Suchergebnisse

1. Introduction -- 2. Methodology -- 3. Theoretical Framework -- 4. Imagining the Bosnian Serb Ethnic Identity: A Historical Overview -- 5. Discourse Analysis of Securitisation Acts of the Political Elite in Republika Srpska -- 6. Perceptions of the Voters in Republika Srpska on the Internat and External Other -- 7. Conclusions.

AbstractThis article utilizes van Gennep's neglected theory of territorial passages to answer two key questions in the study of ontological security (OS) in migration. First, why do the members of the receiving society lose their perceived sense of OS in face of a mass of strangers arriving at their gates? Second, how, if at all, do they attempt to reconstitute it while incorporating the strangers into their world? Following the recent call within OS studies in international relations (IR) to spell out the social mechanisms that facilitate the anxiety and uncertainty of the agents, I use the case of the German societal response to the 2015 refugee crisis to demonstrate that van Gennep's classical approach, far from being structural and functionalist, offers an advanced, power-informed, and processual perspective for uncovering a possible sociosymbolic mechanism behind the perceived "losing" and "re-finding" of OS in migratory encounters. The article delineates the principles of a "thick" approach to OS in migration, explains how van Gennep's theory adds to this approach, and highlights the ultimate unattainability of OS as an essentialist category that is either "present" or "absent" throughout the migratory encounter. It concludes by discussing the added value of van Gennep's theory to the study of OS in the contemporary global milieu of the "age of migration."

Ontological security theory posits that states seek to provide their citizens not just physical but also cognitive security, mostly through routinised foreign policy practices that reinforce notions of the national Self. Several studies established this theoretical assertion at the individual level, using various qualitative methods. This study adds to the literature by taking an experimental approach to provide further empirical support. It develops a novel index for the measurement of foreign policy behaviour's effect on individual citizens' ontological security and employs it in a survey experiment. The experiment examines whether Jewish-Israelis experience change in their sense of ontological security due to their state's deviation from its long-standing offensive–defensive security doctrine. The findings demonstrate that citizens indeed form an attachment to their state's foreign policy practices and that deviation from them can impair their sense of ontological security. This suggests that seemingly rational, strategically warranted policies might sometimes bear unexpected costs for policymakers.