Political theorists and philosophers have long paid attention to anxiety as distinct from and constitutive of fear, and in this article, I argue that international relations (IR) theory needs to do the same. In building my argument, I first turn to existentialist philosophy where anxiety has found its most focused and elaborate treatment to highlight anxiety's distinction from and relation to fear, multiple forms, and links with freedom and agency. Secondly, I discuss some recent interpretations of the Leviathan that identify anxiety as the integral human condition that drives the Hobbesian individuals to egoism and competition for power in the state of nature.Footnote 1 I contend that these interpretations invite us to integrate anxiety into IR theory right at its core, not merely as a competing factor but as a constitutive condition.
Thirdly, I outline an ontological security (OS) perspective that is enriched by insights from existentialism as the most appropriate theoretical venue for integrating anxiety into IR theory as a constitutive condition. This theoretical path establishes anxiety as a constitutive condition, which generates rather than competes with the concern for survival, and helps refine the conception of ontological security by further specifying its link to physical security, underlying dimensions, and relation to change. Integrated into IR theory in this fashion, anxiety explains a wide range of foreign policy behaviors and international outcomes, from securitization to humanitarian action, and accounts for both stability and the potential for change.
Anxiety and fear in existentialist philosophy
Anxiety, both as an integral part of the human condition and in its pathological form, has long preoccupied philosophical and medical thought,Footnote 2 and as noted in Kinnvall and Mitzen, multiple conceptions inform our understanding of anxiety and its relevance for IR.Footnote 3 While this article draws on existentialist conceptions of anxiety, alternative theoretical foundations for integrating anxiety into IR theory may be found, most prominently in Freud and Lacan.Footnote 4 Although existentialism is far from being a unified body of thought – Heidegger vehemently rejected the label of existentialismFootnote 5 – this article will discuss existentialist conceptions pertaining to the distinction and the relation between fear and anxiety, the different types of anxiety, and the relationship between anxiety and freedom, drawing on Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Tillich.
The distinction and relation between anxiety and fear
Mainly, the existentialist conceptions consider anxiety as an integral part of the human condition, and distinguish it from fear, which is projected externally toward specific threats and concrete objects. In Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard states that the object of anxiety is ‘nothing’ and likens it to the dizzy feeling one gets from staring into an abyss.Footnote 6 Rather than a concrete threat or risk, in anxiety, one experiences ‘the possibility of possibility’.Footnote 7 In Kierkegaard, anxiety arises when individuals confront questions of existential significance and find that rational calculation cannot provide sufficient answers; individuals are then forced to make a choice.Footnote 8 Kierkegaard holds that God is the unknown and thus in the absence of certainty, believing in God will always involve an individual choice and an individual ‘leap of faith’.Footnote 9
In Being and Time, Heidegger draws a similar distinction between the moods of fear and anxiety at the ontological levelFootnote 10: ‘That in the face of which [Wovor] we fear (…) is in every case something which we encounter within-the-world (…) It shows itself within a context of involvements’ whereas ‘that in the face of which [Wovor] one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world. Thus it is essentially incapable of having an involvement’.Footnote 11 Hence, fear has a definite object, unlike anxiety, whose object, if any, is precisely no-thing-ness. In Heidegger, nothingness is significant as it characterizes the problem of Being: Being, that which allows things to be, has no presence (i.e. as a being) in the world. Hence in anxiety, Dasein confronts the problem of Being, that is, no-thing-ness.Footnote 12 The illusion of having a fixed and stable identity is destroyed, the familiar world and our habitual ways of relating to it lose their significance.Footnote 13
Building on Heidegger, Paul Tillich clarifies the difference between fear and anxiety by contrasting fear of death with anxiety about death.Footnote 14 Fear of death is directed toward the anticipated events of being killed by illness, by accident, by murder, and so on. Although the ultimate cause of one's death can never be known, fear is directed toward possible causes, and leads the individual to seek various protective measures, such as leading a healthy lifestyle, wearing a seatbelt, or carrying a gun. In contrast, anxiety about death, according to Tillich, stems from the prospect of non-being.
