Ontological security as 'being-with': Indigenous sovereignty and securing against the colonial nation-state

Abstract

The range and diversity of ideas that comprise the conceptual terrain of ontological security (OS) – the security of being – hold much value for understanding political geographies, and how hegemonic and oppressive relationships threaten our collective, multi-species being in the world. Yet, the directed study of (ontological) security has largely been framed through what Mignolo (2011) calls a 'coloniality of knowledge' that does particular kinds of work in the world, including a dismissal of the possibility of understanding OS as formed through a relational interdependence that is positioned against coloniality. This paper foregrounds Indigenous and decolonial scholarship on relationality as a means of articulating a framework for OS as being-with. OS as being-with is constituted by three inter-related themes: a) an ontological dis-embedding from modernist ideals of 'security' and 'autonomy'; b) confrontation with the ontological insecurities that are produced and sustained through the modern state; c) re-articulation of security embedded in a relational worldview that recognises a multiplicity of relations located in place and diversely positioned to secure against the colonial nation-state. As such, OS framed as being-with is also always co-constituted by being-against coloniality in anti-racist struggle. To illustrate this argument, the paper uses a case study of the Voice referendum in Australia in 2023, to discuss how this powerful example, in its long history of Indigenous sovereignty, is an attempt at more open-ended, critically attuned effort towards OS as being-with, with matters of justice and reconciliation at its core. Yet its location within the settler colonial nation-state means it is positioned at, and thwarted by, the 'crosshairs of imperial debris' (Radcliffe, 2017:436).