¹ Several other empirical case studies and postconflict sites could obviously have been chosen to make this point. We selected Valentin Inzko's report as a way to create empirical consistency with our discussion of Sarajevo Red Line project later on in the article.

² UN News, ‘“Fabric of Society” at Risk in Bosnia and Herzegovina, UN Security Council Told’ (2018), available at: {https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/05/1009182} accessed 10 September 2018.

³ In early 2018 concerns were raised over an increase in arm sales to the Bosnian Serb police. See Julian Borger, ‘Arms shipment to Bosnian Serbs stokes EU fears’, The Guardian (13 February 2018), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/bosnian-serb-police-arms-purchase-stokes-eu-fears} accessed 10 September 2018.

⁴ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘Case: Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (2018), available at: {https://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/cases/bosnia-herzegovina} accessed 10 September 2018.

⁵ Andrews, Molly, Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This point resonates with Cox's famous claim that ‘[t]heory is always for someone and for some purpose’. See Cox, Robert W., Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis in original.

⁶ See, among others, Alexander, Claire, ‘Contested memories: the Shahid Minar and the struggle for diasporic space’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36:4 (2013), pp. 590–610CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Duncan (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Preset (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)Google Scholar; Hopkins, Stephen, ‘The Chronicles of Long Kesh: Provisional Irish Republican memoirs and the contested memory of hunger strikes’, Memory Studies, 7:4 (2014), pp. 425–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mälksoo, Maria, ‘Criminalizing communism: Transnational mnemopolitics in Europe’, International Political Sociology, 8:1 (2014), pp. 82–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Edkins, Jenny, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Winter, Jay, ‘Film and the matrix of memory’, The American Historical Review, 106:3 (2001), p. 864CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Balzacq, Thierry, ‘A theory of securitization: Origins, core assumptions, and variants’, in Balzacq, Thierry (ed.) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 14Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Steele, Brent J., ‘Maintaining (US) collective memory: From Hiroshima to a critical study of security history’, Critical Studies of Security, 1:1 (2013), pp. 83–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steele, Brent J., ‘Critical Security History and Hiroshima’, Critical Studies on Security, 3:3 (2016), pp. 303–07CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ There are multiple and competing ways to define ‘dominant’, ‘prevalent’, ‘hegemonic’, and/or ‘grand narratives’. Our conceptualisation of a ‘master narrative’ draws directly on the work of Paul Nesbitt-Larking who defines them as, ‘socially embedded and broadly shared frameworks of knowledge and experience that are understood and communicated in the form of stories’. See Nesbitt–Larking, Paul, ‘The ideological work of narratives’, Political Psychology, 38:3 (2017), pp. 571–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Steele, Maintaining (US) Collective Memory, p. 83.

¹³ Ibid., p. 96.

¹⁴ Steele, ‘Critical Security History and Hiroshima’, pp. 304–05.

¹⁵ See, for example, Agathangelou, Anna M. and Ling, L. H. M., ‘Postcolonial dissidence within dissident IR: Transforming master narratives of sovereignty in Greco-Turkish Cyprus’, Studies in Political Economy, 54:1 (1997), pp. 7–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crawford, Neta C., Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobson, John M. and Sajed, Alina, ‘Navigating beyond the Eurofetishist frontier of critical IR theory: Exploring the complex landscapes of non-Western agency’, International Studies Review, 19:4 (2017), pp. 547–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995)Google Scholar; Shilliam, Robbie, Race and the Underserving Poor: From Abolition to Brexit (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Barkawi, Tarak and Laffey, Mark, ‘The postcolonial moment in security studies’, Review of International Studies, 32:2 (2006), p. 334CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ See, for example, Kearns, Matthew, ‘Gender, visuality and violence: Visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19:4 (2017), pp. 491–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Loken, Meredith and Zelenz, Anna, ‘Explaining extremism Western women in Daesh’, European Journal of International Security, 3:1 (2017), pp. 45–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wibben, Annick T. R., Feminist Security Studies (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 4–10Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Enloe, Cynthia, Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Campbell, David, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Doty, Roxanne, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Hansen, Lene, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Campbell, Writing Security, p. 15. In the same passage, he also acknowledges that ‘In considering the issue of where we go from here, there is a tendency to uncritically accept a particular story of how we got to be here.’

²¹ See, for example, Collective, C.A.S.E., ‘Critical approaches to security in Europe: a networked manifesto’, Security Dialogue, 37:3 (2006), pp. 443–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, Faye, ‘Critical security studies and alternative dialogues for peace: Reconstructing “language barriers” and “talking points”’, in Richmond, Oliver P. et al. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)Google Scholar; Hansen, Lene, ‘Conclusion: Towards an ontopolitics of security’, in Balzacq, Thierry (ed.), Contesting Security: Strategies and Logics (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 219–31Google Scholar; Vuori, Juha A., Critical Security and Chinese Politics: The Anti-Falungong Campaign (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² We would like to thank the reviewers for asking us to elaborate on our selection process.

²³ See, for example, Hansen, Lene, ‘Theorizing the image for security studies: Visual securitization and the Muhammad cartoon crisis’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:1 (2011), pp. 51–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heck, Axel and Schlag, Gabi, ‘Securitizing images: the female body and the war in Afghanistan’, European Journal of International Relations, 19:4 (2012), pp. 891–913CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muller, Benjamin J., ‘(Dis)qualified bodies: Securitization, citizenship and “identity management”’, Citizenship Studies, 8:3 (2004), pp. 279–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Michael C., ‘Words, images, enemies: Securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47:4 (2003), pp. 511–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the relationship between ontological security and images, see Agius, Christine, ‘Drawing the discourses of ontological security: Immigration and identity in the Danish and Swedish cartoon crises’, Cooperation and Conflict, 52:1 (2017), pp. 109–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steele, Brent J., ‘“Ideals that were really never in our possession”: Torture, honor and US identity’, International Relations, 22:2 (2008), pp. 243–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ In securitisation studies, see Aradau, Claudia, ‘Security that matters: Critical infrastructure and the politics of protection’, Security Dialogue, 41:5 (2010), pp. 491–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baele, Stephane J., Balzacq, Thierry, and Bourbeau, Philippe, ‘Numbers in global security governance’, European Journal of International Security, 3:1 (2017), pp. 22–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guggenheim, Michael, ‘Building memory: Architecture, networks, users’, Memory Studies, 2:1 (2009), pp. 39–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neuman, Iver B., ‘Halting time: Monuments to alterity’, Millennium, 46:3 (2018), pp. 331–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In ontological security studies, see Ejdus, Filip, ‘“Not a heap of stones”: Material environments and ontological security in International Relations’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 30:1 (2017), pp. 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rumellili, Bahar, ‘Identity and desecuritisation: the pitfalls of conflating ontological and physical security’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 18:1 (2015), pp. 52–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ See Eberle, Jakob, ‘Narrative, desire, ontological security, transgression: Fantasy as a factor in international politics’, Journal of International Relations and Development, Online First (2017), pp. 1–26Google Scholar; Vieira, Marco A., ‘(Re-)imagining the “Self” of ontological security: the case of Brazil's ambivalent postcolonial subjectivity’, Millennium, 46:2 (2018), pp. 142–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Leira, Halvard, ‘International Relations pluralism and history – embracing amateurism to strengthen the profession’, International Studies Perspectives, 16:1 (2015), pp. 23–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Blaney, David L. and Inayatullah, Naeem, ‘Prelude to a conversation of cultures in international society? Todorov and Nandy on the possibility of dialogue’, Alternatives, Global, Local, Political, 19:1 (1994), p. 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ The term ‘critical’ has many different meanings in IR. Some even argue that critical theory overlaps with problem solving theory. See, for example, Hobson, John M., ‘Is critical theory always for the white West and for Western imperialism? Beyond Westphalian towards a post-racist critical IR’, Review of International Studies, 33:1 (2007), pp. 91–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article, we use the term ‘critical’ as it is invoked within critical security studies writ larger and write small. Ultimately, what is at stake in these ongoing debates is a call for scholars to acknowledge that security cannot be told in one way, that our current stories are unequal and that we all have to engage in a lifelong project of being reflexive if we are to uncover and disrupt granted ‘master narratives’ that envelop our work and in our lives. See, for example, Browning, Christopher and McDonald, Matt, ‘The future of critical security studies: Ethics and the politics of security’, European Journal of International Security, 19:2 (2011), pp. 235–55Google Scholar; Krause, Keith and Williams, Michael C. (eds), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (London: University College London Press)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mutimer, David, Grayson, Kyle, and Beier, J. Marshall, ‘Critical Studies on Security: an introduction’, Critical Studies on Security, 1:1 (2013), pp. 1–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Kurki, Milja, ‘Causes of a divided discipline: Rethinking the concept of cause in International Relations theory’, Review of International Studies, 32:2 (2006), p. 190CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ This ‘School’ of thought credited the end of the Cold War victory to Reagan's military buildup and the ideological assertiveness he undertook during the 1980s that led to bankrupting the Soviet Union. For further information, see Dobson, Alan P., ‘The Reagan administration, economic warfare, and starting to close down the Cold War’, Diplomatic History, 29:1 (2005), pp. 531–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, ‘Who won the Cold War?’, Foreign Policy (1992), p. 136.

