Ontological Security and Emotion in US-Cuba Relations.

This paper considers how international relations scholarship might benefit from studying the emotional consequences of ontological security and insecurity in interstate relations. The first section offers a broad overview of emotion and argues in favour of a modified constructionist approach. In the second section I combine this approach with the concept of ontological security to illustrate how identity based security needs are sustained and potentially transformed via the types of interactive routines states and individuals engage in with one another. In the final section I first apply these understandings to an analysis of some of the historical narratives present in the long standing and often acrimonious USCuban relationship. I so doing, I illustrate the connection between routinized interaction, identity maintenance and specific emotions. I focus on three embedded emotions - pity, gratitude and humiliation - and argue that each plays a key role in explaining the enmity that still exists between the Cuban and American states, and the differing perceptions those states have of each other. I conclude the paper by making three basic contentions concerning ontological security, emotion and international relations: first, this concept offers scholars a way to consider emotion as both socially constructed and as a rational and necessary component of our capacity for agency; second, it allows us to analyze the social psychological consequences of particular types of social interactions; and finally it offers a means through which we can call into question some of the assumptions informing the problematic history of US-Cuban Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]