Although distinct from fear, existentialist conceptions emphasize that anxiety is often disguised as and converted into fear. According to Tillich, anxiety leads the individual into establishing objects of fear because only fear can be faced, attacked, and endured.Footnote 15 Heidegger also notes that although the anticipation of death occasions anxiety, the most common – and inauthentic – way in which we apprehend death is fear: we focus on the actual event of our own demise and are scared by it. Fear treats death as an empirical actuality, rather than as [our] own most possibility.Footnote 16
Another key aspect of existentialist conceptions of anxiety is its ambiguity in that it both attracts and repels.Footnote 17 According to Kierkegaard, ‘anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’; and it offers ‘the selfish infinity of possibility’ which ‘ensnaringly disquiets with its sweet anxiousness’.Footnote 18 Similarly, in Heidegger, whereas the mood of fear discloses an intra-worldy entity that is ‘threatening to’ Dasein, that it is motivated to flee from, the mood of anxiety paves the way to both authenticity and inauthenticity.Footnote 19
Types of anxiety
Tillich provides a clear typology of different forms of anxiety that builds on the insights of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. He argues that there are three basic types of existential anxiety, ‘according to the three directions in which non-being threatens being’.Footnote 20 The primary anxiety is the above discussed anxiety about death, where non-being threatens the ontic dimension of being, its simple existence as a physical entity. However, Tillich argues that non-being threatens individuals not only on the ontic, but also the spiritual and moral dimensions. The spiritual dimension of being entails meaningful existence through participation in spheres of meaning, whereas moral dimension of being comprises fulfilling destiny and potential, and being what is expected of oneself.Footnote 21
Threats to the spiritual dimension of being cause an anxiety of meaninglessness, which Tillich defines as the anxiety about ‘the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning that gives meaning to existence’.Footnote 22 Because understanding and shaping reality through meaning is an integral part of human existence, humans find spiritual reaffirmation in the sharing and making of meaning. Just as the anxiety about death leads the individual to concretize it into specific fears, the anxiety of meaninglessness drives individuals toward a search for certitude in systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Finally, according to Tillich, threats to moral being cause anxiety about condemnation, which stems from the ambiguity between good and evil.Footnote 23 Therefore, every human action is riddled with soul-searching regarding the fulfillment of moral responsibility. The anxiety about condemnation provokes guilt and finds its expression in the search for unambiguous moral standards.
Anxiety and freedom
Although existentialist conceptions do recognize, as Tillich does, the dominant tendency to evade and disguise anxiety through unquestioning obedience to societal expectations and beliefs,Footnote 24 they also underscore the revelatory potential of anxiety for charting a meaningful existence and realizing one's full potential. Heidegger decries ‘fallenness’, the tendency for individuality and distinctiveness to get lost in the anonymity of everyday life (they-self).Footnote 25 Anxiety reveals the insignificance of this familiar world and the limitations of its social roles, mores, and customs and thereby ‘intimates the potential for an individual and distinctive disclosure of the world’:Footnote 26
Being-free for one's ownmost potentiality-for-Being, and therewith for the possibility of authenticity and inauthenticity, is shown, with a primordial concreteness, in anxiety.Footnote 27
In Heidegger, authenticity, whose possibility is manifest in anxiety, is a way of relating to others such that one is not lost to the they-self; it is to exist anticipatory resoluteness, open to call of conscience and possible ways to be.Footnote 28 Relatedly, Kierkegaard stresses the importance of embracing anxiety – not ‘sink[ing] in possibility’ and ‘wheedl[ing] the anxiety that wanted to save him’ and learning how to be anxious in the right way in order to spring into faith.Footnote 29 According to Haynes, anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger opens up a space for both ‘willful and receptive agency’; in Kierkegaard, it is a springboard which can spring off into strict sin or faith, and similarly in Heidegger into strict inauthenticity or authenticity.Footnote 30
Anxiety and state of nature in Hobbes
In making the case for integrating anxiety into IR theory, I now turn to Hobbes. Hobbes occupies a central place in IR theory although he wrote little about IR. In particular, the key assumptions of different strands of realist IR theory concerning the effects of international anarchy, the prevalence of conflict, the primacy of survival motive, and the egoistic, power-maximizing, self-help behavior of states have been premised on Hobbes. At the same time, others have criticized the ways in which Hobbesian ideas have been applied in IR, and used Hobbes as a springboard to question the validity of certain fundamental assumptions of the discipline.Footnote 31
