Abstract
Driven by a core curiosity about the political psychology of change and change-seeking as opposed to continuity and status quo-keeping in world politics, this thesis undertakes to investigate the ontological dynamics and psychic drivers of revisionist behavior in International Relations (IR).
Identifying with a constructivist tendency for “constitutive theorizing,” it deploys—and in so doing, theoretically develops—ontological security studies (OSS) to explore a number of significant identity dimensions like gender, and foreign policy practices such as strategic ambivalence in relation to state self-concept, collective psyche/subjectivity and (in)security of being/becoming-in-the-world.
These theory development and application endeavors are all undertaken with special reference to the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) whose selection as the study’s empirical case is guided by its characteristic strand of revisionism and ideological-geopolitical alignment with other revisionist powers such as China and Russia.
Within this broad framework, Article I, titled “State Revisionism and Ontological (In)Security in International Politics: The Complicated Case of Iran and Its Nuclear Behavior,” concentrates on how a revisionist foreign policy may provide an actor with a sense of ontological security, problematizing the controversial Iranian nuclear program as an instance of state self-identity augmentation despite its attenuating material costs and consequences.
Labeled “State Gender and Ontological Dislocation: Gendering Iran’s Revolutionary Identity and Nuclear Behavior,” Article II draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as well as post-structuralist critiques of masculinism and phallocentrism by feminist philosophers Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous to theorize state gender and ontological consequences of gender identity destabilization at the collective level before employing these propositions in a critical analysis of Iran’s masculine revisionist Self and masculinist reaction to the 2015 nuclear accord.
Article III is named “Self-Harm as Desire for Ontological Security: The Lack, Trauma and Iran’s Shootdown of Civilian Flight PS752” and aspires to theorize state self-harm into the ontological (in)security framework as sacrificing the flesh to salvage a fantasized sovereign Self by invoking insights on trauma from Freudian psychoanalysis of trauma and especially Lacan’s theory of subjectivity, all of which theoretical arguments are then instantiated in the case of Iran’s deliberate downing of passenger flight PS752 in January 2022.
Entitled “Strategic Ambivalence as Ontological Security: Iran and the Russia-Ukraine War,” Article IV as the final chapter of this compilation thesis delves into the sociological theory of Zygmunt Bauman as well as Kleinian-Lacanian psychoanalysis to distinguish between different types of ambivalence and to subsequently theorize strategic ambivalence as discursive strategization of affective ambivalence about a deed or event for ontological security purposes, a theoretical configuration that Iran’s engagement in the Russia-Ukraine war helps illustrate empirically.
Lastly, the conceptual-theoretical thread that runs through all these works and unifies them into a coherent body of scholarship is ontological (in)security studies, theoretically developed here with a view to state revisionism and empirically demonstrated with respect to a classic and quintessential revisionist actor.
Supervisors:
Professor Catarina Kinnvall, Supervisor
Professor Emeritus Magnus Jerneck, Assistant Supervisor
External reviewer:
Associate Professor Marco Viera, University of Birmingham
More information about the thesis is available in the Lund University Research Portal: