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Ontological insecurity dominates the narratives of fear and anxiety that are perpetuated by populist and authoritarian regimes today. In these discourses and imaginings, specific ideas of ‘security’ are desired as a return to order or an imagined or idealized past. In this chapter, we focus on how those narratives regularly rely on gendered and colonial framings that are associated with weakness and disorder. Populist authoritarians then offer solutions to insecurity that demand a style of rule that is often hierarchical, patriarchal, and racially ordered. We illustrate these narratives of ontological insecurity through a focus on postcolonial bordering practices, how gender and emotion feature in discourses of the nation, and the perceived sense of loss of national identity and masculinized ideas of strength. Furthermore, we explain how understanding ontological insecurity invokes new methodological frameworks and suggest additional avenues of exploration and adaptation.

Bordering practices have been a central and controversial feature of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Closed borders, lockdowns, and restrictions on movement and individual “freedoms” have revived concepts of the biopolitical “state of exception” and state control. In this article, we argue that biopolitical critiques of responses to the pandemic fail to grasp the opportunity to rethink worldmaking and instead base their critiques on a desired “return to normal” which foregrounds human-centric individualism at the expense of alternative worldmaking that accounts for the more-than-human. To do so, we bring the virus and the virome into our discussion to rethink bordering practices and how the SARS-CoV-2 virus affects bodies, worlds, and politics. We focus primarily on the Australian case, where the pandemic response began with lockdowns and then gave way to a militarized and individualistic approach. Responses to the pandemic have failed to produce a reimagining of human and more-than-human relations. Opportunities for ethical engagement have been missed, resulting in limited responses that stem from the failure of state capacity and entrenched modes of inequality that are harmful to vulnerable others, both human and more-than-human. This requires an ontological reframing of how we relate to a complex world from a more-than-human perspective.

In the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the status of neutrality or military non-alignment is facing deeper challenges since its expected demise in the post–Cold War period. This article explores the gendered and emotional politics of neutrality and its relationship to peace and security. Neutrality has consistently been conceived as an irrational security option for weak states that refuse to bandwagon. ‘Hegemonic’ or ‘disciplining’ discourses of neutrality have conditioned current debates about alliances and security threats, and are imbued with gendered binaries and logics. Such discourses – textual, visual and other – are important because they reveal how neutrality has been positioned in relation to war, peace, morality and agency, and how such positioning constrained the possibilities for thinking about the ‘peace potential’ of neutrality. However, the gendered and emotive history of neutrality also contains a complexity that can be overlooked if simply understood in terms of binary discourses of weakness and irrationality. Inverted gender and emotional codings are also at work in discourses about neutrality. Seeing this complexity in terms of gender and emotions is critically important for conceptualising peace and security beyond narrow confines.

The Trump presidency ushered in a heightened sense of ontological insecurity in the US, based on a national self-narrative that portrayed an emasculated America. Trump promised to return the US to primacy by pursuing policies and practices that focused on border protection, militarisation, and the vilification of external others, while amplifying racial tensions within the country. From caging immigrant children at the border, to an enabling of white supremacy and the Capitol riots, Trump's presidency was broadly seen as aberration in the self-narrative of America as a tolerant, democratic nation. In this article, I am interested in how gendered bordering practices inform ontological (in)security in Trump's narrative of the nation, domestic and external policy, and discourses. While Trump's electoral loss to Biden in 2020 has been described as a ‘return to normal’, this article instead considers how Trump's presidency exhibited lines of continuity when examined through a gender lens. Understanding how masculinism informs ideas of ontological security reveals how notions of gendered bordering, hierarchy, and ordering have been persistent threads in US politics, rather than simply an anomaly under Trump. This suggests greater potential to read ontological security in more complex terms through gendered bordering practices.

This article proceeds from a critical analysis of gendered narratives of nationhood as manifested in far-right populist politics and discourses in response to major security challenges. We focus on how such narratives exemplify gendered nationalism and inform the discourses of populist political leaders and their followers, with a particular focus on the USA and the UK. We proceed from an engagement with the ontological security literature to show how masculine imaginations and fantasies of fear, hate and anger—‘toxic masculinity’—are in fact gendered responses to ontological insecurity across two major cases of insecurity: climate change and the global coronavirus pandemic. The global coronavirus pandemic and climate denialism have gendered dimensions in populist, masculine discourses, as exemplified in the response to the climate activist Greta Thunberg and to the rejection of experts and lockdown measures in the case of Covid-19. A key contention is that the reinvention of ‘nationhood’, along gendered lines, has created a foundation for governing practices in which hegemonic discourses turn into normalizing narratives that justify masculinist responses to ontological insecurity.

In recent years, border tensions have characterised Swedish-Russian security relations in the form of simulated strikes and military exercises in the Baltic Sea region. In this article, we show that while security tensions ‘at the border’ may be present, a complex process of gendered bordering underwrites Swedish and Russian foreign and security policy, seemingly pitching a progressivist and feminist Swedish foreign and security profile against Russian security performances that exhibit overt masculinist power. The tensions between Russia and Sweden appear imbued with gendered power relations. To analyse these forms of gendered bordering, we engage with Critical Border Studies by understanding bordering as practice, rather than theorising borders as ‘static dividing lines’ and by drawing on feminist security studies by examining bordering practices as constructions of masculinism, sexuality, and as a performance of gendered states. We argue that the gendered dynamics that inform state bordering practices are layered, complex, and contradictory. Rather than two opposing but consistent positions, we identify tensions and ambiguities within these subjectivities and examine how gendered bordering practices shape and militarise the state.

Borders – both physical and otherwise – are seen to be on the rise, but in late modern warfare, a complex process of unbordering can be observed in drone warfare. Targeted killings through drone strikes have changed the battlespace, made physical occupation unnecessary and rendered the Westphalian border as contingent and arbitrary. Furthermore, drones perform a complex form of ordering without borders in unruly spaces imbued with uncertainty, violence and danger. This article examines the intersection of bordering, drones and ontological security through the CIA-led U.S. drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan. It examines the relationship between drone warfare and ontological security, specifically the effects produced by postcolonial unbordering and ordering. For the liberal state, drones provide a sense of ontological security and cohere with liberal values because they are deemed precise and ethical weapons that avoid collateral damage and protect military personnel, without the costs of occupation. Yet drone strikes create deep insecurity within postcolonial borderspaces, impacting communities already subject to multiple forms and legacies of power and control. This article argues that drone warfare has complex implications for bordering/unbordering practices in late modern warfare as well as hierarchical ontological insecurity in postcolonial and liberal subjects.