³² Suganami, Hidemi, ‘Narrative explanation and International Relations: Back to basics’, Millennium, 37:2 (2008), pp. 327–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³³ Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar.

³⁴ Deudney and Ikenberry, ‘Who won the Cold War?’, p. 124, emphasis added.

³⁵ Ashworth, Lucian, A History of International Thought: From the Origins of the Modern State to Academic International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Ashworth, A History of International Thought, p. 194.

³⁷ See also Bell, Duncan, ‘Writing the world: Disciplinary history and beyond’, International Affairs, 85:1 (2009), pp. 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carvalho, Benjamin De, Leira, Halvard, and Hobson, John M., ‘The Big Bangs of IR: the myths that your teachers still tell you about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium, 39:3 (2011), pp. 735–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 194, emphasis added.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 195.

⁴⁰ Steele, ‘Critical Security History and Hiroshima’, p. 304.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 305.

⁴² Buzan, Barry, Wæver, Ole, and Wilde, Jaap de, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 29.

⁴⁴ It is important to note that other scholars are advancing alternative ways for us to move out of security. These do not neatly coincide with the Copenhagen School's discussion of desecuritisation. See, among others, Aradau, Claudia, ‘Security and the democratic scene: Desecuritization and the emancipation’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 7:4 (2004), pp. 388–413CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Behnke, Andreas, ‘No way out: Desecuritization, emancipation and the eternal return of the political – a reply to Aradau’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 9:1 (2006), pp. 62–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, Faye, ‘The Queen's Speech: Desecuritizing the past, present and future of Anglo-Irish relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 21:4 (2015), pp. 911–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Lene, ‘Reconstructing desecuritization: the normative-political in the Copenhagen School and directions for how to apply it’, Review of International Studies, 38:3 (2012), pp. 525–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huysmans, Jef, ‘The question of the limit: Desecuritization and the aesthetics of horror in political realism’, Journal of International Studies, 27:3 (1998), pp. 569–89Google Scholar; Kurowska, Xymena and Reshetnikov, Anatoly, ‘Neutrollization: Industrialized trolling as a pro-Kremlin strategy of desecuritization’, Security Dialogue, Online First (2018), pp. 1–19Google Scholar; MacKenzie, Megan, ‘Securitization and desecuritization: Female soldiers and the reconstruction of women in post-conflict Sierra Leone’, Security Studies, 18:2 (2009), pp. 241–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ From a CSH perspective, this claim could easily be connected to ongoing debates about the role of time and temporality in IR. See, for example, Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. and Jones, Bradford S., ‘Time is of the essence: Event history models in political science’, American Journal of Political Science, 41:4 (1997), pp. 1414–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Callahan, William A., ‘War, shame and time: Pastoral governance and national identity in England and America’, International Studies Quarterly, 50:2 (2006), pp. 395–419CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hom, Andrew R., ‘Timing is everything: Toward a better understanding of time and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 62:1 (2018), pp. 69–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Solomon, Ty, ‘Time and subjectivity in world politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 58:4 (2014), pp. 671–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Donnelly, ‘The Queen's Speech’, pp. 911–34; Stritzel, Holger and Chang, Sean C., ‘Securitization and counter-securitization in Afghanistan’, Security Dialogue, 46:6 (2015), pp. 548–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vuori, Juha A., ‘Let's just say we'd like to avoid any Great Power entanglements: Desecuritization in post-Mao Chinese foreign policy towards major powers’, Global Discourse, 8:1 (2018), pp. 118–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Bourbeau, Philippe and Vuori, Juha A., ‘Security, resilience and desecuritization: Multidirectional moves and dynamics’, Critical Studies on Security, 3:3 (2015), pp. 253–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Austin, Jonathan Luke, ‘(De)securitization dilemmas: Theorising the simultaneous enaction of securitization and desecuritization’, Review of International Studies, 44:2 (2017), pp. 301–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 314–19.

