You need only glance at the headlines these days to know that the current state of international relations is dangerous.

From Washington’s retreat from multilateral commitments to Moscow’s aggressive ethno-nationalism, the defining feature of world affairs is not simply cold strategic calculation but something closer to anxiety.

To explain this search for certainty in a world that no longer reflects the stories states have long told about themselves, political theorists have turned to the field of psychiatry. Specifically, to ideas of “self” and “being” that explain the idea of “ontological security”.

Ontology is a branch of philosophy that ponders the basic question of what it means to exist. In psychiatry, the term ontological security was coined by Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who characterised mentally stable people as having an identity and sense of autonomy that is never in question.

Those suffering from schizophrenia, however, typically felt:

more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.

more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world so that his identity and autonomy are always in question.

States, too, can suffer from this........

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