Introduction
On the evening of 22 May 2017, a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device at the Manchester Arena, moments after an Ariana Grande concert concluded. This would be one of five terrorist attacks faced by the UK in that year. The Manchester blast killed twenty-two people and injured over 100. The next morning, Prime Minister Theresa May stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street to condemn the attacks. While expressing sorrow, her remarks were framed by defiance: ‘the terrorists will never win’ and ‘our values, our country and our way of life will always prevail’.Footnote 1 The invocation of ‘our values’ as inherently under threat, alongside commitments to defeating the ‘pernicious ideology of Islamic extremism’ made over subsequent days, positioned the UK in a grand moral struggle against a perceived perversion of Islam. Such framing served to orientate the tragedy into a familiar narrative of good versus evil, heroism versus villainy, a pattern that was repeated across political and media responses throughout mid-2017. These responses constitute what this article terms political myths – not falsehoods in the mainstream usage of the word, but dramatic and figurative narrative processes that respond to a human need for significance.Footnote 2 The approach to myth is existentialist, drawing from the work of Hans Blumenberg, who understands myth as continuous ‘work’ (Arbeit am Mythos) on a narrative core designed to produce significance (Bedeutsamkeit).Footnote 3 Myths often contain highly dramatic content, telling stories of heroism and villainy, tragedy and joy.Footnote 4 Political myths are normally distinguished in terms of their political content, definitions of politics notwithstanding. The various exploits of the American Founding Fathers, for instance, serve as a political myth on the basis that they provide a sense of significance that explains key facets of American identity and events.Footnote 5 Rather than being static and unchanging objects, myths are characterised as continuous processes of invocation, interpretation, and re-interpretation. They may have a narrative core, but they have a capacity for marginal variation applicable to the respective context.Footnote 6
The article asks the following question: how do political myths sustain ontological security in the face of terror attacks? More specifically, through what cognitive, integrative, and mobilising functions did political and media elites deploy mythic frameworks to prevent physical insecurity from destabilising British identity? It argues that myths generate ontological security through continuous work on a narrative core. Myths always seek to address the anxieties that are fundamental to the human condition. In the case of the 2017 attacks, this work intensified to prevent physical insecurity from cascading into ontological insecurity.Footnote 7
An important clarification here is needed regarding the relationship between physical and ontological security. The Manchester attacks created immediate physical insecurity, whether from the fear created by the attack itself or the potential threat of follow-up attacks. However, the political and media responses analysed throughout this article reveal that elites perceived a deeper threat: that attacks could destabilise fundamental understandings of British identity, values, and national cohesion. As examined in the empirical sections, rhetoric repeatedly frames attacks as attempts to ‘tear our country apart’,Footnote 8 challenge ‘what makes us who we are’,Footnote 9 and force questions about British values, multiculturalism, and who legitimately belongs to the national community. In this context, the terror attacks threatened to intensify anxieties into full-blown ontological insecurity, where identity frameworks collapse and coherent self-narratives become difficult to sustain. The process of myth operated pre-emptively to prevent this cascade by channelling anxiety towards a concrete external threat with clear moral coordinates. Rather than allowing insecurity to accelerate into identity crises, the work on myth transformed diffuse anxiety into focused fear of identifiable enemies that could be confronted within established frameworks of British self-understanding.
This framing positions the article’s contribution to the special issue theme of creating and becoming ontological security. The analysis demonstrates how the work on myth actively creates and maintains ontological security as a continuous, generative process rather than a reactive response to crisis. The ‘creation’ examined here involves sustaining significance and generating frameworks that prevent physical insecurity from destabilising identity. Political myth here is a mechanism of becoming ontologically secure by continuously working to maintain coherent self-narratives, collective identities, and capacity for action in the face of ongoing uncertainty.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I outline the theoretical framework linking political myth and ontological security, drawing on existentialist approaches that view myths as continuous processes of significance-generation. Crucially, the article argues that political myths eschew anxiety, providing clear cognitive, integrative, and mobilising maps for action that maintain ontological security. It investigates how the process of myth prevents physical insecurity from cascading into identity crises. To address this, I adopt an interpretivist method examining how deixis and tropes in elite discourse signal the invocation of the work on myth. Finally, I analyse the narratives about a British conflict with a ‘perverted’ form of Islam, which I argue has become a political myth and became prominent in response to the terror attacks of 2017. I identify and analyse three sub-themes within the myth: Britishness and British values vs. a perversion of Islam, British democracy and Parliament, and resistance through normality. Each sub-theme demonstrates how the cognitive, integrative, and mobilising functions of myth operated to generate ontological security.
