International disturbances are typically followed by a rush to establish a narrative. The last decades alone have seen the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’, the rise of the ‘global terrorist’, and the coming of the ‘Arab Spring’. This paper discusses the appearance of first media and societal narratives of international crises, with the particular focus on the way self-conceptions are present in these narratives, and help provide ontological security to the perceiving self.
In this paper I ask why the general public narratives of unexpected international crises frequently help (re)imagine uncertainty as something familiar or predictable. I show that this process is deeply significant in relation to identity and boundary security as it helps collective identities overcome the fear of uncertainty and the threat of self-examination. To make this point, I draw on a series of 50 original semi-structured interviews about the ‘Arab Spring’ that I conducted with members of the general public at the time the crisis events were unravelling. I show how illusions of recognising unexpected events and the political imagining this produces can be motivated by self-concepts in need of security.
I propose to read early perceptions of international crises through a reformulation of ontological security principles that find motivation for behaviour in self-identity needs. Political imagining seeks continuous self-concepts and routinizes new encounters within familiar and self-affirming frames. This paper reformulates the currently accepted approaches to ontological continuity: instead of an unchanging narrative I suggest that it may rest in a continuously positive version of the self, with narratives of others balancing and securing the relationship.