I turn to Hobbes neither because he discusses anxiety extensively, nor because I believe yet another interpretation of Hobbes will settle debates in IR theory once and for all. The preoccupation with Hobbes in IR theory stems from the way in which certain interpretations of his ideas have become ‘stubborn clichés’Footnote 32 that are used to marginalize and relegate in importance other aspects of international politics. Hence, even though the rich theorization in existentialist philosophy outlined above provides a generous basis for the engagement of IR theory with anxiety, through Hobbes it can also be effectively argued that anxiety is not simply another factor to consider, but an integral, constitutive condition. In that spirit, I present below a reading of Leviathan which focuses on anxiety. I argue that Hobbes draws the distinction and relation between anxiety and fear along the same lines as the existentialistsFootnote 33 and considers anxiety as a background condition of the egoistic competition for power in the state of nature and a basis for state authority. On that basis, I argue that anxiety needs to be integrated into IR theory as a constitutive factor that gives rise to fear, rather than as a secondary concern that competes with it. Along with some recent analyses of Hobbes for IR theory, this interpretation focuses on the psycho-ideational factors driving conflict, highlights the role of Leviathan in constituting a collective symbolic order, and focuses on the implications of domestic political processes for interstate relations.Footnote 34
Unknowability of the future and anxiety
Hobbes is best known as a theorist of fear and he certainly is. The centrality of fear in Hobbes is often associated with the period of political, religious, and economic crisis that he was born into.Footnote 35 However, the English civil war was also a period of dramatic change from the medieval period of fixed and established truths, order, and hierarchies into the modern era of unlimited possibilities.Footnote 36 This has led Hobbes to pay significant attention also to anxiety, both distinctly and within his multi-dimensional conception of fear.Footnote 37
Anxiety in Hobbes is deeply intertwined with the unknowability of the future and limitations of human capacity. Michaelis argues that Hobbes ‘privileges the future to a degree that is unprecedented in the history of political philosophy’.Footnote 38 Foresight, the stable representation of the future that man [sic] seeks to have at the present, represents the ultimate concern of man, according to Hobbes, but one which he can never attain with absolute certainty. Future is unknowable – in the sense of being able to anticipate all possibilities – because it cannot be known on the basis of experience, ‘the things to come have no being at all’.Footnote 39 As a result, man ‘lives in a perpetual solicitude of the time to come’ and like Promotheus, ‘hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep’.Footnote 40 In addition to not knowing all the possibilities, man is also unable to know all the causes of all possibilities, and order the present accordingly. Even though future also induces curiosity and wonder, and stimulates individuals' thirst for knowledge and self-determination, Hobbes underlines that because of limitations of human capacity, the search for knowledge will only yield what is yet not known, and paradoxically aggravate the anxiety about the future:
Anxiety for the future time, disposeth men to enquire into the causes of things: because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their best advantage. Curiosity, or love of the knowledge of the causes, draws a man from consideration of the effect, to seek the cause; and again, the cause of that cause; till of necessity he must come to this thought at last, that there is some cause, whereof there is no former cause, but is eternall; which is it men call God.Footnote 41
It should be underscored that this unknowability is qualitatively different from the uncertainty, which figures prominently in structural realist IR explanations as a factor driving the survival motive and self-help behavior.Footnote 42 These accounts, which draw on Hobbes' diffidence argument,Footnote 43 limit uncertainty to the inability of knowing the motives and intentions of other actors and do not pay adequate attention to the emotional ramifications of uncertainty. Hobbes, however, also emphasizes the more fundamental, ‘hard uncertainty’,Footnote 44 which stems from not being able to foresee all the possibilities and the causes of all possibilities.Footnote 45 Hobbes' human beings find themselves in a world not of their making, and this drives not cool-headed risk-minimizing calculations, but a strong emotional response, a ‘perpetual fear, always accompanying mankind in the ignorance of causes, as it were in the dark’.Footnote 46 According to Blits, this ‘perpetual fear’ is neither the fear of other men, nor the fear of God, but the ‘primal, indeterminate fear of the unknown’.Footnote 47 Boulting describes this ‘perpetual fear’ as an ‘iconic fear’, which is ‘objectless and limitless’, arising from ‘a cosmic meaninglessness held as a subjective inner sense of the infinite’.Footnote 48
