The Empires Strike Back: Ontological Security and Foreign Policy

• In Event: Poster Session: International Security 2

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century global security was assessed to have ended the debate between capitalism and communism with the sweeping victory of the former (Fukuyama 1992). As the US got mired in the Clash of Civilizations (Huntington 1996) it seemed to dismiss and or forget the concerns of what was called the “second world” as they were considered vanquished. Some have argued that US foreign policy has pushed Russia into attacking Ukraine (Grygiel & Mitchell 2016; Mearsheimer 2022), while others have argued that the vital explanatory variant was the Russian leader himself (Short 2022) who is responsible for the system called “Putinism” (Laquer 2015, Taylor 2018). While all these explanations for the current direction of the world order have merit, I argue that the rise of global authoritarianism has changed the way certain states see themselves and that their foreign policy perspective is revisionist. Ontological security as a concept (Giddens 1991) explains the way revisionist states operate because of the way that they perceive the world.
This paper will compare the post-cold war development of Russian and Turkish foreign policy. In Russia the leadership which grew with the events of the collapse of the Berlin wall and its aftermath has adopted and cultivated a revisionist attitude to global security and has invaded Ukraine. Turkey also has also joined Russia in its revisionism by obstructing NATO’s expansion and conducting hybrid warfare activities.

Author

• Akis Kalaitzidis