Creating ontological security through political myth
There is a burgeoning literature on the concept of ontological security in international relations, as outlined by Brent Steele and Cornelia Baciu in the introduction to this special issue.Footnote 10 Recently, there have been increasing attempts to rediscover both its philosophical (especially existentialist)Footnote 11 and psychoanalytical origins.Footnote 12 While much of the literature focuses on crisis and how ontological insecurity can be developed, the focus of this article and special issue is to consider the ways in which ontological security may be both developed and sustained. Bohdana Kurylo, for instance, touches briefly on mythologising and how it enables resistance of ordinary citizens in the Ukrainian context.Footnote 13 Indeed, the concept of political myth has become an increasing focus of IR,Footnote 14 with research into the Ukraine war,Footnote 15 American individualism,Footnote 16 the ‘Chinese Dream’,Footnote 17 climate leadership,Footnote 18 Brexit,Footnote 19 the ‘Blair poodle myth’Footnote 20 in developing strategic narratives,Footnote 21 and inspiring sacrifice.Footnote 22 However, there remain some conceptual differences on political myth.Footnote 23 While contemporary scholarship rarely deploys myth as a synonym for something false, earlier figures such as James George Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl saw myths as primitive and replaceable by scientific rationality.Footnote 24 The approach in this article focuses less on the truth or falseness of particular myths and is rather concerned with their function. I draw from literature grounded in the intersection between existentialist philosophy and German philosophical anthropology. These works originate in writers such as Hans BlumenbergFootnote 25 and the adaptation of his theories into a philosophy of political myth by Chiara Bottici.Footnote 26 Blumenberg – whose work has received increased scholarly attentionFootnote 27 – sees myths as not static and unchanging objects but rather processes of continuous ‘work’ on a narrative core that produces a sense of significance (Bedeutsamkeit). Blumenberg defines significance as something that ‘makes possible a “density” that excludes empty spaces and time’.Footnote 28 Crucially, this does not mean answering ultimate meanings about the existence of life and death but is rather an inner-worldly concern that mitigates anxiety. As Chiara Bottici describes, something significant is ‘something that situates itself between the two extremes of a simple meaning and the meaning of life and death’.Footnote 29
Blumenberg adopted this conceptualisation of significance from Erich Rothacker. Rothacker pointed out that humans, unlike other animals, take a ‘distance towards things’ and transform these things into mental objects with different levels of significance. This ability allows us to categorise and, crucially, disregard what is irrelevant.Footnote 30 This need for significance is a response to our own finitude and limited perception. We cannot pay equal attention to all aspects of the world and so must selectively focus. Blumenberg highlights naming as critical here, as what becomes ‘identifiable by means of a name is raised out of its unfamiliarity by means of metaphor and is made accessible in terms of its significance by telling stories’, meaning we avoid the ‘panic and paralysis’ of anxiety as they are ‘dissolved by the appearance of calculable magnitudes’ and ways to deal with them.Footnote 31 Blumenberg here appears to depict a certain vulnerability within human beings, and this is influenced by Arnold Gehlen’s view of humans as deficient or defective beings (Mängelwesen). Gehlen posited that human beings have unique versatility since our ‘world-openness’ (Weltoffenheit) makes us adaptable to multiple environments.Footnote 32 However, this simultaneously exposes us to overwhelming stimuli, prompting a need for relief (Entlastung). To manage this, we construct ideas, symbols, and metaphors to filter information and highlight select objects, which then form the basis of social institutions. Habits and rituals are particularly vital, as they reduce the cognitive effort required to navigate daily life. Without such categorisation, our experience would be chaotic and ungrounded. Most usefully, this process is always ongoing and survives the innumerable changes experienced by humanity.Footnote 33
Like other thinkers, Blumenberg claims the human condition poses unique challenges, such as anxiety. However, the concept Blumenberg deploys to elucidate this is the ‘absolutism of reality’, a situation in which ‘man comes close to not having control of the conditions of his existence and, what is more important, believes that he simply lacks control of them’.Footnote 34 We live in a world of innumerable simultaneously occurring events and possibilities, most of which are indifferent to our existence. Experiencing this in its raw form, with no concepts, ideas, myths, art, and so on to mediate our experiences, would leave us overwhelmed. Myths should be understood as one process of finding significance within the absolutism of reality. Specifically, significance answers the question of ‘why?’ by raising the issue of ‘whence’, and therefore ‘it can limit itself to telling a story of some of the conditions of existence without necessarily aspiring to answer the question of the sense of life in general’.Footnote 35 Political myth concretises and grounds (begründen) significance to the political conditions of our existence.Footnote 36
This existentialist understanding distinguishes myths from narratives more broadly. While all myths involve narratives, not all narratives are myths. Following Bottici, myths differ from ‘mere narratives’ in that they must answer existential questions in highly dramatic form with the specific function of providing significance.Footnote 37 Narratives can describe events or recount experiences without addressing existential needs or providing frameworks for managing anxieties. Myths, by contrast, are narrative processes addressing the specific need for significance, and furthermore, political myths address those concerns in political life. They transform ambiguous political phenomena into dramatically structured stories of heroism and villainy, providing cognitive maps, reinforcing integrative collectives, and mobilising action. This functional approach to myth also requires clarification about the role of authenticity. While the analysis focuses on mythic functions rather than factual accuracy, this does not mean myths operate independently of reality, or that ‘anything goes’. Myths must resonate with audiences’ lived experiences and felt anxieties to successfully generate ontological security. If myths are not up to date and fail to adapt to the present exigencies of a social group, then they fundamentally cease to be myths.Footnote 38
As Gellwitzki and Houde put it, political myths ‘hold the promise of overcoming perpetually recurring ambiguity, instability, and anxiety, and this prospect has an affective pull that guides the direction of changes in autobiographical narratives’.Footnote 39 Myths allow us to re-articulate who we are, our purpose, our positionality, and how we should respond to a given situation. However, a crucial theoretical clarification is required to understand how political myths generate ontological security during crises such as terrorist attacks. Following Rumelili,Footnote 40 it is essential to distinguish between physical security and ontological security as two distinct but interrelated layers. Physical security concerns freedom from bodily harm and survival. Ontological security, by contrast, involves stability and certainty of being, maintaining coherent self-narratives, and having the capacity for meaningful action. Crucially, both forms of security can vary independently: actors can be physically insecure while ontologically secure and vice versa. As Rumelili argues, ‘ontological security requires differentiation and in that sense presupposes an Other’ but does not ‘necessitate the securitisation of the Other in the sense of defining it as a physical threat’.Footnote 41 Physical threats and ontological security can coexist when stable identity frameworks are maintained. In stable conflicts, actors ‘experience stability and certainty of being in a relationship where the Other is constructed as a threat to their security-as-survival’, thereby sustaining conflict-producing routines that reinforce their certainty of being.Footnote 42 This state of ontological security/physical insecurity is what political myths help to sustain, maintaining identity coherence even while physical danger persists.
Political myths do not merely respond to ontological insecurity but also actively generate ontological security in the face of physical threats. Threats and enemies can secure ontologically precisely because fear provides a direct object that can be managed and countered, unlike formless anxiety.Footnote 43 As Rumelili has argued, ‘the pursuit of ontological security is generative of concerns to physical security, through the attribution of danger and threat to external entities’.Footnote 44 As we see below, the Manchester attacks were mythically constructed as an existential ideological threat. However, this was not evidence of ontological insecurity among Britons per se, but rather a mechanism through which ontological security was generated and maintained. By providing clear enemies, moral frameworks, and action imperatives, myth prevented physical insecurity from cascading into ontological insecurity. To grasp how myth does this, it is important to examine its different functional features. These are the cognitive, integrative, and mobilising.