Hence, by dissecting Hobbesian fear into its different dimensions, Blits finds in Hobbes, considerable emphasis on anxiety, in the sense of ‘what Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and others call Angst’.Footnote 49 Reflecting existentialist conceptions of the tendency for anxiety to be converted into fear, Hobbes also underlines that human beings require an object to be fearful, ‘the perpetual fear… must needs have for object something’,Footnote 50 so that the primal, iconic fear of the unknown, of things to come, is transformed to an ‘indexical’ fear – of something given and external, Gods or people.Footnote 51 Hence, fear of objects is neither the only nor the deepest stratum of Hobbesian fear;Footnote 52 it is a derivative of what has later come to be distinguished from fear as anxiety. Fear in the indexical form is not an innate passion but one that is produced through a process of ‘political and cultural reconstruction’.Footnote 53
Anxiety and the ‘perpetual fear’ generated by the unknowability of the future and limits of human knowledge make not only self-preservation at present, but also the foresight of future self-preservation an ultimate concern.Footnote 54 What distinguishes humans from animals according to Hobbes is this very concern rooted in the awareness of deathFootnote 55 and ‘care of knowing the causes’.Footnote 56 As will be discussed below, this temporal dimension is critical to Hobbes' assumptions regarding the human desire for power, conflict in the state of nature, and the origins of the Commonwealth.Footnote 57
Anxiety, power, and state of nature
According to Hobbes, there is a critical link between power and foresight: ‘foresight of things to come, which is Providence, belongs only to him by whose will they are to come’.Footnote 58 In other words, the human desire for power originates in anxiety about the future because the future can only be known to those who have the power to shape the future. Thus, anxiety leads the individual into a never-ending race to acquire greater power, because s/he can never know how much power will be necessary for future preservation. Conflict in the state of nature arises from the fact that all desire power and compete with one another in order to attain certainty about the future.Footnote 59
The uncertainty in the state of nature is also amplified by an absence of shared meanings and moral standards. Hobbes underlines how the absence of shared meanings amplifies anxiety, because it renders the individual unable to make sense of the events that befall them. People can only make use of their own experiences and ideas in knowing the future, and their uncertainty is aggravated because they are unable to obtain any confirmation of their predictions.Footnote 60 Without shared meanings, language is not a reliable medium of communication.Footnote 61 Because individuals filter experiences through their own opinions and passions, language can distort reality and aggravate misunderstandings and contentions: ‘One man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth feare’.Footnote 62 The absence of communal bonds aggravates anxiety because it renders it impossible for individuals to share experiences and cooperate to obtain greater control of the future.
While dominant interpretations of Hobbes trace the source of conflict to the aggressiveness and egoism inherent in human nature, this ‘interpretation of uncertainty of the future as the central problem of Hobbes's political philosophy clarifies the larger drama in which the problem of competitive egoism arises’.Footnote 63 It is the insecurity that is caused by anxiety about the future that lies at the root of egoism and deadly competition for power. People seek power neither because of their egoistic nature nor immoderate desires; the competition for power emerges as a symptom of their desperate attempts to quell the anxiety that stems from the uncertainty of the future.Footnote 64 Anxiety about the future leads people to accumulate power in order to control and shape the future to their advantage; however, this leads to the fear of others who engage in the very pursuit. Thus, anxiety functions as the constitutive background condition of the egoistic power struggle that makes up the state of nature.
Anxiety and the state
Subsequently, according to Hobbes, the value of the Commonwealth lies not only in protecting individuals from the condition of Warre (ensuring their present survival) but also in providing them with the foresight of their own preservation. Due to its concentration of power, the Commonwealth, on the one hand, inspires fear and therefore keeps the deadly competition under control. On the other hand, and more fundamentally, due to its concentration of power, the Commonwealth possesses the ability to control, shape, and thus know the future. Hence, foresight, rooted in the power to determine the future, rests in the Commonwealth and becomes ‘the basis of his authority’.Footnote 65 The State is able to neutralize the generalized conflict of the state of nature because it provides a regular and predictable system within which the future can be known.Footnote 66 Thus, people defer to the State not only out of fear, but also because of its ability to control the future and thereby to order the present.
