Germany and Israel have not succeeded in turning their historical connection into a shared project around which a true friendship can form.

Felix Berenskoetter argues that a shared commitment to the memory of the Holocaust and to Israel’s right to exist has not formed a true friendship between Germany and Israel. Disagreements about how Israel should handle its security in the face of potential threats from Iran show that a new debate about the nature of the relationship between the two countries and the shared project of Israel’s security is now needed

Approaches to Concept Analysis

This article takes as its point of departure Stefano Guzzini’s recent call for ‘ontological theorizing’ as a reflexive engagement with central concepts. In an attempt to advance this agenda, the article presents an accessible overview of different approaches to concept analysis to stake out the field for a discussion of what ontological theorising might entail. The article advances the notion of concepts as ‘basic’ and lays out the parameters through which they obtain meaning, followed by a discussion of three approaches, which tackle the multifaceted nature of basic concepts within and across different contexts. These approaches are labelled ‘historical’, ‘scientific’ and ‘political(critical)’ and presented through the work of Reinhart Koselleck, Giovanni Sartori and Michel Foucault, respectively. The article notes that concept analysis, as discussed here, stands in tension with modern forms of theory building yet is a creative source for theorising that accepts the unstable, political and context-bound nature of ontology

Anxiety, Time, and Agency

This article scrutinizes two concepts central to the ontological security framework, agency and anxiety. Its point of departure is the view that conceptions of agency are expressed in the attempt to become ontologically secure, which requires a more careful look at how humans try to satisfy the need for a ‘stable sense of Self’ by putting in place ‘anxiety controlling mechanisms’. This, in turn, raises the question what these mechanisms are supposed to control, which shifts attention to the concept of ‘anxiety’. Going back to Kierkegaard’s original treatment and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, the article reviews the emergence of anxiety as a core feature of the human condition and highlights what it calls the ‘anxiety paradox’: the tendency of reflexive humans facing the freedom of being in time to attach themselves to constructs that provide a sense of temporal continuity, or certainty. The article argues that the existing ontological security literature is trapped in this paradox and therefore cannot account for radical forms of agency

Friends in War: Sweden between Solidarity and Self-help, 1939-1945

This article scrutinizes the assumption that friends support each other in times of war. Picking up the notion that solidarity, or ‘other-help’, is a key feature of friendship between states, the article explores how states behave when a friend is attacked by an overwhelming enemy. It directs attention to the trade-off between solidarity and self-help governments face in such a situation and makes the novel argument that the decision about whether and how to support the friend is significantly influenced by assessments of the distribution of material capabilities and the relationship the state has with the aggressor. This proposition is supported empirically in an examination of Sweden’s response to its Nordic friends’ need for help during the Second World War – to Finland during the 1939-1940 ‘Winter War’ with the Soviet Union, and to Norway following the invasion of Germany from 1940 to 1945

The ontological security of special relationships: the case of Germany’s relations with Israel

This article suggests studying special relationships in international politics from an ontological security perspective. It argues that conceptualising the partners to special relationships as ontological security-seekers provides a promising theoretical angle to address gaps in our understanding of three important dimensions of such relations: their emergence and stability; the processes and practices of maintaining them; and the power relations within special relations. The article illustrates its theoretical argument in a case study on the German-Israeli relationship. The close partnership between the two countries that has developed since the Holocaust ranks as one of the most remarkable examples of special relationships in the international arena. We argue that foregrounding the ontological security which the special relationship provides in particular for Germany sheds important new light on how German-Israeli relations have developed. Specifically, we hold that Germany’s ontological security needs already were an important driver in establishing the relationship and have been a key stabiliser of it ever since; that the ontological security perspective can make sense of three interrelated practices of maintaining the ‘specialness’ of the relationship; and that the asymmetries between the ontological security needs of the two partners help account for Israel’s political leverage in the relationship

States of Ambivalence: Recovering the Concept of ‘the Stranger’ in International Relations

This article revisits and revives the concept of ‘the Stranger’ in theorizing international relations by discussing how this figure appears and what role it plays in the politics of (collective) identity. It shows that this concept is central to poststructuralist logic discussing the political production of discourses of danger and to scholarship on ontological security but remains subdued in their analytical narratives. Making the concept of the Stranger explicit is important, we argue, because it directs attention to ambivalence as a source of anxiety and grasps the unsettling experiences that political strategies of conquest or conversion, including practices of securitization, respond to. Against this backdrop, the article provides a nuanced reading of the Stranger as a form of otherness that captures ambiguity as a threat to modern conceptions of ‘identity’, and outlines three scenarios of how it may be encountered in interstate relations: the phenomenon of ‘rising powers’ from the perspective of the hegemon, the dissolution of enmity (overcoming an antagonistic relationship) and the dissolution of friendship (close allies drifting apart). Aware that recovering the concept is not simply an academic exercise but may feed into how the term is used in political discourse and how practitioners deal with strange encounters, we conclude by pointing to alternative readings of the Stranger/strangeness and the value of doing so

The political import of deconstruction—Derrida’s limits?: a forum on Jacques Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 Years, part I

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s

"Je suis en terrasse": political violence, civilizational politics, and the everyday courage to be

Following the attacks against the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the subsequent acts of political violence in Paris the following November a number of memes spread swiftly across social media. Most notable of these were proclamations of Je suis Charlie, Je suis Paris, Je suis en terrasse and tricolorising one’s Facebook profile page. Although there are various ways by which this phenomenon might be explained this paper argues that, at least for some people, they seem to have operated as key mechanisms by which individuals/society sought to re-establish what Tillich calls ‘the courage to be’, and which in more contemporary terminology might be labelled a sense of ontological security – the ability to go on in the face of what would otherwise be debilitating anxieties of existential dread. The paper argues the memes did this through a number of mechanisms. These included, establishing a sense of vicarious identification with the victims; embracing increased levels of danger and seeking to confront the question of mortality head on; reasserting a sense of community and home via the re-instantiation of everyday routines now ascribed with enhanced political and existential significance; and reaffirming a new civilisationally inflected self-narrative