Ambivalence is widely regarded as a source of ontological insecurity and anxiety due to its close association with uncertainty, undecidability, and indeterminacy. While ontological security studies (OSS) has usefully engaged with the concept of ambivalence as an epistemic phenomenon and its manifestations in international politics such as ‘strangers’, almost no attention has been paid to ambivalence as a strategic choice, that is to strategic ambivalence . Building up on the extant OSS scholarship, this article first conceptualizes strategic ambivalence as strategization of affective ambivalence by state actors for ontological ends through narrative productions and discursive representations. It then deploys the Lacanian theorization of the lacking-desiring subject’s relations with the symbolic Other to investigate the question of how strategic ambivalence may operate as a vehicle for fulfillment of a fantasized Self and attainment of ontological security. It argues that strategic ambivalence speaks to a deeper Self-negating paradox at the heart of the split subject as it desires – and inevitably fails – to remedy its inherent division and ontological insecurity. Adopting a subjective-performative view of statehood as opposed to an essentialist ‘state as person’ framework, the article lastly proceeds to instantiate its theoretical propositions by interrogating the Islamic Republic of Iran’s controversial intervention in the Russia-Ukraine War on behalf of the Russian aggressor; an involvement Iran has, paradoxically, both confirmed and denied in a strategically ambivalent attempt to manage contradictions and anxieties of its anti-Western and anti-aggression identities.
Maysam Behravesh (Thu,) studied this question.