The Leviathan contains different forms of anxiety – of death, meaninglessness, and condemnation – in the manner outlined by Tillich. As ‘the perpetual fear… must needs have for object something’,Footnote 67 the state chooses people's objects of fear and magnifies and exaggerates dangers they pose in order to convince people into fearing them.Footnote 68 The state also contains anxieties by constructing moral unanimity around a shared set of meanings. The Hobbesian individuals submit to the Leviathan as a provider not only of physical security but also of stability and continuity, which derives from settled meanings.Footnote 69 As Michaelis argues:
The Leviathan establishes an artificial unanimity concerning the meaning of such terms as good and bad, justice and injustice… and maintains this unanimity with the threat of punishment. The sovereign power not only provides individuals with protection against the potential aggression of others…it also offers a sense of coherence, a stable order of shared meaning, that they would be unable to provide for themselves in its absence.Footnote 70
In sum, for Hobbes, anxiety stems from the unknowability of the future and limits of human condition, and is distinct from the fear of a specific, present danger. Hence, Hobbes draws a distinction between anxiety and fear that is very much like the one later developed in existentialist philosophy.Footnote 71 For Hobbes, anxiety is an agonizing emotion, which individuals will seek to contain. Future can be mastered by power and hence anxiety leads people into the never-ending power competition that makes up the state of nature. The state, due to its concentration of power and ability to regulate meanings, is able, on the one hand, to instill the fear that is necessary to keep the power struggle induced by anxiety under control, and, on the other, shape the future and thereby contain the anxieties.
Charting a theoretical path: existentialism and ontological security studies
In this section, building on insights I derived from existentialist conceptions and grounded in IR theory via my reading of Hobbes, I develop OS studies into more systematically incorporating anxiety. As discussed in Kinnvall and Mitzen,Footnote 72 both GiddensFootnote 73 and the IR theorists have associated ontological insecurity with various notions of anxiety but have not incorporated the full range of existentialist insights on anxiety; in particular, on the relation between anxiety and fear, the different types of anxiety, and the positive potential of anxiety. I argue that existentialist insights on anxiety strengthen OS theory by further specifying the link between ontological and physical security, clarifying the underlying dimensions of ontological security, and refining the debates on agency and change. The anxiety-based interpretation of the Leviathan grounds this theorization in IR theory by establishing the pursuit of ontological security and the containment of anxiety as a primary and constitutive human motive that generates and, under certain conditions, overrides the pursuit of physical security.
Such an exercise raises the notorious level of analysis question as existentialism as well as the original conceptualizations of ontological (in) security by Giddens and Laing have the individual in mind.Footnote 74 Furthermore, the IR interpretations of Hobbes premised on the analogy between individuals in the Hobbesian state of nature and states under anarchy have been duly criticized.Footnote 75 However, OS studies have pragmatically situated itself across multiple levels of analysis in IR.Footnote 76 While scholars have provided powerful defenses of the state ontological security-seeking assumption, resting on the heuristic value of the state-as-person analogyFootnote 77 and the construction of political communities as Selves,Footnote 78 OS studies do not require an analytical choice between the state as a provider and a pursuer of ontological security. Hence, integrating anxiety into IR theory via OS studies enables us to study the state simultaneously as one that is anxious, and one that owes its political authority to its ability to contain the anxieties of its individual citizens. This second-image theorization also better reflects Hobbes' conception of the international by focusing on the interrelationship between domestic political processes and international interactions.Footnote 79
Recasting ontological and physical security
OS studies have made great headway in establishing the pursuit of ontological security as a motive that is distinct from and additional to the pursuit of physical security. It is now widely accepted that ‘states also engage in ontological security-seeking’,Footnote 80 and that security has both ontological and physical dimensions, such that one can be ontologically secure but physically insecure and also ontologically insecure but physically secure.Footnote 81 The distinction between ontological and physical security is drawn on the basis of the referent object; ontological security is specified as the security of Self and as Being, whereas physical security is specified as the security of the ‘body’ and as survival. While distinct, it is also recognized that the pursuit of ontological security often triggers and amplifies physical security concerns, in the form of securitization of subjectivity, specification of dangers, and constructing the Other as a threat.Footnote 82 At the same time, OS theorists have discussed many contexts where ontological security concerns have trumped physical ones, generating a trade-off between ontological and physical security, as in protracted conflicts, peace processes, and humanitarian action.Footnote 83 However, what is left undertheorized is how this precise relation between ontological and physical security is produced: how the security of Self remains distinct from that of the body, how the construction of threats serves the pursuit of ontological security, and how, in the context of trade-offs, ontological security concerns override physical ones.