⁵⁰ Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Psychology Press, 1997), p. 2Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Guzzini, Stefano, ‘Securitization as a causal mechanism’, Security Dialogue, 42:4–5 (2011), p. 337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Ibid., p. 25.

⁵³ See, among others, Balzacq, Thierry, Léonard, Sarah, and Ruzicka, Jan, ‘Securitization revisited: Theory and cases’, International Relations, 30:4 (2015), pp. 494–531CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ciutä, Felix, ‘Security and the problem of context: a hermeneutical critique of securitisation theory', Review of International Studies, 35:2 (2009), pp. 301–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ejdus, Filip and Božović, Mina, ‘Grammar, context and power: Securitization of the 2010 Belgrade Pride parade’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 17:1 (2017), pp. 17–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stritzel, Holger, ‘Towards a theory of securitization: Copenhagen and beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:3 (2007), pp. 357–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ Jutila, Matti, ‘Securitization, history and identity: Some conceptual clarifications and examples from politics of Finnish war history’, Nationalities Papers, 43:6 (2015), pp. 927–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hayes, Also Jarrod, Constructing National Security: US Relations with India and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hayes, Jarrod, ‘Securitization, social identity, and democratic security: Nixon, India and the ties that bind’, International Organization, 66:1 (2012), pp. 63–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Jutila, ‘Securitization, history, and identity’, p. 928.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Balamir, Bezen, ‘History writing and securitization of the Other: the construction and reconstruction of Palestinian and Israeli security discourses’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23:2 (2010), p. 285Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Vuori, Juha A., ‘A timely prophet? The Doomsday Clock as a visualization of securitization moves with a global referent object’, Security Dialogue, 41:3 (2010), p. 255CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ Mälksoo, Maria, ‘“Memory must be defended”: Beyond the politics of mnemonical security’, Security Dialogue, 46:3 (2015), pp. 221–37 (p. 221)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 227.

⁶¹ In turn, many scholars have incorporated unexpected and everyday settings into securitisation studies. See Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory; Balzacq (ed.), Contesting Security; Huysmans, Jef, ‘What's in an act? On Security speech acts and little security nothings’, Security Dialogue, 42:4–5 (2011), pp. 371–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huysmans, Jef, ‘Democratic surveillance in times of curiosity’, European Journal of International Security, 1:1 (2016), pp. 73–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² For an exception, see Roman, Camil Fransc, ‘The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the Prussian political imaginary: a political anthropological genealogy of the “special” German-French relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 21:2 (2018), pp. 322–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Psychology Press, 1997), p. 14Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Aradau, Claudia and Van Munster, Rens, Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 17Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Shaw, Martin, ‘Still the key reference point: the Second World War, the international system and contemporary warfare’, Critical Studies on Security, 3:3 (2015), p. 285CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁶ Sylvester, Christine, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (London: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McSorely, Kevin, ‘Doing military fitness: Physical culture, civilian leisure and militarism’, Critical Military Studies, 2:1 (2016), pp. 103–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Enloe, Nimo's War, Emma's War.

