ABSTRACT
This chapter comprises analysis and discussion of the key theoretical underpinnings of the argument in this book. This entails consideration, firstly, of critical geopolitics and ontological security and a conceptualisation of how foreign policy-makers mobilise spatial themes and frames of reference in order to elucidate familiar renderings of the world and the state’s place in it. Then discourse is theorised as a social practice that is fundamental to how these mobilisations take place. Following that, an interpretivist, genealogical approach is outlined which impels a study of historic constitutions of identity and how they are deployed in order to seek ontological security, or security of the self. Finally the nature and implications of the empirical material – debates in the British House of Commons – and how it will be put to work in the rest of the book is explored.
