Commissioned Book Review: Filip Ejdus, Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession
| Author | Siavash Chavoshi |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211052911 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(3) NP17 –NP18
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1052911PSW0010.1177/14789299211052911Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s
Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession by Filip Ejdus.
United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 216pp.,
$ 69.62, ISBN 3030206661.
In Crisis and Ontological Insecurity, Ejdus
(2020) collectively reflects on Serbia’s
anxiety over the secession of Kosovo since
the nineteenth century. The author con-
vincingly explores the question of why
small states often risk their material inter-
est and physical security to sustain their
particular identity narratives to gain onto-
logical security. Certainly, the feeling of
ontological security refers to a condition
where states get to articulate their unique
and stable identity markers as a healthy
and continuous “self” in the international
society. However, once states fail to project
their unique markers, they often experi-
ence ontological insecurity. Ejdus places a
particular emphasis on states’ feeling of
ontological insecurity to present a compel-
ling analysis of how countries experience
identity crisis that leads actors to seek irra-
tional and self-harming policy in pursuit of
biographical continuity as a great nation.
The neat overview of the book illuminates
that states’ provocative behaviors or “inner
turmoil” have to be interpreted through
states’ feeling of ontological insecurity in
IR.
In contrast to state-centric IR theories
which interpret states’ provocative and
irrational behaviors in regard to survival
and uncertainty in the anarchic system,
Ejdus’ starting point is the claim that states
often desperately seek ontological security
and embark into conflicts and irrational
acts to subside their status underper-
formance in the international society. It is
evident from the foregoing that states’
desire to gain ontological security and try
to secure their self-certainty and a stable
social identity through their strong national
sentiments, narratives, and daily routines.
In part, the author sets his discussion
mainly on Giddens (1984–1991) and the
realm of discursive consciousness to delin-
eate states’ desire for recognition and onto-
logical security. Ejdus’ book is innovative
in several ways that are paramount for the
IR scholars to understand that states seek
to sustain their existence, finitude, rela-
tions, and autobiography in the so-called
critical situations. The critical situation
refers to unpredictable events which dis-
turb one’s biographical and self-identity
through losing territory to an external
enemy. He argues that these critical situa-
tions can put an undeniable amount of
social anxiety and distress over a state’s
self-identity by disrupting countries’
national routines and narratives.
This is worth underscoring that states
often find the source of ontological secu-
rity in constancy of their material environ-
ment. Ejdus’ framing assumes that states
seek to sustain their material belongings
such as historical monuments, mountains,
or even urban landscapes as their so-called
“self-identity scripts” to define themselves
as a nation. From a closer look, Serbia his-
torically feels ontological insecure over
Kosovo. Ejdus nicely provides relevant
and historically rich analysis on the Serbia
and Kosovo’s conflict from the nineteenth
century onward. In his attempt to examine
the long-lasting conflict among Serbia and
Kosovo, the author seeks Serbia’s national
anxiety as being culturally engraved in
Serbian national collective identity. For
Ejdus, Kosovo has become the deepest
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