Securitization is not necessary for ontological security---the alt mantains the coherence of us/them distinctions without presenting others as a risk to our identity

Nevertheless, the conflation of ontological and physical security in the extant literature has constrained the theorisation of the ways in which processes of securitisation/desecuritisation and identity construction impinge on one another. First, much of the critical literature on security has reduced identity either to a subject position constituted by discourses of physical security or to a sector of physical security. Those who have focused on discourses of security have emphasised ‘how representations of danger make us what we are’ and how ‘politics of security, constituting and mobilizing difference … specifies who we are and what we are allowed to be’ (Dillon 1996: 34–35). For example, Maria Stern (2006: 192) has traced how identity emerges in the context of discourses of security and is essential to their functioning: ‘In order for the subject of security to be secured, it must be named, represented, and given an identity’. In her conceptualisation, the definition of an Other has followed the naming of danger and the identification of threat and thus the Other necessarily becomes radical and dangerous. Similarly, in securitisation theory, identity is only one among the many issues that can be framed as security issues, and it enters the picture only if and when it is explicitly discussed as a security issue. According to Wæver (1998: 69), identity remains an ‘external factor’ when other issues are being securitised or desecuritised. Similarly, Williams (2003) has neglected the question of whether and how identity allows for desecuritisation, and has focused instead on how securitisation reifies identities and challenges their negotiability and flexibility.

Thus, critical security theorists have predominantly focused on the state of ontological security/physical (in)security, and on how discourses and practices of physical (in)security condition and constrain processes of identity formation and the pursuit of ontological security. As a result, the security of the capacity to constitute a distinct Self, that is, ontological security, has been conflated with discourses of physical (in)security and acts of securitisation. The possibility for attaining ontological security in alternative states of physical security, and in particular, the question of whether and how the pursuit of a stable identity allows for a move to a state of ontological security/physical asecurity have remained unexplored.

In fact, the conflation of physical and ontological security forms the very basis of Roe’s (2004) controversial argument that ‘securitisation is an inherent condition of minority rights’. According to Roe (2004: 290), for a minority group, the maintenance of a distinct identity is necessarily imbued with security-ness, which if taken out, may mean the very death of the minority. Thus, desecuritisation of issues, such as minority rights, may be logically impossible. Here, Roe is referring to the concern for ontological security on part of an ethnic group and its freedom to maintain its distinctiveness, yet he is positing securitisation, which is an act associated with the pursuit of physical security, as its inherent condition. As a result, according to Roe (2006: 433), even an us/them dichotomy becomes a securitised relation.

In contrast, the two-layered conception of security leads me to argue that desecuritisation (of minority rights and other issues) is possible, and that it is only possible because ontological security is distinct from and not reducible to physical security. Desecuritisation of minority rights and identities does not necessarily undermine group distinctiveness (ontological security), but it ends the reproduction of this distinctiveness through the representation of the majority as a threat (physical (in)security). Although securitisation does generate ontological security, the latter is not dependent on the former. The distinction between ontological and physical security also opens up the possibility of attaining ontological security in a state of physical asecurity. In this case, as noted before, the Self maintains the stability and certainty of its being by differentiating itself from significant Others, without identifying a particular Other as a source of imminent harm and danger. This state of security does not bring the ‘death’ of identities, but maintains us/them distinctions, which are necessary for the certainty and stability of being, without constructing the Other as an imminent threat to the group’s survival (see also Browning and Joenniemi 2012).