Desires, Fantasies and Hierarchies: Postcolonial Status Anxiety through Ontological Security

Abstract

Status-seeking practices of some states from the Global South have increasingly been studied in the status literature in International Relations. The existing debates, whilst developing significant advances recently, still fail to account for and theorise both status anxieties of postcolonial states and the intrinsic relation between them and existential anxieties. This article will address this gap through utilising an ontological security perspective on status-seeking. By focusing on subjectivities (not solely on identities as conventionally done in the status literature) and introducing subject production to the process of status-seeking, this article conceptualises status in relation to identity narratives of the subject to achieve ‘wholeness’ in hierarchical social orders. This novel post-structuralist understanding of status and status-seeking through the introduction of a Lacanian theorisation of ontological security offers an alternative perspective to approaches in status debates to understand status anxieties of postcolonial states better. The conceptual discussion will be illustrated through demonstrating Turkey’s status anxiety in relation to its paid-off debt to International Monetary Fund.