First, the distinction between anxiety and fear provides a firmer ground to understand the distinction between ontological and physical security. As Arfi also underlines in this volume, neither the body/self nor the survival/being distinctions hold in light of how we experience time and identity.Footnote 84 In existentialist conceptions, as previously discussed, the distinction between anxiety and fear does not reside in different referent objects; it is not that one is anxious to secure the Self and fearful of threats to the body, but anxious about non-entities, possibilities, and uncertainties and fearful of known entities and objectified risks. Building on this distinction, it is possible to associate the pursuit of ontological security with the containment (or evasion) of anxiety, and thereby distinguish it from the pursuit of physical security through defending oneself (Self and body) against known threats. As a fundamental mood in Heidegger's formulation, anxiety is not simply one among many possible mental states, but rather constitutive of human existence, and the ‘ground of other ways of affectively experiencing the world, including fear’.Footnote 85 Thus, it grounds also other emotional states such as guilt, shame, and humiliation that have been associated with anxiety and ontological insecurity in the OS literature.Footnote 86
Second, the tendency to contain/evade anxieties through fears grounds the link often made in the OS literature between ontological security and securitization. It is argued in the OS literature that the stability and continuity of Being is often pursued through narratives that distinguish ‘them’ from a collective ‘us’,Footnote 87 and the identification of threats and enemies.Footnote 88 As previously discussed, threats and enemies can secure ontologically because, as Hobbes also recognized, fear has an object, and objects, unlike nothingness, can be managed and countered.Footnote 89 Consequently, as Heidegger underlined, the problem of Being is commonly – and inauthentically – apprehended with fear. The tendency to contain/evade anxiety through fears thus establishes how the pursuit of ontological security is generative of concerns to physical security, through the attribution of danger and threat to external entities. Thus, the anxiety–fear relationship supports the basic premise of securitization theory that dangers and threats are constructed through the naming of issues and entities as suchFootnote 90 and posits anxiety as an underlying condition which facilitates collective fear appraisals, and thereby the success of securitizing moves.Footnote 91
Consequently, it also becomes possible to conceive the relentless pursuit of absolute physical security in the face of ever-present threats as a response to anxiety, rather than the independent primal motive. This is how ontological security concerns override physical ones in contexts such as protracted conflicts. Actors develop psycho-social attachments to violent, physically threatening conflicts, not only because conflict routines suppress uncertainty,Footnote 92 but also because conflicts provide definite objects of fear, which facilitate the containment of anxiety. Attempts at resolving protracted conflicts repeatedly fail because the prospect of resolution unleashes the anxieties, which were heretofore contained, and generates a longing for return to conflict, that is easily manipulated by spoilers of peace processes.Footnote 93 Thus, the anxiety–fear relationship provides a firmer ground to establish ontological security as the primary and constitutive concern, which is further endorsed by the Hobbesian emphasis on anxiety as a driver of power competition in the state of nature. Overall, this places OS studies on a stronger footing with respect to conventional IR theories which draw on Hobbes to assert the primacy of the survival motive and demote all other motives to the secondary and competing status.
