Anxiety and Existentialist Explorations in IR

My theoretical work on ontological security has drawn me into a deeper engagement with the existentialist notion of anxiety. In a series of publications, I developed the existentialist distinction between fear and anxiety that I had introduced in the edited volume on Conflict Resolution and Ontological Security into a broader theorization of the role that anxiety plays in international relations. My International Theory article published in 2020 argued that anxiety needs to be integrated into IR theory as a constitutive condition. In order to ground this claim, I offered an existentialist reading of the Leviathan to show how Hobbes conceived of anxiety as the primal human condition that gives rise to the state of nature.

I also found the chance to focus more heavily on the role of anxiety in international politics during a two-year Marie Curie Global Fellowship (2017-9). The research project ANXINT analyzed how the prevalence of anxiety interacts with nativist and cosmopolitan norms in shaping international political attitudes.

I was invited to deliver the keynote address of the 2019 Convention of the Central and Eastern European International Studies Association, organized around the theme International Relations in the Age of Anxiety. A revised version of this keynote address has been published as an article in the Journal of International Studies and Development. In this article, I argued that anxiety impacts international relations as a public mood, a collective way of being attuned to the world, and in such contexts and periods, the resonance of securitisation and the appeal of nativist and populist doctrines that offer ideological and moral certainty are enhanced.

Most recently, I have edited a special issue on Anxiety and Change in International Relations for the journal Uluslararasi Iliskiler. In the introduction I wrote for the special issue, I provided an overview of the development of the literature on anxiety in international relations.