Cognitive
The cognitive aspect of myth is fundamentally about perception and mapping. Lance Bennett described myths as like ‘the lenses in a pair of glasses in the sense that they are not the things people see when they look at the world, they are the things they see with’, formed through ‘associative mechanisms that link private experience, ongoing reality, and public history into powerful frameworks of understanding’.Footnote 45 They provide a ‘concentrated, simplified, and standardised view of reality’ and an ‘instrument of chaos control, of introducing some regularity into the seeming randomness of the visible universe’.Footnote 46 Often, such myths are embodied within metaphors that are repeated in discourse, providing mental maps to understand the world that ‘intensify some perceptions and screen others out of attention’.Footnote 47 Christopher FloodFootnote 48 similarly utilised the concept of ‘cognitive schema’, which is a ‘cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes’.Footnote 49 These schemas are interrelated cognitions of thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that enable quick interpretation of people, events, and situations with limited information. For Flood, cognitive schemata allow us to understand how ‘discursive and other symbolic practices influence the ways in which members of social groups organise their perceptions on the basis of acquired cognitive frameworks’, which, once established, create an ‘organizing and filtering procedure for the reception of new information, be it the combination of sights and sounds into images of physical objects of the complex perceptions of social situations’.Footnote 50 This means myths are invokable by slogans such as ‘Workers of the world, unite’, or through verbal and non-verbal forms, such as iconic and ritual representations.Footnote 51 Similarly, Bottici and Challand argue that myths can be invoked through synecdoche, whereby symbols, images, songs, films, or advertisements can ‘recall the whole work on myth’ that underpins them.Footnote 52
Integrative
The cognitive aspect of the work on myth does not occur in isolation. Nationalist myths especially construct peoples’ identities as not only individuals but also members of a community.Footnote 53 Commonly, myths form collective ‘WE-identities’Footnote 54 and ‘THEY-identities’Footnote 55 and are ‘identificatory machines’ that remind people of their affiliation to a community.Footnote 56 This overlaps with the concept of entitativity, or how we perceive groups as possessing unity and coherence abstract from the individuals constituting it.Footnote 57 By turning disparate people into high-entitative groups, the work on myth invokes characters as part of an established collective, and evidence suggests people identify more strongly with such groups, especially when uncertain about their own beliefs.Footnote 58 This has clear echoes with the process of labelling and naming in the construction of myths and also ontological security. Furthermore, ontological security emerges from not only a coherent self-narrative but also stable social contexts in which individuals feel securely embedded.Footnote 59 Myth supports this embeddedness by transforming disparate individuals into parts of recognisable social collectives.
Mobilising
The final aspect of the work on myth is the mobilising. This finds origins in the works of Georges Sorel, who saw myths as not simply ‘descriptions of things’ but also ‘expressions of a determination to act’.Footnote 60 The human mind, for Sorel, cannot be content with reason alone.Footnote 61 Sorel argued that relying solely on reason limits great social changes, because such changes were always created through imaginative means. Myths enable us to capture the sentiments and passions of the masses by making them enter decisive struggles against opposing forces.Footnote 62 Indeed, Sorel was critical of intellectuals such as Ernest Renan, whose usage of ‘syllogisms’, he contended, could never account for the passion of movements with religious or mythic qualities.Footnote 63 As a (then) revolutionary socialist, he was sceptical of Marxists who were ‘afraid of revolution’ and who, he claimed, sought to ‘shake the confidence felt by the workers in the preparations they are making for the revolution … they cast ridicule on the idea of the general strike – the only idea that could have value as a motivating force’.Footnote 64 Crucially, Sorel would argue that those ‘living in the world of myths’ become ‘secure from all refutation’.Footnote 65 A normatively contrasting, though analytically similar, view is offered by Ernst Cassirer (although he does not mention Sorel directly). Cassirer expressed horror at the potential for myth to lead to repressive politics and atrocities.Footnote 66 Myths turn the ‘passive state’ of deep, internalised emotions into an ‘active process’ that is then intersubjectively displayed. In a passage that has some echoes of ontological insecurity, Cassirer referred to these as ‘critical moments’ in which ‘the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again … it is always there, lurking in the dark, waiting for its hour and opportunity’.Footnote 67
Political leaders make substantial efforts to evoke myths in response to political phenomena and to mobilise. As Murray Edelman explains, they become ‘surefire vehicles for engaging the emotions of large numbers of people’, meaning that ‘leaders will predictably interpret events in these forms, and their audiences will eagerly cooperate in creating the world in the same configurations’.Footnote 68 They indeed feature frequently in rhetoric.Footnote 69 From an ontological security perspective, this is crucial. As Bahar Rumelili argues, ontological security is not just about maintaining a coherent self but also involves sustaining the capacity to act in a world perceived as unpredictable, even if this means a person’s physical safety may be compromised.Footnote 70 Myth, in this context, enables agents to transform disorientation into decisiveness. It provides a symbolic structure within which action feels not only possible but also necessary and justified.
The cognitive, integrative, and mobilising aspects of myth provide a mental map, points of identity and belonging, and a clear direction for action, together generating ontological security. It allows for the development of consistent autobiographical narratives, a stronger sense of self and identity, and a route to carry on in the face of uncertainty. Indeed, generating significance through myth is a process that enables people to act as ontologically secure agents within the world.
Method
This article adopts an interpretivist approach to examine how political and media figures use language to invoke political myth (whether consciously or not). Certain linguistic cues are signals through which the work on myth is recalled, offering a schema by which audiences interpret events. I focus on deixis and the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Deixis refers to the linguistic act of ‘pointing’, where expressions locate meaning relative to the speaker’s position in time, space, and identity.Footnote 71 The speaker becomes the ‘deictic centre’, with others positioned relative to them. The three main forms relevant here are person, place, and time deixis.Footnote 72 Person deixis denotes participants such as the speaker, allies, enemies, or the audience. These are often marked by pronouns like ‘we’, which invites identification with the speaker.Footnote 73 Deixis is a routine feature of everyday language and, on its own, is not mythic. For instance, the sentence ‘yesterday I went to the shop’ involves all three forms of deixis but lacks figurative or dramatic content. What distinguishes mythic language is the construction of narratives that respond to a need for significance. These narratives are expressed through tropes, which are linguistic devices that go beyond literal meaning. Among the most relevant are metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche.Footnote 74 Tropes are especially useful when speakers and writers appeal to emotion. When directed towards the speaker (the deictic centre), they evoke positive emotions and values, such as pride, honour, courage, and solidarity. By contrast, when used against opponents, they evoke negative emotions such as fear and shame.Footnote 75
Other important tropes in the work on myth include metonymy and synecdoche. Metonymy occurs when the ‘name of a referent (or thing referred to) is replaced by the name of an attribute, or entity related in some semantic way, or by spatial proximity’.Footnote 76 Unlike metaphor, this relies on association rather than similarity. For instance, Number 10, or 10 Downing Street, would be a metonymical expression referring to the UK government. Synecdoche is a specific type of metonymy in which a part of something is used to refer to the whole. The combination of deixis and tropes is crucial to the framework. Deixis alone would only reveal who is positioned where in mythic narratives, and tropes alone would only identify figurative language without showing how it constructs collective subject positions within the myth itself. Together, they reveal both the structural positioning of mythic actors and the dramatic content that gives myth its existential resonance. The distinction among different types of tropes similarly matters because they perform different functions within the work on myth. Metaphors create cognitive schemas through comparison and similarity (Parliament as a place of liberty), metonymy invokes mythic frameworks through association (Westminster standing for British democracy), and synecdoche allows parts to recall entire mythic narratives (e.g., drinking tea invoking the theme of resilience). This analysis reveals how specific rhetorical choices activate the cognitive, integrative, and mobilising dimensions of myth that generate ontological security.