⁶⁷ Bell, Duncan, ‘Introduction: Violence and memory’, Millennium, 38:2 (2009), p. 348Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ For perhaps the best attempt to conceptualise collective speech act, see Sperling, James and Webber, Mark, ‘NATO and the Ukraine Crisis: Collective securitization’, European Journal of International Security, 2:1 (2016), pp. 19–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ Mälksoo, ‘“Memory must be defended”’, p. 222.

⁷⁰ Enloe, Cynthia, ‘The mundane matters’, International Political Sociology, 5:4 (2011), pp. 447–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ Huysmans, ‘What's in an act?’, pp. 371–83.

⁷² Behnke, Andreas, ‘No way out: Desecuritization, emancipation and the eternal return of the political – a reply to Aradau’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 9:1 (2006), pp. 62–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ Charrett, Catherine, ‘Ritualised securitization: the European Union's failed response to Hamas's success’, European Journal of International Relations, Online First (2018), pp. 1–23Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 10.

⁷⁵ Oren, Ido and Solomon, Ty, ‘WMD, WMD, WMD: Securitization through ritualised incantation of ambiguous phrases’, Review of International Studies, 41:2 (2015), p. 324CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 326.

⁷⁷ For excellent overviews of the pluralistic debates taking place, see Kinnvall, Catarina and Mitzen, Jennifer, ‘An introduction to the Special Issue: Ontological securities in world politics’, Cooperation and Conflict, 52:1 (2017), pp. 3–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kinnvall, Catarina, Manners, Ian, and Mitzen, Jennifer, ‘Introduction to the 2018 Special Issue on European security: “Ontological (in)security in the European Union”’, European Security, 27:3 (2018), pp. 249–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁸ Croft, Stuart, ‘Constructing ontological insecurity: the insecuritization of Britain's Muslims’, Contemporary Security Policy, 33:2 (2012), p. 223CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁹ Steele, Brent J., Ontological Security in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ Mitzen, Jennifer, ‘Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:3 (2006), pp. 342–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ Giddens, Anthony, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 61Google Scholar. The referent of critical situations has received special treatment in recent ontological security studies. See, in particular, Ejdus, Filip, ‘Critical situations, fundamental questions and ontological insecurity in world politics’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 21:4 (2018), pp. 883–908CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸² Weldes, Jutta, ‘The cultural production of crises: U.S. identity and missiles in Cuba’, in Weldes, Jutta et al. (eds), Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁸³ Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 243Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ See Berenskoetter, Felix, ‘Parameters of a national biography’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:1 (2014), pp. 262–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Subotić, Jelena, ‘Narrative, ontological security, and foreign policy change’, Foreign Policy Analysis, 12:4 (2016), pp. 610–27Google Scholar; Kinnvall, Catarina, ‘Globalization and religious nationalism: Self, identity, and the search for ontological security’, Political Psychology, 25:5 (2004), pp. 741–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zarakol, Ayşe, ‘Ontological (in)security and state denial of historical crimes: Turkey and Japan’, International Relations, 24:1 (2010), pp. 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁵ Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations, p. 18; Krolikowski, Alanna, ‘State personhood in ontological security theories of international relations and Chinese nationalism: a sceptical view’, The Chinese Journal of International Politics, 2:1 (2008), pp. 109–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Giddens, The Constitution of Society, pp. 199–203.

⁸⁷ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁸⁸ Steele, Brent J., ‘Ontological security and the power of self-identity: British neutrality and the American Civil War’, Review of International Studies, 31:3 (2005), p. 526CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ Kratochwil, Friedrich, ‘History, action and identity: Revisiting the “second” great debate and assessing its importance for social theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:1 (2006), pp. 20–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁰ Barder, Alexander D., ‘Neo-materialist ecologies and global systemic crises’, Globalizations, 13:4 (2016), p. 399CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹¹ Ibid., p. 407, emphasis added.

