Ontological Security Seeking and Rationales: A Tripartite take on Motivational Factors (with Illustrations from the South Caucasus)

This paper tries to offer a new take on, and give further meaning to, the otherwise rather generic social mechanism of ontological security seeking (OSS). It will do so by exploring the intersection of social images, narratives and perceptions of security in the countries of the South Caucasus to scrutinize contested patterns of othering/belonging embedded within the broader EU-Russia context – which sheds light onto particular securitization practices and their constitutive motivations. It also offers another perspective on the poststructuralist debate on the identity-foreign policy nexus by presenting a deeper understanding of the social mechanisms of in/security constitution and intergroup relations: namely, the dynamic interaction of two layers of identity formation – internal and relational - with OSS being the modus operandi of the self’s identity shaping within this framework. Cutting across the traditional values-vs.-interests debate of foreign policy motivations, the claim is made that this ontological security seeking (and reasoning about) relies on a tripartite set of motivational factors within these processes of identification: 1. cognitive, 2. rationalist/utilitarian and 3. affectional/emotional. Inherently linked to this complex are notions of power: OSS understood as a function of othering is then an exercise of conceptual and categorial boundary drawing. In turn, these boundaries and cognitive frontiers are connected with security discourses as discursive power (could) manifest(s) itself. Thus, categorial (normative) power is part of the complex process of identity demarcations and takes into account not only representations of imaginary sets of belonging/otherness but ideological projections of power. In other terms, categories (of belonging) are securitized - and linked to the tripartite set of motivations of identity construction(s) yet again.