Following the framework outlined above, I identify language as mythic when it (1) invokes dramatic figurative content involving heroism, villainy, or moral struggle, (2) addresses existential concerns about identity, purpose, and significance rather than describing events, (3) draws on established narrative cores (such as the Blitz myth) while adapting them to present circumstances, and (4) functions to provide the cognitive, integrative, and mobilising frameworks that generate ontological security. The linguistic analysis of deixis and tropes reveals how these mythic elements are invoked, and the interpretive analysis demonstrates their existential function – the ‘why’ they constitute myth rather than narrative.
The analysis examines speeches by senior government officials and media opinion pieces published in 2017. Using gov.uk and Hansard, I gathered government speeches referring to terrorist attacks, excluding procedural ones that lacked mythic elements. For media, I selected two broadsheets and two tabloids, balanced by political orientation. The left-leaning outlets were the Guardian (8) and Daily Mirror (10), and the right-leaning were the Telegraph (12) and Daily Mail (11). While some texts were more explicit than others, all included references interpretable as invoking political myth. Throughout the analysis, I distinguish between various actors in myth construction. Political elites articulate mythic frames in official speeches, media commentators circulate and contribute to these themes, and publics are both the intended audience and symbolic participants whose perceived need for significance is engaged. This analysis therefore examines how elite actors deploy the work on myth to generate ontological security through the three functions outlined above, rather than documenting the presence of widespread ontological insecurity among publics. The speeches and articles represent attempts to maintain identity stability and provide interpretive coherence in the face of physical threats.
Ontological security and the 2017 terror attacks
The political myth in question posits that Britain is in an intractable conflict with a pernicious, or perverted, form of Islam that seeks to destroy British society. It is a simple tale of good and evil, heroism and villainy, in which the audience are not just passive recipients but also direct participants. The issue of the truth or falseness of this political myth is not relevant to the analysis, only the functional role it plays in generating ontological security. However, before analysing this myth further, an important clarification must be made about the asymmetric effects of the myth. While the mythic framings examined throughout worked to generate or maintain ontological security for a constructed ‘majority’ by providing stable interpretive frameworks and collective identity markers, they likely simultaneously intensified ontological insecurity for British Muslim communities. The politicisation of Islam and the insistence on distinguishing ‘British values’ from ‘perverted Islam’ challenged British Muslim identities and narratives of belonging. Following Rumelili and Çelik’s analysis of ontologically asymmetric conflicts, wherein ‘minority groups remain in a continuous state of ontological insecurity while majority group members enjoy a more privileged status’,Footnote 77 we can recognise that the integrative function of myth (creating stable we-identities) was simultaneously destabilising for minorities. This asymmetric dynamic is a characteristic of conflictual political myth, generating ontological security for some through mechanisms that may threaten it for others.
This political myth has innumerable origins and adaptations, and could perhaps be seen as a localised adaptation of the ‘clash of civilisations’ myth outlined by Bottici and Challand.Footnote 78 This would be consistent with the claim that myths have narrative cores but also capacity for marginal variation.Footnote 79 It is constructed as the latest iteration of historical conflicts faced by Britons, echoing the Blitz myth that was invoked especially following the 7 July 2005 London terror attacks.Footnote 80 This latter myth recalls a time in which Britain, and especially London, was heavily bombarded during World War II. It is frequently evoked as a golden age of Britishness as, despite the hardships felt by residents, Britons ‘laughed in the face of terror’, survived, and continued with an exceptional community spirit.Footnote 81 While less prominent in 2017, it still features in some media responses. For example, following the Westminster Bridge attack, Max Hastings called for barriers to be put on Westminster Bridge to prevent similar attacks, arguing they are just as necessary as ‘Spitfires and anti-aircraft guns were in the 1940s’.Footnote 82
I identify three sub-themes of the myth: Britishness and British values vs. a perversion of Islam, British democracy and Parliament, and resistance through normality. These sub-themes come together to provide a referent understanding and a lens to map the conflict (the cognitive), identify friends and enemies (the integrative), and encourage people to action (the mobilising). The work on this political myth maintains ontological security by positing a nominal definiteness that provides significance. Finally, the myth does not exist in a vacuum. It draws on long-standing imaginaries of Britishness, liberalism, and national endurance, collective features that may be understood as part of Britain’s national self-understanding within what Anderson would have termed the ‘Imagined Community’.Footnote 83 Such devices activate and reshape collective memory, positioning crises within a historical continuum of righteous struggle.