⁹² Ratko Mladić was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of ten offences involving extermination, murder, and persecution of civilian populations. See The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ‘ICTY Convicts Ratko Mladić for Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity’ (2017), available at: {http://www.icty.org/en/press/icty-convicts-ratko-mladi%C4%87-for-genocide-war-crimes-and-crimes-against-humanity} accessed 21 September 2018.

⁹³ Steele, ‘Critical Security History and Hiroshima’, p. 306.

⁹⁴ Ibid., p. 305.

⁹⁵ See Rossdale, Chris, ‘Enclosing critique: the limits of ontological security’, International Political Sociology, 9:4 (2015), pp. 369–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Browning, Christopher and Joenniemi, Pertti, ‘Ontological security, self-articulation and the securitization of identity’, Cooperation and Conflict, 52:1 (2017), pp. 31–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁶ Rossdale, ‘Enclosing critique’, p. 369.

⁹⁷ Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘Border (In)Securities, “Regular” Populations, and the Mediterranean Crisis: The Vernacular, the Everyday, and the Ontological’, paper presented at the ISA Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, US (16–19 March 2016), p. 26.

⁹⁸ Rumelili, Bahar, ‘Breaking with Europe's pasts: Memory, reconciliation and ontological insecurity’, European Security, 27:3 (2018), p. 289CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁹ Epstein, Charlotte, ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2011), pp. 327–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ See, for example, Bubandt, Nils, ‘Vernacular security: the politics of feeling safe in global, national and local worlds’, Security Dialogue, 36:3 (2005), pp. 275–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vaughan-Williams, Nick and Stevens, Daniel, ‘Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security: the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge’, Security Dialogue, 47:1 (2016), pp. 40–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Löfflmann, Georg and Vaughan-Williams, Nick, ‘Vernacular imaginaries of European border security among citizens: From walls to information management’, European Journal of International Security, Online First (2018), pp. 1–19Google Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., p. 40.

¹⁰² See, for example, Blieker, Roland, ‘Multidisciplinarity’, in Guillaume, Xavier and Bilgin, Pinar (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 319–27Google Scholar; Blieker, Roland, ‘Pluralist methods for visual global politics’, Millennium, 43:3 (2015), pp. 872–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰³ This mistake is one of the reasons why this article does not pretend to provide a ready-made CSH method. We feel very strongly about defending the reflexive ethos CSH seeks to embody. For further insights, see Aradau, Claudia, Huysmans, Jef, Neal, Andrew, and Voelkner, Nadine, Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 1–23Google Scholar; Aradau, Claudia and Huysmans, Jef, ‘Critical methods in International Relations: the politics of techniques, devices and acts’, European Journal of International Relations, 20:3 (2014), pp. 596–619CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Halvard Leira and Benjamin de Carvalho, ‘History’, in Guillaume and Bilgin (eds), Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology, p. 290.

¹⁰⁵ Leira, International Relations Pluralism and History, pp. 23–31.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 54.

¹⁰⁷ Yee, Albert S., ‘The causal effects of ideas on policies’, International Organization, 50:1 (1996), pp. 69–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a causal mechanism’, p. 338. For a more conventional approach to causal tracing, see Checkel, Jeffrey T., ‘Tracing causal mechanisms’, International Studies Review, 8:2 (2006), pp. 362–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On context-specific methods, see Lupovici, Amir, ‘Constructivist methods: a plea and manifesto for pluralism’, Review of International Studies, 35:1 (2009), pp. 98–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ Elizabeth Jelin, ‘State repression and the struggle for memory’, Open Democracy (2006), available at: {https://www.opendemocracy.net/arts/jelin_3891.jsp} accessed 24 September 2018.

¹¹⁰ Giddens, The Constitution of Society, p. 54.

