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Failing to account for ontological security would obscure the potential of desecuritisation for transformative peace, where peace is not only agreed on paper but experienced socially (see Kay 2012). Considering securitisation reifies identities and challenges their negotiability and flexibility, it is important that desecuritisation reconfigures self/other relations from a state of insecurity to one of asecurity without inducing unmanageable existential anxieties (Williams 2003). Investigating the road to transformative peace, Sean Kay argues that while peacemaking can be explained by rational actor models that focus on negotiating ‘objective’ issues, constraints on peacebuilding remain ontologically driven, which explains the dramatic decrease in violence but the persistence of existential anxieties in Northern Ireland (Kay 2012). Comparatively, despite the fact that violence has been non-existent (except sporadic hooliganism and vandalism incidents) since the opening of borders in 2003, opinion polls and referenda predictions show that insecurities and anxieties attached to achieving a comprehensive settlement in Cyprus are still very strong.

Rumelili explains ontological security and insecurity-as-survival, or ontological insecurity and asecurity as survival, are not sustainable states of security (Rumelili 2004). In other words, actors’ concerns about survival are likely to destabilise security-as-being, and insecurity-as- being may generate concerns about survival as actors will turn to securitisation to reaffirm their identity narratives and find an identifiable threat to channel their existential anxieties in search for a more stable identity (Rumelili 2011). Within this framework of analysis, the ideal state and normative view of security is the state of ontological security/physical asecurity, where the self is secure about its biographical continuity and self-identity and does not experience a concern about imminent threat or danger. In such a state, actors can maintain the self/other distinctions without seeing the other as a threat. Conversely, where security-as- survival and security-as-being contradict one another, actors are tempted to translate anxiety, which has no identifiable object, into fear, which is easier to pin down. The powerful drive in humans to maintain the sense of self-identity and biographical continuity that dispels fear of changing too fast or against one’s will makes all actors ontological security seekers (see Sigel

anxiety”, because constituting an enemy can become an easy way of reaffirming a particular notion of collective self (Browning 2016:167).

Tajfel explains that because groups provide a sense of belonging and self-esteem, individuals tend to favour their own group (ingroup) in relation to other groups (outgroups) even when the group formation per se is relatively meaningless (Tajfel 1982, Tajfel 2010). However, this does not mean that group membership is static, or exclusive or singular; they can overlap, dissolve or emerge. Our relationship with the collective group is co-constructed, meaning the group narratives affect our self-identity and a change in our identity-narratives could affect our group or our membership. Actors who feel existentially uncertain (towards the insecure end of the spectrum) seek to reaffirm their self-identity by drawing closer to any collective that is perceived as being able to reduce insecurity and existential anxiety (Kinnvall 2004). Any collective identity that can provide such security is a potential pole of attraction because collective identities are institutionalised and embedded in historical narratives that reach beyond their members and provide a sense of immortality. For example, nation-states or religious communities can offer both the strong narrative for individuals to anchor their identities historically, and a primordial relationship to a certain territory (Kinnvall 2004:763). Thus, actors inevitably tend to intensify their connections to the respective identity group that they perceive can ensure their safety. In pursuance of the preservation and reaffirmation of the collective-self, groups will often advocate policy solutions connected to the values embodied within the context of their respective identities. As a result, competing groups may increasingly come to view one another as obstacles to a desired stability, threats to an object of value or as impediments to a particular goal. Within this process, self and other become essentialised bodies, which reduces them to a number of subjectively fabricated characteristics that are perceived as natural and unified signifiers for groups; those on the outside lack the traits that are valued by the self (Kinnvall 2004). Securitising subjectivity in an attempt to re-affirm self-identity based on exclusive collective narratives involves a process of turning the stranger into an enemy, through which self is sacralised by demonising the other (Kinnvall 2004). In other words, communities establish norms, routines and institutions to identify who belongs and who does not in an attempt to narrate their identities and bolster

their ontological security; those, who are on the insecure end of the spectrum, are more likely to establish an inherently securitised relationship with the other and come to portray ‘outsiders’ as threats to their safety, which increases the likelihood of conflict and violence between groups.

‘Insecure’ actors repeatedly attempt to create a secure base for their identity narratives, which prompts defensive positioning that is prone to securitisation (see Young 1999). Routines and habits that are integral to actors’ quest for ontological security can take a life of their own (Hopf 2010, Kay 2012). Giddens explains blind commitment to established routines as a sign of neurotic compulsion due to lack of basic trust; “It is a compulsiveness born out of unmastered anxiety, which lacks that specific hope which creates social involvements over and above established patterns” (Giddens 1991:40). Without basic trust, actors lack the capacity to act or think creatively in relation to routines. According to Giddens, “trust itself, by its very nature, is in a certain sense creative, because it entails a commitment that is a ‘leap into the unknown’” (Giddens 1991:41). Lack of creative and reflexive capacity, because of the compulsive enactment of routines, or because of lack of basic trust in relation to social and material environment, can trigger chronic melancholic or schizophrenic tendencies. Adapting routines and behaviours to alleviate anxieties or maintaining the right amount of anxiety that allows for self-reflexivity without translating it into securitisation can be particularly hard for collective identities due to their institutionalised and self-perpetuating quality.