Sub-theme 1: Britishness and British values vs. a perversion of Islam
There are continuous references to Britain being attacked by a perverted form of Islam. This sub-theme demonstrates how the mythic framework operates cognitively and integratively by demarcating boundaries between the British self and a hostile other. It distinguishes sharply between British values and this ideology, often also separating ‘ordinary Muslims’ who are ‘compatible’ with Britishness and those who are not. Theresa May reminded audiences that the attackers were:
[B]ound together by the single, evil ideology of Islamist extremism … It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam … a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth.Footnote 84
This initial response evokes the cognitive scheme that recognises the collective Western self (of which the UK is considered part), recalled by signifiers such as freedom, democracy, and human rights, as being irreconcilably opposed to a perverse understanding of Islam. In this case especially, the cognitive aspect of myth is dependent upon the integrative aspect of myth. This is expressed through person deixis, such as ‘Our Western values’ as distinct from a ‘perversion of Islam’. It also demonstrates the integrative function of political myth. The use of inclusive deixis (‘our’) constructs a collectivity in shared liberal–democratic values. Simultaneously, we see a simplified interpretive schema, reducing ambiguity by framing the threat as ideological rather than random:
Defeating this ideology is one of the great challenges of our time … It will only be defeated when we turn people’s minds away from this violence – and make them understand that our values – pluralistic, British values – are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.Footnote 85
The mobilising aspect of myth is invoked by reminding the audience of the necessity of defeating the ideology. By referring to this as ‘one of the great challenges of our time’, it deploys time deixis to understand the challenge as relative to great challenges of other times. This is reinforced through person deixis that reminds Britons they are part of this very conflict, and that their values are superior, crucial to the integrative aspect of myth. By positioning Britons as being in this existential conflict, May constructs a map for interpreting the conflict while providing an explanation and direction that both myth and ontological security demand. Here, we see a Sorelian call for victory by Britons over the insidious ‘other’ and a clear route to achieving it. Other government figures would later augment a particularly pejorative understanding of the enemy, with then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson referring to this perverted form of Islam as a type of ‘disease’ or ‘psychosis’ to be overcome.Footnote 86 Sajid Javid called for a ‘spirit of defiance’, affirming that ‘we are all part of one society’ and that ‘the Muslim values we were raised to believe in are the same British values supported by tens of millions in this country’. These statements integrate Muslims within the moral in-group while isolating the extremist threat.Footnote 87
The above produces ontological security, reflecting Bahar Rumelili’s claim that conflict can ‘sustain the political and social production of definite objects of fear, systems of meaning that clearly differentiate friends from enemies, and unequivocal moral standards premised on the necessity for survival’.Footnote 88 As such, a reminder of the conflict and the positionality of subjects is crucial at a time of a terror attack to maintain ontological security, in which the normality of order is disrupted. Here, the mythic provides guidance in dramatic form, with clearly identifiable actors that re-establish the familiarity upon which ontological security often depends.
Right-leaning media commentary often highlighted divisions between the perceived perversion of Islam and British values, alongside perceived problems with multiculturalism.Footnote 89 In response to the Manchester Arena attack, which killed many young girls, Sarah Vine highlights the distinction between free women and the female emancipation that Islamists find offensive as based on the notion that ‘man is superior to women’ and ‘that non-Islamic girls and women are second-class citizens, barely human, the lowest of the low, for whom no punishment or suffering can ever be enough’. She evidences this further with examples of sex trafficking scandals such as those in Rotherham, which means such beliefs may even be ‘hiding in plain sight in the midst of decent, ordinary Muslim communities in Britain’.Footnote 90 Richard Littlejohn condemns the suppression of women, questioning how women wearing burkas would ever embrace ‘British values’ when, in fact, ‘the costume is a deliberate rejection of British values’.Footnote 91 Here we see a reinvigoration of the deictic centre of reinforcing the identifier of ‘Britain/British values’ as ultimately distinct from a particularly savage and pernicious enemy, positing a clear, evil, enemy that Britons must overcome. But there is also another distinct feature we see among right-leaning tabloids such as the Daily Mail: a perception that a weak establishment liberalism has ‘enabled’ such attacks to take place.Footnote 92 Indeed, the ‘pernicious doctrine of “multiculturalism”’ is ‘just a fancy word for apartheid [that] has created vast, monocultural Muslim ghettoes in our great cities’.Footnote 93 They also critique a perceived refusal by the ‘liberal left’ to admit a link between extremism that is ‘peculiar to the Muslim community’ that is ‘not usually found among Christians, Hindus, or Sikhs’.Footnote 94 In response to the Manchester Arena attack, John R. Bradley calls for a ‘turning point in the war on terror’, declaring that following the grief of the Manchester attack, a ‘powerful sense was growing that enough is enough, that concrete measures must be taken – and quickly – to end our passivity in the face of carnage’.Footnote 95 The Telegraph makes similar commentary, calling for Britons to boldly call the enemy Islamic extremism and that ‘we should not be scared to say it out loud, and destroy it before it destroys us’.Footnote 96 Juliet Samuel references the attacks suffered by Dover during World War II, while also remarking that this threat is different since the ‘fanatics live here among us, in British flats, living off British benefits, enjoying British freedoms’, thereby emphasising the presence of an enemy within. Nonetheless, following the Finsbury Park mosque attack, one dissenting voice explicitly warned against specifically demonising Islam, pointing out that ‘ancient religions have been corrupted into excuses for lethal violence throughout the centuries, just as secular ideologies have’.Footnote 97 In an article entitled ‘Detain, deport, exclude: This is how Britain should respond to terror’ for the Telegraph, Richard Kemp argues that ‘no self-respecting nation can tolerate such a barbaric assault on its youth and its future’, calling for decisive action that includes internment and deportation of suspected terrorists.Footnote 98 These interventions by right-leaning media outlets do more than describe social tensions. Rather, they enact the cognitive function of myth by translating complex cultural and political phenomena into morally legible symbols of threat. Invoking specific clothing items or urban enclaves serves as synecdochic shorthand for a broader, mythologised enemy. In each case, the deictic centre simultaneously creates distances and augments entitativity between the collective self and other. This process generates ontological security by narrowing interpretive possibilities and reinforcing the mythic map of friend and foe.
