IDENTITY, SECURITY, AND THE REMAKING OF WORLD ORDER
ISSUE ONE
INAUGURAL EDITION
Something is happening in world politics that existing frameworks struggle to name. The vocabulary of international relations — great power competition, multipolarity, shifting alliances — captures part of it, but leaves something essential unspoken. What is at stake in the current moment is not merely the redistribution of material capabilities or the renegotiation of institutional arrangements. It is something deeper: a crisis in the shared frameworks of meaning that have made international life intelligible.
This newsletter begins from a premise that may seem counterintuitive: that the most important dimension of contemporary geopolitics is ontological. By this is meant not merely that ideas matter alongside material forces — a claim now commonplace in international relations scholarship — but that the fundamental categories through which states understand themselves, their security, and their place in history are themselves in flux. The ground is shifting beneath the feet of world order.
Geopolitics and Ontology exists to explore this terrain. It offers a space for developing, testing, and refining an analytical framework that takes seriously the existential dimensions of international politics — not as a replacement for material and institutional analysis, but as a necessary complement to it. The aim is scholarly conversation: rigorous engagement with the burning questions of world order, pursued in dialogue with interlocutors who share the conviction that something important is being missed.
THE PUZZLE
Consider a puzzle that should trouble any serious student of world politics. The material conditions of great power competition today are, by most measures, less threatening than during the Cold War. Nuclear arsenals are smaller. Economic interdependence is deeper. No power commands the ideological allegiance that either superpower once enjoyed. And yet the rhetoric of existential threat pervades contemporary discourse. Commentators speak of civilizational clash, systemic rivalry, the end of the liberal order. States that face no imminent military threat behave as if their very existence were at stake.
The standard explanations are insufficient. Realists point to the security dilemma and power transitions, but these mechanisms predict caution and hedging, not the apocalyptic framing that characterizes contemporary competition. Liberals emphasize institutional erosion, but institutions have weathered challenges before without generating this sense of fundamental rupture. Constructivists invoke norm contestation, but the current moment feels less like a debate over rules than a questioning of the very categories through which rules could be formulated.
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
— ANTONIO GRAMSCI
Gramsci's formulation, written nearly a century ago, captures something essential about the present. The current moment is not simply a transition between orders — it is a period in which the very meaning of order is uncertain. This uncertainty generates anxiety disproportionate to material threats, because what is threatened is not merely physical security but the frameworks of meaning that make security intelligible.
THE FRAMEWORK
The analytical framework developed in this newsletter rests on a central claim: that international orders provide not only physical security but ontological security — a stable sense of identity, continuity, and meaning in the world. When orders are disrupted, the resulting crisis is not merely institutional or material but existential. States do not simply lose capabilities or influence; they lose the frameworks through which they understood themselves.
This insight, drawn from the ontological security literature in international relations, has been applied primarily to individual states. The contribution here is to extend it to orders themselves. The post-Cold War liberal order was not merely a distribution of power or a set of institutions; it was a framework of meaning that provided answers to fundamental questions: What is the purpose of political life? What constitutes legitimate authority? What is the trajectory of history?
For states embedded in that order, these answers were ontologically stabilizing. Sovereignty meant democratic self-governance. Development meant market integration. Security meant collective defense against threats to the liberal peace. The rules-based order was not merely a constraint but a source of identity — a way of understanding who states were and what they were for.
The crisis of that order is thus experienced as existential, even by states that are not materially threatened. What is at stake is not simply rules but the categories through which political life has been understood. This explains why debates about the rules-based order are so charged: they are not merely technical disagreements about institutional design but struggles over the basic architecture of international meaning.
SOVEREIGNTY REIMAGINED
A second dimension of the framework concerns sovereignty itself. The traditional debate asks whether sovereignty is eroding (due to globalization, interdependence, transnational threats) or persisting (through nationalist reassertion, great power politics). Both positions treat sovereignty as something states possess — more or less of it, depending on circumstances.
This newsletter proposes a different view: sovereignty is not possessed but performed. It is continuously achieved through practices of assertion, recognition, and contestation. This performative understanding opens analytical space for examining how states enact sovereign identity differently, and how these performances interact in a multipolar system.
Three modes of sovereign assertion can be distinguished:
REFUSAL SOVEREIGNTY
The capacity to say no — to reject external impositions, refuse definitions imposed by others, resist incorporation into orders on others' terms. Russia's rejection of NATO expansion, China's resistance to 'universal values' discourse, the Global South's refusal of climate conditionalities — all exemplify this mode.
