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What It Means to (Mis)Trust: Forced Migration, Ontological (In)Security, and the Unrecognized Political Psychology of the Israeli‐Lebanese Conflict
Author(s) -
Gazit Orit
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
political psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.419
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1467-9221
pISSN - 0162-895X
DOI - 10.1111/pops.12703
Subject(s) - politics , ontological security , context (archaeology) , forced migration , state (computer science) , social psychology , identity (music) , sociology , feeling , political science , political economy , psychology , law , paleontology , physics , refugee , algorithm , computer science , acoustics , biology
What does it mean to search for trust—the constitutive element of feeling ontologically secure—in the context of protracted conflict, trauma, and forced migration? This article addresses this key question in ontological security (OS) studies in International Relations (IR) by analyzing an unrecognized consequence of the Israeli‐Lebanese conflict: a Lebanese community of forced migrants created overnight on Israeli premises due to Israel's unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. Relying on 60 in‐depth interviews with Lebanese migrants in Israel, the article demonstrates how forced migrants engage in various OS‐seeking strategies in relentless efforts to reconstitute trust. These strategies range from self‐justification and securitizing identity through religious and communal practices, to a search for recognition from statist institutions and boundary‐work vis‐à‐vis “sibling” disempowered “others” in the host state. However, the article shows how under political circumstances of protracted conflict and repeated perceived betrayal by the state, forced migrants are unable to reconstitute the routinized relations of trust on which OS is based. By exposing the particularistic, dynamic, and highly political character of the migrants' quest for trust, the article sheds new light on the political psychology of an “old” conflict and on the multiple meanings of ontological (in)security in migration.