Left-leaning media commentary has similarities but usually opposes homogenising Muslims and instead locates other sources of blame, such as Western destabilisation.Footnote 99 It expresses frustration at the persistent demonisation of Muslims and insufficient engagement from government figures with Muslim communities.Footnote 100 Nonetheless, many articles still postulate the battle and the monstrosity of the individual terrorists. Brian Reade emphasises his ‘visceral rage’ that ‘someone who lived among us could sink so low as to walk into a crowd of girls enjoying the most exciting night of their short lives and blow them to pieces for the sake of some twisted cause’, and that one could not contrast one victim, Saffie-Rose Roussos, whose school referred to her as a ‘beautiful girl’, more starkly than with the suicide bomber ‘who took her life so nonchalantly’.Footnote 101 Some left-leaning sources also replicate right-leaning commentary, arguing that there are internal battles within the Muslim community itself. In order to ‘win the battle’, Adam Deen argues that we need to ‘address the idea of Islam twisted by the extremists’ and ‘snuff out the sparks before they develop into a flame’.Footnote 102 Elsewhere, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown argued that some conservative Muslim families were ‘in denial about what is going on in their homes and mosques’ and that ‘tiny girls in headscarves, intolerant religious schools, irrational beliefs and self-segregation have no place in Britain’.Footnote 103 Matthew d’Ancona argues that the impact of even a small minority of extremists is substantial. He invokes the mobilising aspect of myth, reminding readers of the ‘global battle against this wicked ideology’ that requires both ‘Muslims and non-Muslims to unite against the common enemy by any and all legal means necessary’.Footnote 104 Similarly, Nick Cohen of the Guardian urges us to stand up and fight for ‘our values’ and warns that words of diversity and community are worthless if we ‘lose the battle for Muslim minds’.Footnote 105 Saira Khan critiques the right for demonising Muslims and forcing them to choose between their faith and Britishness when it is everyone’s responsibility to ‘tackle extremists’ and not just Muslims.Footnote 106
While more attentive to nuance and social context, these accounts still preserve the core ontological function of myth. Both sides reproduce the same mythic pattern: a dramatised struggle between good and evil, requiring collective resolve. The function remains the same, offering readers a stabilising account of who ‘we’ are, what threatens us, and how to proceed. All such commentary articulates the myth precisely to remind the reader how to interpret events and, specifically, provide the significance and a direction of travel that is crucial to maintaining ontological security. An existential threat is posited in these claims, but that remains preferable to the ambiguity that ontological insecurity creates. Overall, this sub-theme enhances ontological security specifically through its cognitive and integrative functions working in tandem. Cognitively, it provides a clear moral schema distinguishing British liberal–democratic values from ‘perverted’ Islamist ideology, offering an interpretive framework that transforms ambiguous violence into comprehensible ideological conflict. This cognitive clarity prevents the disorientation and uncertainty that could trigger ontological insecurity. In terms of the integrative aspect, the construction of high-entitative groups (we vs. they) reinforces collective identity and belonging. By repeatedly invoking this we/they distinction via person deixis and metaphorical language, political and media actors maintained stable identity frameworks even while perceived physical threats existed. The aim was to ensure ‘Britons’ would remain ontologically secure (knowing who ‘we’ are, what ‘we’ stand for) despite being physically insecure (facing terror threats).
Sub-theme 2: British democracy and Parliament
In this sub-theme, myth is invoked through symbolic references to Parliament and its historical endurance. Here, place and time deixis are deployed to situate the crisis within a broader mythic narrative of democratic sanctity. Following the attack on Parliament on 22 March 2017, Theresa May referred to the symbolic nature of the attack:
The location of this attack was no accident. The terrorists chose to strike at the heart of our capital city, where people of all nationalities, religions and cultures come together to celebrate the values of liberty, democracy and freedom of speech.
These streets of Westminster – home to the world’s oldest Parliament – are ingrained with a spirit of freedom that echoes in some of the furthest corners of the globe. And the values our Parliament represents – democracy, freedom, human rights, the rule of law – command the admiration and respect of free people everywhere. That is why it is a target for those who reject those values.Footnote 107
This is highly figurative and metaphorical language. Parliament is not only a geographical location but also a site of mythic significance, representing continuity, stability, and the moral integrity of the British polity. This reinforces the integrative function by affirming a coherent collective identity under siege. It extols virtues that strengthen understandings of the collective self through exceptionalisation of the British political system. This notion is reinforced further through reminders of the Blitz and the structural damage suffered by Parliament during it. Former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon referred to the attack as being ‘on the centre of our democracy and our way of life’, but reminding people that:
[The] terrorist attack wasn’t the first time we’ve seen an attack on what Winston Churchill once called ‘the citadel of liberty’. 76 years ago Nazi bombs destroyed the Chamber in the House of Commons. Yet the enemy couldn’t touch the spirit of the British people … and while the great chamber of the Commons was rebuilt … nothing stops democracy.Footnote 108
This articulates time and place deixis, recalling the Blitz era and the partial destruction of Parliament, using it as a metaphor to connect this to the present situation. Evoking reminders of the Nazis and Churchill recalls via synecdoche the tales of the Blitz. This was echoed by Sajid Javid, who noted that after the attack the ‘division bell’, which rings when parliamentarians are due to vote or to start the day’s proceedings, rang as normal, which ‘sent a signal to the wider world that the work of our democracy continued, stronger than ever’.Footnote 109
Media rhetoric similarly highlighted the symbolic aspects of the attacks. It was, metaphorically speaking, an attack on ‘democracy’. Tom Harris insists that, despite the perceived threat, the ‘Palace of Westminster remains what it has always been: the centre of government, of democracy for our people’ and that our ‘oldest civil right is not to vote, but to lobby our representatives’, something that ‘will not end’ and ‘must not end’.Footnote 110 This relies heavily on tropes such as synecdoche and metonymy. Parliament is mentioned through various associated concepts such as ‘Westminster’, ‘democracy’, and ‘freedom’. Westminster is crucial because it is an example of place deixis that incorporates all Britons (but especially Londoners) often invoked with time deixis owing to the constructed enduring nature of the institution of Parliament and, more broadly, democracy. This provides fertile ground to recall images of previous triumphs and values and to inspire the public with the confidence of victory. Some make direct reference to previous attacks on the Houses of Parliament during the Blitz when the Commons chamber was bombed, praising the prime minister and leader of the opposition for mimicking Churchill and Attlee for showing ‘that the best way to defeat terrorism is to prove that we will not be moved from our values and our place’.Footnote 111 These statements unify person, place, and time deixis to refer to the Palace of Westminster as the ‘centre’ of ‘our democracy’, something familiar to most British people that is continuing despite attempts by terrorists to disrupt it.
Parliament and democracy are implicitly conceived as part of the high-entitative group of Britons positioned as the ‘good’ within the myth. These values are not simply abstract political ideals; they become sources of significance through which British political life is interpreted. This claim also opens the space for praise for those who defend it by carrying on with parliamentary business, but similarly allows representation of heroic figures who would defend such institutions. PC Keith Palmer, who was killed by the attacker, Khalid Masood, outside Parliament, is chief among these. Indeed, Prime Minister Theresa May referred to him in her opening speech as someone who had died ‘in defence of the public and our democracy’, who was ‘every inch a hero’, and whose ‘actions would never be forgotten’.Footnote 112 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) Commons leader Nigel Dodds urged fellow MPs to recognise that they could conduct parliamentary business because of officers like Palmer, and that he in particular ‘embodied the rule of law’ and ‘stood in harm’s way for all of us’.Footnote 113 Chris Bryant called for a shield to be placed in the Commons chamber in honour of Palmer. Such gestures are normally reserved for assassinated MPs, such as Airey Neave and Ian Gow, but Bryant proposed that Palmer should have one since he was ‘our shield and defender yesterday’.Footnote 114 Such dramatic and highly figurative language elevates Palmer to a level of heroism. He goes beyond protecting the physical safety of parliamentarians to defending democracy and the rule of law itself. Such utterances place these abstract values into a directly tangible human being, giving them renewed significance.
