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LIT-1478: Routines die hard: Ontological security and audience agency in securitisation

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1133) from the CC BY version of record; worth reading for the concept of ontological agency, an audience's maintenance of its routines, which often means ignoring securitisation rather than accepting or contesting it. Its South Korean illustration is chance observation of routine missile launches ignored in Gangneung, and tweets of fear and blame after a malfunction under a news embargo. The authors read the inaction as coping that lets securitisation reproduce itself, with anxiety latent and its management delegated to elites, not as resistance to the security narrative.
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance, emotion-and-affect
SupportsCLAIM-445 — A protective regime, in a person, an institution or a system of states, becomes self-maintaining when the interventions it authorizes shift the evidence used to judge its necessity, the authority and resources of those who judge it, the capacities of its constituents or the threat environment itself in ways that favour its continuation; this can happen when the original threat was real and the first protection apt, and it is a failure only where the regime has become less responsive to evidence that it is no longer needed
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1133 — Ku & Finch — Routines die hard: ontological agency in securitisation
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1202 — A securitised public keeps its routines by not attending to routine security practices, which keeps an anxiety about the threat latent rather than absent; when the security apparatus itself disrupts those routines the anxiety surfaces, and with it blame of the apparatus, THEORY-898 — In Gangneung, South Korea, in 2022, people the authors observed by chance in beach-front cafés outwardly ignored routine retaliatory missile launches and military sites on the beach, while a missile malfunction at night under a news embargo was followed by tweets voicing fear of war with North Korea and blaming the government and military

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Ku, M. & Finch, B. (2024). Routines die hard: Ontological security and audience agency in securitisation. Review of International Studies 52(2): 306–331. doi:10.1017/S0260210524000834.

Key takeaways

From the reading, NOTE-1133. Page numbers are the journal’s.

  • Ontological agency. “ontological agency is about inaction as much as action in the face of securitising acts” (p. 307).
  • Inaction reproduces securitisation. It is limited agency “as it may allow for the reproduction of securitising practices and the structure of securitisation” (p. 314).
  • Delegation. “Accepting securitisation is also a way for laypeople to delegate the task of managing their anxiety to political elites” (p. 312).
  • The illustration. One afternoon of routine launches observed by chance, outward behaviour only (p. 317, fn. 57), and one night of tweets filtered on “war” and “North Korea” (pp. 321–328).

Why this is here

The exchange cited it at turn U16 for South Korean publics preserving their ordinary routines against anxiety-inducing security narratives. The abstract matches, and frames it as audience agency against securitisation in Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde’s sense, registered in the same batch.

Corrected 2026-10-24, from the reading. The exchange’s description, and CLAIM-445’s use of it (“publics keeping ordinary routines against anxiety-inducing security narratives”), reverse the paper’s point. Routines are kept against anxiety; the security narrative is not resisted but ignored, held latently, and left to reproduce itself, and accepting it delegates the management of anxiety to elites. That supports the claim’s epistemic feedback from the audience’s side rather than limiting it. What does limit it is the reaction when the protector itself disrupted routines: blame of the military and of the embargo. Filed from it: THEORY-898.

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