CLAIM SOVEREIGNTY
The assertion of entitlements — to recognition, resources, voice, participation in rule-making. BRICS demands for IMF and World Bank reform, African Union claims to ownership of peace and security, 'swing states' leveraging their position between great powers — these are expressions of claim sovereignty.
CONSTITUTIVE SOVEREIGNTY
The capacity to author one's own political form — to determine not just policies but the very categories through which political life is understood. China's 'civilizational state' discourse, Russia's 'sovereign democracy,' India's 'Vishwaguru' — each represents an assertion of the right to define the terms of political existence.
The key insight is that in a multipolar world without hegemonic consensus, sovereignty must be continuously re-achieved through performance. Different modes carry different costs and possibilities, and the balance among them shapes the character of international order.
THE RECURSIVITY OF RIVALRY
A third element of the framework concerns the recursive character of great power competition. Conventional analysis treats competition as a response to objective conflicts of interest, security dilemmas, or power transitions. Identity enters as a background condition or intervening variable, not as something produced by competition itself.
The argument here is different: great power competition is significantly recursive — it creates the identities, interests, and threats it purports to respond to. The mechanism operates through ontological security-seeking. States facing identity uncertainty seek stable self-narratives. Adversarial relationships, though dangerous, provide ontological stability by clarifying who 'we' are. The defender of democracy requires an autocratic adversary; the guardian of civilization requires a barbarian at the gates; the champion of sovereignty requires an imperial hegemon.
This creates attachment to conflict that persists even when material conditions change. The U.S.-China relationship, for instance, is not simply a response to China's rise but a recursive dynamic in which each power's identity increasingly depends on the other as adversary. Cooperation would serve material interests, but it would also disrupt the narratives that sustain ontological security. The result is what Jennifer Mitzen calls 'ontological security dilemma' — a situation in which the pursuit of identity security perpetuates conflict even when physical security would be better served by cooperation.
THE CONTEST FOR THE FUTURE
A final dimension concerns time itself. Great power competition is fundamentally about who gets to define the future — not just who will be powerful, but what the world will mean, what possibilities will be open, what forms of life will be legitimate.
The analysis attends to three temporal dynamics:
Competing historicities. Different actors construct different relationships between past, present, and future. The 'civilizational state' discourse claims access to ancient wisdom that transcends Western modernity. The liberal order claimed the future through narratives of inevitable democratization and market integration. These are not merely rhetorical strategies but frameworks through which possibilities are constituted.
Struggles over periodization. Whether the present is 'post-Cold War,' 'new Cold War,' 'post-American,' or 'multipolar' is not a neutral description but a political contest. Each periodization carries implications for what is possible and what is foreclosed.
Anticipatory governance. Great powers increasingly govern through anticipation — constructing futures (technological supremacy, demographic decline, climate catastrophe, systemic war) and acting to bring about or prevent them. This makes imagination a site of geopolitical struggle.
WHAT THIS NEWSLETTER OFFERS
Future issues will develop this framework through several interrelated threads:
Theoretical elaboration. Deepening the conceptual architecture through engagement with ontological security theory, performativity, systems theory, and the philosophy of time.
Empirical application. Testing whether the framework illuminates dynamics in specific cases: U.S.-China relations, Russia and European security, the Global South's navigation of great power competition, regional orders in flux.
Literature engagement. Positioning the framework against realist, liberal, constructivist, and civilizational approaches — not to dismiss them but to show what each captures and what remains invisible.
Normative reflection. If great power competition is partly recursive — created through the very practices meant to respond to it — then there is space for reflexive interruption. What would it mean to pursue ontological security without attachment to conflict?
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The framework offered here does not claim to replace existing approaches to international relations. Material capabilities matter; institutions matter; norms matter. The claim is more modest: that something important is being missed when the ontological dimension is neglected. The current crisis of world order is not merely about power, rules, or ideas — it is about the very categories through which international life has been understood. Attending to this dimension may illuminate dynamics that remain otherwise opaque.
The coming years will determine whether the international system settles into new patterns of meaning or continues in turbulent uncertainty. Understanding what is at stake — not merely materially but existentially — is essential for navigating what lies ahead.
— Guy-Maurille
NEXT ISSUE
The Ontological Security of Orders
Why the crisis of world order feels existential — even when material threats remain ambiguous
GEOPOLITICS AND ONTOLOGY
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