While most of this sub-theme is expressed in rhetoric from politicians, it is still mentioned in media outlets. Michael Burleigh for the Daily Mail describes ‘a murderous attack on the people of Britain at the very seat of our democracy – and under the watchful gaze of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill, a man who, more than anyone in the past two centuries, has symbolised the spirit of defiance’.Footnote 115 The ‘very seat’ of our democracy is a metonym for Parliament, which is metaphorically ‘watched’ by the heroic figure of Winston Churchill. The Telegraph also refers to Parliament itself as the ‘heart and symbol of our democracy’.Footnote 116 Juliet Samuel points out the tribulations that British democracy has previously overcome, and that British democracy ‘did not spring unbidden from its obvious righteousness, but from a long history of trial and error’.Footnote 117 Rosa Prince argues that debates about responsibility and response, especially in an election year, show the strength of British democracy. Indeed, that is what eventually defeats ‘Islamic terrorism … not military might or by rounding up the usual suspects … [but] by celebrating our democracy’ and refusing to compromise on values of ‘tolerance, fairness, and equality’.Footnote 118
These rhetorical strategies unify deixis, symbolism, and historical analogy to anchor ontological security. They make Parliament a site of mythic endurance, linking contemporary crisis with earlier victories over existential threats. By reactivating these themes, political actors and commentators provide a map of meaning that reaffirms identity and encourages continuity. This sub-theme contributes to ontological security generation primarily through temporal and spatial anchoring. By invoking the endurance of Parliament across centuries and its survival of the Blitz, the work on myth situates the 2017 attacks within a continuous narrative of democratic resilience. This temporal framing prevents the attacks from appearing as unprecedented ruptures that would destabilise self-understanding. Instead, they are the latest in a series of challenges already overcome. This ensures the attacks are presented with familiarity, and the present crisis becomes ontologically manageable through connection to past victories. The spatial anchoring through phrases such as ‘Westminster’ and ‘the heart of our democracy’ roots abstract values in concrete familiar and identifiable locations. PC Palmer also generates ontological security by embodying otherwise abstract democratic values into tangible human heroism, transforming philosophical principles into significance.
Sub-theme 3: Resistance through normality
The final sub-theme illustrates a subtler mode of mythic mobilisation through the reassertion of routine and normality as existential defiance. Such narratives offer a pathway to ontological security through their affective and symbolic resonance. Ironically, this is a unique way of invoking the mobilising aspect of political myth while also creating the conditions to maintain ontological security. While rare, it is similar to responses to the Boston Marathon bombings in the United States, where the United States was re-framed as the type that ‘gets back up, brushes herself off, and gets on with life’.Footnote 119 This sub-theme is mythic rather than merely narrative because it transforms routine activities (drinking tea, going to work, using public transport) into dramatically significant acts of resistance within a grand moral struggle. More importantly, this sub-theme enhances ontological security through the mobilisation of normality itself. By framing ‘carrying on’ as heroic defiance, the work on myth allows Britons to maintain their daily routines while also experiencing them as meaningful participation in existential struggle. This resolves an apparent paradox throughout the 2017 responses in that myth is both dramatic (presenting high existential stakes) and normalising (emphasising routine continuation). The drama provides significance and moral purpose, whereas the normality provides stability and continuity. Britons can ‘carry on’ precisely because carrying on has been elevated to existential significance through the work on myth.
As established, the mobilising aspect of myth is often designed to incite passions. Indeed, mobilising language does appear here, such as Fallon declaring to Britons that they are ‘more united than ever in defending our way of life’ and expressing pride at the ‘defiance’ shown.Footnote 120 However, normality and not over-reacting are incorporated into this mobilising discourse. Following the London Parliament attacks, May claimed that any attempt to defeat British values through terror is ‘doomed to failure’, as Londoners would ‘come together as normal’, ‘get up and go about their day as normal’, ‘walk these streets’, and ‘move forward together … never giving into terror’ and ‘never allowing the voices of hate and evil to drive us apart’.Footnote 121 The following day in an address to Parliament, May followed this by praising the responses of people, who still filled offices and cafes:
It is in these actions – millions of acts of normality – that we find the best response to terrorism. A response that denies our enemies their victory. That refuses to let them win. That shows we will never give in … to the men and women who propagate this hate and evil: you will not defeat us … let this be the message from this House and this nation today: our values will prevail.Footnote 122
The ‘millions of acts of normality’ remind audiences that vast and disparate acts are connected, thereby increasing the entitativity of a collective ‘self’ that is crucial to the integrative aspect of myth. These acts of normality represented people playing their role within the story of the myth: the conflict with ‘hate and evil’. Not only do these acts of normality deny the enemy their victory, they also set the groundwork for a Sorelian promise of victory. Elsewhere, Boris Johnson argued that the ‘easiest way to lose a war on terror is to be terrified’ and we ‘cannot afford to let them change the way we live our lives’.Footnote 123 Essentially, Johnson called for Britons to win the ‘war’ by appealing to normality, and that would necessarily include the very systems and structures that generate ontological security. Amber Rudd, then Home Secretary, warned audiences that the attacks in both Manchester and London had intended to ‘tear our country apart’ but were met with ‘overwhelming defiance’ of people engaging in normal activities, meaning that, rather than being ‘divided by violence, people seemed ever closer together’ despite the attempts of terrorists to divide them. Britons would evidently ‘stand together’ and ‘make the point that terrorists will never win … that our values, our country, our unity, will prevail’.Footnote 124
