Bianca Naude

A feature of IR scholarship since Hobbes, state personhood acquired a specific vocabulary when Alexander Wendt (2004) argued that "states are people too." Theories that employ the concept--implicitly or explicitly--have proliferated over the past two decades, all rooted, to some degree, in an assumption of ontological flatness between states and their constituents. The move has been both productive and contentious: while it has enabled novel theoretical articulations of state agency, it has also attracted sustained critique for erasing racial, gendered, classed, and other power hierarchies embedded in social and political life. This paper asks why critiques of state personhood reappear, why they take on their particular shape, and what metaphysical assumptions they are underpinned by. The intervention is diagnostic, commenting on what I see as a problematic conflation between ontological flatness and epistemological/methodological monism, at the heart of which lies a dualist contradiction. The critique, I hold, is valid internally only if we assume that ontology entails epistemological and normative content--which I argue it does not. I posit that normative critiques of the flat ontologies underpinning state personhood therefore commit what Ryle describes as a category mistake. Departing from a distinction we rarely make in IR--between ontology and metaphysics--I argue that physical and social facts are not ontologically incommensurable but co-constitutive aspects of a single continuous field. Social hierarchies, in state personhood theories, are not erased but immanent to the analysis. Ultimately, the paper defends state personhood by sharpening the distinction between metaphysics and ontology: what reads as the erasure of hierarchy is the demand in dualist thinking for visibility to be front-loaded. On a monist plane, hierarchy is not erased but immanent. The fix, therefore, is not more naming, but a distinction the field skipped.

International Relations has long deployed state personhood as interpretive shorthand to explain phenomena as broad as collective emotions, collective psychology, collective consciousness, and even collective defence mechanisms. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, scholars have largely bracketed the question of what kind of entity the state really is, and how it can experience phenomena ordinarily reserved for human persons. Drawing on Alfred Gell's and Roy Wagner's anthropology, I introduce the framework of distributed personhood, recasting the state not as a bounded organism but as a living, "breathing" flow of institutions, practices, memories, and the emotions and impulses that move through them. Collective political life, I argue, is located in a corporeal connection that runs between bodies, interwoven with the symbolic rather than beneath it; as a “mycorrhizal ecosystem” in which every sensation reverberates through an invisible and uninterrupted mesh.

Despite big commitments to combatting climate change, BRICS member states have been slow to implement collective decisions about climate action due to a view that these actions are incompatible with domestic development imperatives. While economic development is both a sovereign right and an obligation for states with a responsibility to provide in the basic needs of their citizens, this chapter argues that climate action should not be seen as an obstacle to development but rather as a moral and ethical responsibility to our cosmic selves. By shifting our thinking from regarding the environment as something that can be appropriated, apportioned, and exploited as we see fit to experiencing nature as an actor with equal ontological status and its own intrinsic value, we can overcome the “no technical solution problem” of economic development versus environmental health that currently hinders global progress on combatting climate change.

When the Omicron variant of the COVID–19 virus was identified in November 2021, western states responded by immediately imposing a travel ban on African countries in a bid to keep ‘the African virus’ out of their territories. Seen by some as a necessary step to protect western lives, the travel bans caused a visceral reliving among Africans of colonial-era experiences of shame, humiliation and degradation. We know that actors, during times of crisis, exaggerate identity borders between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and we can understand western reactions to the discovery of Omicron against this theoretical backdrop. What is not clear, however, is why the Omicron travel ban caused such a visceral reliving of a past trauma in the African collective. Supported by a qualitative analysis of news media, this research sets out to explain how travel bans imposed by western nations caused a re-traumatization of the African collective, arguing that narratives surrounding ‘Africa's Omicron virus’ are an extension of the ‘heart of darkness’ ideation that dominated imperial European discourse and practice. Deeper understanding of the many ways in which colonial subjugation persists today, the article argues, can help us better respond to similar future global crises.

Life stories help ground states in the chaos of social life by allowing them to experience themselves, their behaviours, and their relationships as coherent, predictable, and tractable. Continuity in these stories is important for maintaining a sense of ontological security, but they can also constrain agency when crises challenge understandings of self, others, and the world ‘out there’. Against approaches in ontological security scholarship (OSS) that treat uncertainty and anxiety primarily as paralysing, this article shows how encounters with expanded possibility can generate productive forms of agency instead. While change may carry emancipatory potential, the article finds that actors may ultimately act to restabilise existing versions of the self rather than transforming it. An examination of South Africa’s responses to the crises in Gaza and Ukraine shows that although these destabilising moments created opportunities for the state to rewrite its life story, it chose to pursue a system-level rescripting of the moral grammar of international politics to maintain a semblance of continuity. By reordering the interpretive framework of global governance around the evolving narrative arcs of its own life story, the state is able to avoid deeper self-transformation.

Moving among current research on the ontological status of the state alongside important arguments in support of the state personhood thesis, Naude begins by exploring Freud’s personality theory and the ways in which this theory has evolved over time in response to newer insights from the field of experimental psychology. Recognizing that Freud’s work is in many ways outdated, she considers more recent literature on narcissism as an aspect of self-esteem rather than a form of psychopathology, drawing specifically on Kohut’s expansion of the concept of narcissism as a normal feature of personality development. Using the South African state as a case study, Naude demonstrates the various ways in which the state presents itself to the outside world on the one hand, and how it wishes to see itself on the other. She further considers how narcissistic defenses help protect the state's ego from criticism and self-judgments.