Life narrative and the possibilities of self: South Africa’s position on Gaza and Ukraine through an ontological security lens

Abstract Life stories help ground states in the chaos of social life by allowing them to experience themselves, their behaviours, and their relationships as coherent, predictable, and tractable. Continuity in these stories is important for maintaining a sense of ontological security, but they can also constrain agency when crises challenge understandings of self, others, and the world ‘out there’. Against approaches in ontological security scholarship (OSS) that treat uncertainty and anxiety primarily as paralysing, this article shows how encounters with expanded possibility can generate productive forms of agency instead. While change may carry emancipatory potential, the article finds that actors may ultimately act to restabilise existing versions of the self rather than transforming it. An examination of South Africa’s responses to the crises in Gaza and Ukraine shows that although these destabilising moments created opportunities for the state to rewrite its life story, it chose to pursue a system-level rescripting of the moral grammar of international politics to maintain a semblance of continuity. By reordering the interpretive framework of global governance around the evolving narrative arcs of its own life story, the state is able to avoid deeper self-transformation.