorically or literally anthropomorphizing collectives through the application or analogizing of individual processes. The debates have been found in a variety of corners of IR, most centrally in the development of a research community focused on Ontological Security Studies (OSS). Critics of that research community have focused on the supposed level of analysis problem within OSS (from the late 2000s), and through the middle of the past decade has taken the form of work that argued against the appropriation of individual, and particularly psychological, processes, to collectives including especially states. This was despite the fact that a number of defenses had been issued by scholars for such appropriation.

In this riveting, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically rich book, Bianca Naude takes on the central concerns over states as collectives, and state personhood specifically, by arguing that states are collectives that are not reducible to the individuals within them. After a masterful review of the work on state personhood in IR (“The Ontological Status of the State,” chap. 2), Naude deploys insights from Sigmund Freud’s personality theory, and Heinz Kohut’s work on narcissism (chap. 3), to assert that the appropriation of individual, and especially psychological, concepts is not the problem. Rather, it is how those referents are deployed. Specifically, Naude posits in contrast to more recent critical deployments of the term that see it as a pathology, that narcissism can be a “normal aspect of self-esteem” (p. 172). Thus, even though some states viewed as “narcissistic” may be seen as having violent and problematic tendencies (see Linus Hagström, “Great Power Narcissism and Ontological (In)security: The Narrative Mediation of Greatness and Weakness in International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 65[2]: 331–42, 2021), Naude notes that narcissism is part of protecting the ego. Healthy investments in the self can in turn lead to positive reinforcements and even progressive possibilities. The book illustrates these insights in the context of the “state person” of postapartheid South Africa (chaps. 4 and 5), examining foreign policy discourses through speeches, declarations, official government documents, and policy papers. The book concludes with some important implications for the applicability of narcissism and ego defenses to other states and collectives (chap. 6).

This is an ambitious and even audacious book. Its contributions are numerous; I’ll focus on five here. First, the literatures synthesized and consulted are remarkable. Naude provides an organized and powerful rendering of works in IR on state personhood (pp. 25–35), emotions (pp. 39–45), identity (pp. 35–39), relationalism (pp. 43–49), and narcissism (chap. 3). Naude was even able to incorporate recent contributions to these debates such as the work on “state consciousness” by Adam Lerner (“What’s It Like to Be a State? An Argument for State Consciousness,” International Theory 13[2]: 260–86, 2021) as well as the aforementioned study Hagström. Second, this is an unabashed defense of state personhood, taking into consideration the criticisms of recent scholars on that thorny issue but also creatively deploying the understanding of emotions and narcissism so that they do not have to fall prey to concerns over “pathologizing” these processes. It is within these two literatures—those of emotions and narcissism in collectives—where Naude’s lasting contributions will, I expect, emerge. A third set of contributions involves Naude’s assertion that emotions are experienced within and across collectives, and that as such they are complex and not always “negative” (including fear and anger), and that they are “psychological states” rather than physical ones and therefore “a physical body is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the capacity to experience emotions” (p. 43).

The fourth set of contributions focuses specifically on the previously mentioned concept of narcissism. Here Naude starts with, but then moves beyond, Freud (specifically on pp. 64–65). While Freud’s work on narcissism “focused … on the subject’s withdrawal from external objects in response to negative experiences with the outside world,” it is Kohut’s work that Naude sees as advancing a more nuanced and even positive understanding of narcissism as promoting resiliency and healthy self-esteem. Here narcissism is not solely inward, but a way to fortify and constantly evolve a self that is in communication with society. Self-conscious emotions are therefore not pathologies (or not always so), but rather functions for working within and being a part of “moral communities.” Thus, rather than self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, or anxiety inhibiting action (as sometimes assumed in OSS), they can and often are the basis for action and engagement with the world.

A final set of contributions come from Naude’s meticulous and precise analysis of postapartheid South Africa, focusing not only on the “state” but also on the importance of the relational space between foreign and domestic policies, the presentation of a state person that involves historical contexts including especially “racialized divisions” playing out across and interdependently between both contexts (pp. 114–21).

Naude’s work is so careful it is hard to locate any areas requiring better specification or development. My concerns here are mere quibbles. There is a tension, for instance, between the very precise and important understanding the author deploys of relationalism and the push against “Cartesian dualism” that marks the opening chapters of her work, and the use throughout the book of causal language and the reduction of some of the processes analyzed to somewhat deterministic understandings of social and political relationships. My own sense is that this is a function of her Freudian starting point. As I’ve discussed in a relatively recent book (Restraint in International Politics, 2019), Freud’s more causal, mechanistic views on libidinal drives are less useful than those of his contemporary, Carl Gustav Jung. The latter’s understanding of the libido went beyond individual sex drives, and into “psychic energic” social spaces where collectives channel that build up into processes, including positive and productive ones, that appear quite similar to the “investments” that Naude so adeptly discusses in chapter 3.

Second, while Naude provides a very persuasive treatment of the racialized contexts of South Africa as a state person, gendered contexts are not treated. And yet it is hard to read passages such as the “affective experience derive[d] from the state’s colonial history” left it “feeling emasculated” (p. 122), and not see gendered dynamics to narcissism. There is a growing body of work that engages with the gendered dynamics of ontological security-seeking (Catarina Kinnvall, “Populism, Ontological Insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the Masculinization of Indian Politics,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 32[3]: 283–302, 2019; Katharine A. M. Wright, Toni Haastrup, and Roberta Guerrina, “Equalities in Freefall? Ontological Insecurity and the Long‐Term Impact of COVID‐19 in the Academy,” Gender, Work & Organization 28: 163–67, 2021; Will Delehanty and Brent Steele, “Engaging the Narrative in Ontological (In)security Theory: Insights from Feminist IR,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22[3]: 523–40, 2009). Future work within and outside of that research community might examine the gendered dynamics of narcissism more directly.

For those who think that state personhood is not only useful but also a real social feature of global politics, Naude’s book is an achievement on a number of fronts. It is a splendid blend of careful analysis combined with creativity and innovation, and thus worthy of scholarly attention now and in the years to come.