The OS literature has also identified contexts where ontological security is pursued and attained through means other than securitization, such as routines of cooperation, humanitarian action, stable peace.Footnote 94 The existentialist notions of anxiety accommodate and also account for this wider range of means of attaining ontological security in IR, including the pursuits of status, honor, and ideological stability. Especially relevant in this context is the differentiated notion of anxiety developed by Tillich, which posits the production of ideological and moral certainty as means of targeting the anxieties of meaninglessness and condemnation, respectively.Footnote 95 As discussed earlier, the significant role played by states in the production of such ideological and moral certainty is also recognized in Hobbes, specifically through establishing a stable set of meanings at the domestic level and maintaining order at the international level.Footnote 96
Anxiety, agency, and change
Existentialist conceptions of anxiety also provide a vantage point to refine the ongoing debates in the OS literature on agency and change. At stake are the questions of whether agency requires ontological security and the type of agency that the pursuit of ontological security is generative of. Mitzen defines ontological insecurity as a ‘rare condition’ and a totally ‘incapacitating state’ and thereby views ontological security as the basis for agency.Footnote 97 This raises what is referred to previously by Berenskoetter as the ‘Anxiety Paradox’: the question of whether ontological security, which, by definition, relies on stable self-narratives and continuity in routines, necessarily yields a conservative agency that is committed to continuity over change.Footnote 98 It is argued, in response, that ontologically secure actors with a healthy basic trust are not rigidly attached to routines and able to tolerate the small disruptions caused by uncertainty.Footnote 99 Going further, Flockhart suggests that ontologically secure individuals have the capability to both make change and cope with change.Footnote 100 Rossdale, on the other hand, criticizes this preoccupation with ontological security for foreclosing the possibility of ‘incoherent, contradictory, and partial subjectivity’ as a point of resistance and change.Footnote 101
Existentialist insights on anxiety assist the OS literature in transversing the binary conceptualization of ontological security/insecurity, which is very much the root of the above controversy. Because anxiety is an inherent human condition that is commonly disguised and evaded but never completely dispelled, ontological security cannot ever be absolute and all-encompassing.Footnote 102 Existentialism emphasizes that despite the human inclination to evade and flee from anxiety and to confront it in inauthentic ways, there is always the potential to be enticed by anxiety, and embrace unknowability, ambiguity, and possibility. Therefore, existentialist insights recast ontological security as an always incomplete and fragile state that allows for the alternative modes of subjectivity that Rossdale points to.Footnote 103
The revelatory potential of anxiety, when incorporated into OS studies, significantly contributes to our theorization of change in IR.Footnote 104 Although anxiety drives far-ranging individual and institutional attempts to evade it through converting it into objects of fear and establishing ideological certainty, it remains in margins and the liminal intersticesFootnote 105 and reveals the potential to break free from the limitations of societal norms and the possibility for authenticity. Thus, while the temptation to contain anxiety mostly functions as a driver of conservative and authoritarian politics,Footnote 106 its revelatory nature can also be mobilized for a variety of counter-hegemonic and radical political agendas.
It is therefore important to recognize, as Berenskoetter and Arfi also do in this volume, how anxiety may potentially drive radical agency.Footnote 107 Anxiety can function as an internal source of change, at times, trumping the need for cognitive stability, and opening individuals to possible ways to be and thereby to take risks and pursue radical change.Footnote 108 Yet, while pointing to the potential, existentialism, as a normative theory on meaningful and authentic existence, does not explain the conditions under which this radical agency materializes. Moreover, the ultimate political direction of such radical agency remains moot, as a wide variety of political projects, ranging from fascism to environmentalism, have found inspiration in the existentialist call to authenticity.Footnote 109
Conclusion
Despite its prominence in political and social theory, anxiety has been long neglected by IR scholars. This article charted a theoretical path for the integration of anxiety into IR theory, through the incorporation of existentialist insights on anxiety into OS studies, supported by an anxiety-based reading of the Leviathan. This theoretical path establishes anxiety as a constitutive condition, which generates rather than competes with the concern for survival, and thereby guards against the dismissal of ontological security as a secondary concern by conventional approaches to IR. It provides a firmer theoretical ground to explain the distinction and relation between ontological and physical security. It posits anxiety as a factor that drives a wide range of foreign policy behaviors and international outcomes, from securitization to humanitarian action, and accounts for both stability and the potential for change. While this theoretical path puts anxiety into conversation with a wide range of literatures and puzzles in IR theory, it suffers from multifinality in the explanation of particular outcomes. Hence, existentialism provides a critical foundational step in establishing anxiety as a constitutive condition that is distinct from fear, but further conceptual work is necessary to make anxiety a building block of explanatory theories of IR.