¹¹¹ See Bassanelli, Michela, Gravano, Viviana, Grechi, Giulia, and Postiglione, Gennaro, Beyond Memorialization: Design for Conflict Heritage (Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies; REcall Book, 2014), p. 14Google Scholar, available at: {https://re.public.polimi.it/retrieve/handle/11311/961621/40484/6_Recall_Book_Bassanelli.pdf} accessed 30 September 2018.

¹¹² Alan Taylor, ‘20 years since the Bosnian War’, The Atlantic (2012), available at: {https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2012/04/20-years-since-the-bosnian-war/100278/} accessed 10 February 2017.

¹¹³ Giovannucci, Katelyn E., ‘Remembering the victims: the Sarajevo Red Line memorial and the trauma art paradox’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 4:9 (2013), p. 449Google Scholar.

¹¹⁴ Cooke-Welling, Andrew, ‘Genocide is a neglected area of criminological inquiry’, Mediterranean Quarterly, 23:4 (2012), p. 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁵ Giovannucci, ‘Remembering the victims’, p. 449.

¹¹⁶ Sontag, Susan, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 19Google Scholar.

¹¹⁷ Adopting a CSH perspective, it is plain that missing people are not seen or represented in this installation. See Clark, Janine Natalya, ‘Missing persons, reconciliation and the view from below: a case study of Bosnia-Hercegovina’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 10:4 (2010), pp. 425–42Google Scholar. See also Edkins, Jenny, Missing: Persons and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁸ This topic has started to inform a recent conversation taking place in securitisation studies. See Aradau, Claudia, ‘From securitization theory to critical approaches to (in)security’, European Journal of International Security, 3:3 (2018), pp. 300–05CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bertrand, Sarah, ‘Can the subaltern securitize? Postcolonial perspectives on securitization and its critics’, European Journal of International Security, 3:3 (2018), pp. 281–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Lene, ‘The Little Mermaid's silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School’, Millennium, 29:2 (2000), pp. 285–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Guillaume, Xavier, ‘How to do things with silence: Rethinking the centrality of speech to the securitization framework’, Security Dialogue, Online First (2018), pp. 1–17Google Scholar.

¹¹⁹ Giovannucci, ‘Remembering the vcctims’, p. 450.

¹²⁰ Bassanelli et al., Beyond Memorialization, p. 16.

¹²¹ Ruggie, John Gerard, ‘Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1 (1993), pp. 139–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²² Jackson, Richard, Writing the War on Terror: Language, Politics and Counter-Terrorism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 2Google Scholar.

¹²³ Awad, Sarah H., ‘Document a contested memory: Symbols in the changing city space of Cairo’, Culture & Psychology, 23:2 (2017), pp. 234–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁴ Falk, Barbara J. and Mitchell, Paul T., ‘The last good war?: the lingering impact of World War II epistemology and ontology in conflict and popular culture’, Critical Studies on Security, 3:3 (2015), p. 291CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁵ Chernobrov, Dmitry, ‘Ontological security and public (mis)recognition of international crises: Uncertainty, political imagining and the Self’, Political Psychology, 37:5 (2016), p. 385CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁶ See Lupovici, Amir, The Power of Deterrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sucharov, Mira, ‘Imagining ourselves then and now: Nostalgia and Canadian multiculturalism’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 16:4 (2013), p. 544CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁷ Leira, International Relations Pluralism and History, pp. 23–31.

¹²⁸ Dragovic-Soso, Jasna, ‘History of failure: Attempts to create a national truth and reconciliation commission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1997–2006’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 10:2 (2016), pp. 292–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹²⁹ Jelin, Elizabeth, State Repression and the Labours of Memory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003), p. 27Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ Marianne Hirsch, ‘Postmemory’, available at: {www.postmemory.net} accessed 29 September 2018.

¹³¹ McGrattan, Cillian and Hopkins, Stephen, ‘Memory in post-conflict societies: From contention to integration’, Ethnopolitics, 15:5 (2017), p. 491Google Scholar.