Following the London attacks, much of the media claimed that Britons would continue drinking tea in defiance.Footnote 125 Martin Kettle in the Guardian reports that terror attacks cause people to rally together and would enhance Britain’s wartime self-image as the ‘nation that could take it, that was not afraid, could keep calm and carry on’ or ‘go on drinking tea came effortlessly to the fore’.Footnote 126 Piers Morgan points out that Britons will simply ‘make a pot of tea, keep calm, and carry on’ in the face of terror.Footnote 127 These examples perform a mythic condensation of British resilience. The repetition of tea and humour operates metonymically, invoking a national character said to be impervious to fear. They reassure, unify, and prescribe behaviour, thereby fulfilling all three mythic functions. Through time and place deixis, Kettle and Morgan draw equivalences between historical events such as the bombing of London during World War II and the sustained bombing campaign by the IRA to the threat posed by Islamic extremism, providing a cognitive map for the reader that links otherwise separate and contingent events to present conditions. This was further represented by an image of a fabricated London Underground sign that read: ‘All terrorists are politely reminded that THIS IS LONDON and whatever you do to us, we will drink tea and jolly well carry on. Thank you.’Footnote 128 Despite being fake, it was nonetheless discussed in many articles, shared widely on social media, and mentioned in a House of Commons debate.Footnote 129 The sign called for resistance and persistence against adversity and reinforced the notion that terrorists would not be victorious. ‘One thing is clear: the public refuses to allow these people to change their way of life. The popular response to Wednesday’s attack has been one of resolve, a determination to “keep calm and carry on”. That is the British way. Learn the lessons that need to be learned, confront those who must be confronted, but do not allow the conflict to change the country beyond recognition. This is a land of liberty and stubborn endurance. None of its enemies has yet managed to change that’.Footnote 130 Hugh Muir in the Guardian warns people not just to carry on with their regular daily activities but also not to abscond from things they enjoy and not to let ‘zealots rob us of what makes us who we are’.Footnote 131
Right-leaning commentators often drew from the Blitz to interpret the attacks,Footnote 132 a strategy that was adopted following previous attacks such as 7/7 and the murder of Lee Rigby.Footnote 133 Burleigh encourages readers to find their ‘Churchillian spirit’ of ‘defiance’.Footnote 134 Michael Deacon argues that they thought they could bring London ‘to its knees with senseless murder’, but London simply ‘gets back up and goes about its business’.Footnote 135 Responses among left-leaning publications still invoked mythic themes, particularly following the Manchester attack. Comparisons to the Blitz were made,Footnote 136 providing images of the destruction wrought by the Blitz and reminding people of how the ‘spirit and humour of Manchester and its people, from all ethnicities and creeds, lives on’.Footnote 137 As Fiona Phillips in the Mirror writes, Britons should move on with ‘the most profound respect for those whose lives have been lost … We have to love and cherish our fellow human beings while moving forward armed only with love and kindness’.Footnote 138 Even those that express fear about the situation still acknowledge that the ‘correct procedure’ is to ‘stick two metaphorical… or literal … fingers up to them and defiantly carry on regardless’.Footnote 139 Each evokes time and place deixis in the process of placing the Blitz and present attacks as if they are one extended conflict. It provides a simple yet compelling plot adaptable to multiple situations, avoiding a sense of ambiguity and anxiety that may otherwise occur following such attacks. This capacity to ‘carry on’ despite exceptional odds manages to unify the mobilising potential of myth with the routine and grounded certainty typical of ontological security. One example of this can be found in response to a New York Times article claiming that Britain was ‘reeling’ following a series of terror attacks. Writing in the Daily Mail, Dominic Lawson angrily responds that both London and Manchester will continue to endure, and that ‘we are not reeling’ or even ‘slightly unsteady’, while being ‘determined to not have our way of life changed by these murderous nonentities from the radicalised depths of what is sometimes called “the Muslim community”’. He also reminds us that Britons survived the Blitz without reeling then, and would not in present circumstances either.Footnote 140
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated that political myths generate ontological security during moments of crisis by transforming physical insecurity into mechanisms of identity stabilisation. The 2017 attacks created physical insecurity in the immediate fear of bodily harm and disruption to daily life but were assuaged through mythic responses that operated to maintain ontological security by providing stable cognitive schemas, integrative markers, and mobilising imperatives. The mythic framings here were not reactions to widespread ontological insecurity but rather constitutive mechanisms that prevented such insecurity from developing. Myth functioned to convert diffuse anxiety into focused fear, making such perceived physical threats ontologically manageable. The attacks threatened to unleash ontological crises as competing voices sought to pose questions about British values, multiculturalism, and national purpose. While the myth itself had a multitude of effects on different groups, it sought to frame this by channelling anxiety towards identifiable enemies (‘perverted’ Islam, terrorists), within familiar moral frameworks (democracy, British resilience). However, this process operated asymmetrically, producing ontological security for a majority while likely intensifying insecurity for British Muslim communities whose belonging was questioned.Footnote 141 This, it seems, raises further normative and ethical questions about myths in politics, and whether their attempts to generate security for some depend upon mechanisms that threaten it for others. At the same time, myths seem to achieve this in part by simplifying. While myth can offer genuine comfort and solidarity against disruption, it can also limit alternative interpretations and contribute to the exclusion or essentialisation of particular groups. The repeated invocation of national symbols, historical reference points, and routine behaviour demonstrates that the work on myth is as much about normalisation as it is about dramatisation. This tension lies at the heart of myth’s power, as political myths do not merely reflect an already-existing reality. Rather, they actively shape the conditions of experience under uncertainty. As such, their normative evaluation must consider not just their content but also their function. Specifically, what forms of belonging they enable, what anxieties they suppress, and whose security they ultimately serve.
When myth is invoked in response to collective trauma, the question certainly remains as to whether this is always a bad thing. While this article cannot definitively argue this either way, it does seem that myths that are exclusionary in nature may be reasonably subjected to a normative critique. The myths in question certainly have inclusionary elements and may indeed provide significant comfort in the face of trauma. Perhaps those elements should be encouraged, while also being aware of the clear essentialising dangers that myth may pose, even if they are key generators of ontological security.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Brent Steele and Dr Cornelia Baciu for inviting me to participate in this special issue and the support they offered as editors. I’m also especially grateful to Dr Gabi Schlag, who gave a thorough reading and constructive critique of the paper at our workshop at the University of Kiel in January 2025. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their exceptional feedback, which helped me to revise this article and make it as strong as can be.
Xander Kirke is Assistant Professor in International Relations and Politics at Northumbria University, UK. His research focuses on the role that political myths and ontological security play in terrorism, extremism, and radicalisation.
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