Eco-anxiety and the self in a warming world: Conceptualising ontologically insecure communities

Abstract While much work has been done on ontological security relating to the state’s sense of self, whether addressing the role of migration, globalisation, and even membership to supranational entities like the European Union, scholars have explored less how creating ontological security could be an unexpected outcome in responding to anxiety around shared environmental spaces. In this paper, we conceptualise an ‘ontological insecurity community’ – where groups of states that surround transboundary environmental spaces are bound together by a shared anxiety driven by environmental change. This shared anxiety around environmental change counter-intuitively may create ontological security in how states form an ontological insecurity community. We suggest that unpacking transboundary spaces provides particular lessons for better understanding environmental change through the lens of ontological security and the place of transboundary spaces for state anxiety. In this paper, we draw upon existing work on eco-anxiety to theorise how this concept can be applied to ontological security and provide two illustrative case studies of the Amazon and the Arctic. Our work expands ontological security by asking how environmental change may creatively mobilise states from insecure to secure beings through community formation.