My interest in the nexus between identity and security has led me to the emerging literature on ontological security. In a theoretical article published in Journal of International Relations and Development in 2015, I have pointed to the pitfalls of conflating ontological security (security of self and identity) with physical security (security of body and territory), and argued that desecuritization may generate ontological insecurity, if the removal of certain issues from security realm contradicts and undermines existing identity constructions.

Later, I developed this argument through an edited book project on conflict resolution. In the edited volume, Ontological Security and Conflict Resolution: Peace Anxieties, I offer an extensive theoretical framework, drawing on Giddens and existentialist thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Tillich, on how conflicts provide frameworks of ontological security by defining objects of fear and systems of meaning and morality, and how conflict resolution generates anxiety by disrupting these formed frameworks. The volume includes chapters on Israeli-Palestinian, Northern Irish, Cyprus, Kurdish, and historical Nordic conflicts, which reflect on how attachment to certain identity narratives and routines on part of conflict parties hamper resolution efforts.

Subsequently, I have had the opportunity to draw policy implications of ontological security more clearly in a coauthored article with Ayşe Betül Çelik, and published in Security Dialogue where we analyzed how ontological security concerns affected Turkey’s peace process with the Kurds and how an agonistic peace may be the basis for reinstating ontological security. Contributing to a special issue on Ontological (In)security in the European Union published in European Security, I focused on the ontological insecurities generated by the European Union’s narrative on ‘breaking with the past’ and stressed the need to analyze the reconciliation dynamics and memory politics in different European societies. Most recently, in an article co-authored with Lisa Strombom and published in Third World Quarterly, we have argued that an agonistic recognition process could have guarded against the  ontological insecurity generated by the peace processes in the Israeli-Palestinian and Greek- conflicts, and thus prevented the ensuing backlash.