Fateful moments and narrative change during conflict: navigating ontological security for the Korean peace process

Abstract This article advances ontological security studies and understandings of conflict transformation by theorizing “fateful moments.” These moments are discursively constituted—distinguishable by no inherent properties of the events being narrated but inscribed as “fateful” through authoritative interpretation. Their performative inauguration retroactively founds conditions that make narrative transformation possible and creates space for new relational futures without provoking ontological crisis. Such reconfigurations demonstrate how the ontological security-seeking project can move beyond anxiety-managing continuity postures by instituting revised narrative orders that provide new frameworks of meaning the state subsequently seeks to secure. The article identifies how fateful moment inauguration is conditioned by material dissonance, actors’ seeking to (re-)assert authority as providers of intelligibility, and the intertextual anchoring of narratives—that are themselves subject to supplementation via iterative movement. Inter-Korean relations demonstrate the framework's interpretive utility. Despite decades of antagonistic identity bordering, the inter-Korean peace process of the 2000s became viable through performative narrative reframing. Events were rendered consequential not by essence, but through the exercise of interpretive authority within permissive discursive conditions. Analyzing performative language, the article intervenes in ontological security studies debates regarding change, tracing how stability is resecured after fateful moments, while demonstrating how this enables conflict transformation.