Reflections on the Ethical Commitments of an Emancipatory Ontological Security Studies

Abstract

From its inception in the mid-2000s, Ontological Security Studies (OSS) largely kept to a broadly Constructivist application of social scientific explanation of the instances in which states privileged the security and stability of identity, sometimes at the expense of their physical security. OSS’s explanatory approach remained uncontested until the mid-2010s when scholars such as Chris Rossdale and Chris Browning issued a call for it to also embrace a normative, emancipatory mission. These latter scholars, and those which responded to their call in the late 2010s and early 2020s, foreshadowed the kind of ethical approaches they believed expressed the emancipatory mission for OSS. However, the specification of their ethical theoretic commitments remained inchoate. This article describes various strains of ethical consequentialism, deontology, and virtue-ethics in these early emancipatory OSS (E-OSS) works. Afterwards, it argues that a satisfactory E-OSS must be committed to a synthesis of deontological and virtue-ethical ethics.