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Postcolonial bordering and ontological insecurities

This special issue takes as its point of departure the historical trajectories of modernity and globalisation, as they have impacted on colonial and postcolonial pasts and on the postcolonial present and its potential futures. In particular, it is focused on the emerging ontological insecurities that are manifest in the (re)bordering of identities, cultures, communities and states. These ontological insecurities are spurred by global processes of free trade and augmented capital flows as well as by new technologies of communication, information and travel and not least by current crises and political uncertainties at all levels of analysis. Of importance is how such emerging ontological insecurities can be understood in terms of social and political change, dislocation, hybridity and impermanence and how they typically generate a search for ontological security and stability that affects contemporary political identities in one way or another. Here we highlight not only the securitising aspects of identity stability but also the opening up of these processes in terms of refusing or resisting contemporary narratives of closure and essentialisation. Hence, the special issue deals with critical aspects of bordering, territory and the rewriting of the state in postcolonial terms. It also takes seriously the psychic and cultural processes through which identities are organised, reiterated and/or reorganised. The articles in this special issue cover a broad range of sites and concerns regarding ontological security and postcolonial bordering. These include the relationship between human security and ontological security and the role of postcolonial Sikh identities; violent cartographies of ontological insecurities in postcolonial Russia and Ukraine; the performance of citizenship rituals in postcolonial Canada; the interplay between postcolonial expressions of religious social formations in response to ontological insecurities in postcolonial South Asia; the Green Line in Cyprus as a circulating symbol of ontological insecurity; the practice of drone warfare and the re-inscription of specific power relations of ontological insecurity in postcolonial Pakistan, and finally; the dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland.