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Lauren Rogers, Ontological security-seeking: national identities under stress, International Affairs, Volume 101, Issue 3, May 2025, Pages 1135–1136, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaf078
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned the tide for many European countries when it came to their security policies. Ontological security-seeking offers a new way to understand these changes, using the case-studies of Sweden and Germany. As Regina Karp observes, both countries saw significant policy changes as a result of the invasion. Sweden abandoned a decades-long policy of military non-alignment and Germany's Zeitenwende speech was meant to mark a new era of security policy for one of the European Union's largest political powers. Using ontological security as a framework, Karp traces how these states balanced continuity with change during the Cold War and beyond. She further demonstrates how ‘ontological ambiguity’ was a useful tool for both states when faced with global structural changes (p. 2). In doing so, Karp stakes a claim about the role of structural and other external material factors in the ontological security dynamics of states, thus adding to the literature on the interplay between the material and ideational dimensions in ontological security studies. Karp argues that the interpretation of structural change determines ‘what adaptation moves are necessary and which are not’ (p. 26).
