Defending home: Abjection, and the ontological security of ‘home’ in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict

This article rethinks the concept of ‘home’ within ontological security studies. While recent debates in ontological security have moved towards more dynamic understandings of becoming, prevailing accounts of home continue to reproduce a Self/Other binary that obscures the internal instability, violence, and hierarchy that constitute the home. In response, the article develops the concept of the ‘home of becoming’. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and on Taylor, Levinas, and Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, it reconceptualises home as an interrelated and unstable space in which troubling otherness is not external to the Self but constitutive of it. Home is therefore not a stable refuge but a mythicised space maintained through violence and the management of anxiety. The article applies this framework to Russian discourse on Ukraine and shows how Ukraine is positioned as simultaneously part of, and threatening to, the Russian home. The ‘home of becoming’ thus offers a more dynamic and emancipatory understanding of ontological security, identity, and violence.