Under ‘critical situations’ the self is tempted to fortify the borders of its identity, more often than not, by turning to exclusivist rhetoric to differentiate between members and non- members. ‘Chosen traumas’, and their opposites, ‘chosen glories’ that bolster collective harmony and self-esteem provide comforting stories in times of intensified existential anxiety. (see Volkan 1997) Yet, making ethnic memories, traumas or narratives an integral part of the collective self-identity reduces ontological security to upholding a particular securitised identity, which means closing the door on reflexivity (Browning 2016). Some actors may be less capable than others to reflexively monitor their actions, due to their historical narratives, failed nation-building (infancy), high levels of existential anxiety, perpetuating conflict, or due

resort to xenophobic, fundamentalist, exclusive and populist accounts of nationalism, ethnicity and religion as an ontological security seeking strategy (Kinnvall 2004, Roe 2008, Browning and Joenniemi 2013).

Although ontological security is inter-dependent but by no means the same as discourses of securitisation, for the very reason that securitisation is an easy resort to reinforce ontological security, actors can find themselves in conflict-producing routines (Mitzen 2006). Particularly in protracted conflicts, there is a strong tendency to see the security needs of the rival identity narratives as zero-sum and to assume that one’s own security and identity can be protected or enhanced by depriving the other of security and identity (Kelman 1997:68). Consequently, peace processes that do not predicate on adaptation of self-narratives and routines are bound to remain vulnerable to resecuritisation or at worse, reignition of violence. Yet, desecuritisation cannot leave the existing identity constructions intact because those antagonistic and threatening relationships embedded in protracted conflict environments are part of the narrative that establishes the boundaries of a distinct-self. Ontological security considerations are crucial for desecuritisation to be successful and sustainable in reconfiguring the self/other relationships based on representations of threat and enemy. Consequently, this begs the question of how the self can move from a securitised to a non- securitised relation with the other while its very identity is dependent on this relationship. In other words, how do we desecuritise threat perceptions embedded in identity narratives without creating existential anxieties that challenge self-identity and hence trigger ontological insecurity? Opening up the securitisation framework to a broader range of actors and beyond the speech-act, and understanding it as a multi-directional negotiated process could help us better theorise desecuritisation and identify actors who can initiate sustainable desecuritisation practices. Without underestimating the importance of external factors and political will on the part of the political elite for peacemaking, broadening and extending the analysis can help us place actors such as civil society and media at the heart of desecuritisation and provide us with more tools to support the bottom-up and horizontal reconfiguration of narratives in a creative and reflexive way. ‘Peace’ cannot merely be agreed on by the political elite, it also needs to be believed in by the audience. In other words, it

needs to entail a shift in enemy perceptions and exclusive identity narratives, and reconfigure the enemy or the threatening other into a partner, a parent, a neighbour or a friend. To address our lack of understanding and capacity to deal with effective, emotional, perceptual and the not overtly cognitive experience of peacebuilding we need to acknowledge the intricate relationship between desecuritisation and ontological security.

Protracted conflicts often endure because despite the discernible threat posed to physical security in terms of ineffective use of resources, damage to infrastructure, or loss of life, they uphold and reaffirm a sense of certainty about both self-identity and the identity of the other (Mitzen 2006, Steele 2008, Rumelili 2015). By contrast, desecuritisation produces anxiety, as it requires flexibility and openness towards reconceptualising the identities involved in conflict and accepting that the world might not actually be how we think it is. Desecuritisation as a peacebuilding strategy needs questions about who will we be if our enemy was not an enemy after all or if we were more similar to the enemy than we thought. Faced with such an anxiety-inducing prospect of self-questioning, if not handled with care, reconciliation may well be rejected in favour of the security of what is known (Browning 2016). Therefore, agreeing on a peace settlement on Track 1 level requires a significant and reflexive adaptation of embedded routines, habits and by extension narratives because a peace settlement requires creativity to break the ‘safety’ of the conflict that is known and a ‘leap into the unknown’ for collective identities. Although this is exactly why the ‘non-violent’ descriptor of the Cyprus Problem is relevant (it provides room for reflexivity, two-level desecuritisation and a more ‘stabilised’ environment for reconciliation), it is also why I maintain that the failure to reconfigure the identity narratives vis-à-vis Turkishness and to address Greek-Cypriots’ existential anxieties triggered by the prospect of making peace with their primordial enemy is one of the main reasons behind the ‘no’ vote on the reunification referenda in 2004.

Inevitably, the prospect of peace does/needs to challenge the fears, deprivations and isolations of groups by bringing them together, but that very possibility can create a sense of anxiety since it requires actors to question their previous understandings of the ‘other’ and open themselves up for new definitions and group relations (Çelik 2015). Unlike the way

a non-negotiable object in peacemaking. Because the self can only be negotiated through reconfiguration of narratives, these anxieties need to be channelled constructively through carefully crafted peacebuilding efforts to move actors towards the ontologically secure end of the spectrum. Failing to do so would thwart peace efforts and possibly result in further securitisation. In other words, although structural interventions and Track 1 level peacemaking can achieve security-as-survival and stabilisation, they create what Rumelili calls ‘peace-anxieties’ (See Rumelili 2015); they can also essentialise the identity narratives of the salient parties by assuming homogenised positions and inherent interests. If not addressed, peace-anxieties can have a crippling effect on the peacebuilding efforts, such as compulsive attachment to routines in relation to the other or phobic behaviour towards the peacebuilding efforts.