Our recent article, which I co-authored with Amit Tubi of the Department of Spatial Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was published in International Studies Review (September 2026). This is an interdisciplinary venture bringing together insights from International Relations (IR) and Geography to rethink the relations between climate change and existential anxiety.

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In this study, we address climate change as one of the most pressing challenges facing states and the international community in recent decades, prompting adaptation and mitigation efforts among international actors at all scales.

 

While the proliferating field of Ontological Security (OS) studies in IR offers timely tools to address this challenge, a comprehensive theorization of climate change through an OS lens has yet to be developed. Focusing on the interface between existential anxiety and climate action, we aim to fill this void.

 

First, we position our contribution within the ‘material turn’ in OS studies and distinguish between three climate-induced anxieties drawing on Tillich’s existentialist typology: anxieties of fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, and guilt and condemnation.

 

Second, we move from existential anxiety to climate action, offering a novel framework that shows how each type of climate-related anxiety triggers a different set of OS-seeking strategies with strikingly different outcomes for mitigation and adaptation, ranging from denial, distraction and intellectualization (anxieties of fate and death), through futurization, meaning preservation, and spiritual self affirmation (anxieties of emptiness and meaninglessness), to social alignment, social differentiation, and conscious cleaning (anxieties of guilt and condemnation).

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We thus show that the existential anxiety elicited by climate change is much more multifaceted than previously considered, and that a variety of existential anxieties are associated with very different forms of climate action, some conducive and potentially transformative, while others debilitating, self-defeating, and even dangerous.

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For example, we show how anxieties of fate and death may lead actors to cling to irrational, at times self-defeating, climate-related behaviors. However, when actors are driven by an existential anxiety that takes on a more interactionist social form, affected by the gaze of, and recurring encounters with, various ‘others’, and related to social-emotional mechanisms such as the wish to avoid shame and guilt, the actors’ OS-seeking behavior has the potential to take on conducive, at times even transformative, climate action.

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Additionally, specific OS-seeking strategies, such as meaning preservation, might seem to have a rather neutral effect, but can increase vulnerability in the long term by allowing people to reduce their anxiety while delaying more tangible changes to decrease climatic risks.

 

Theorizing the relationship between OS and climate action is therefore not merely an intellectual exercise. Advancing the promptly growing research agenda on climate change in IR, our focus on climate action is essential since it holds the potential to expedite the practical design of adequate interventions and responses necessary to reduce the extent of climate change and alleviate its impacts, some of which are already unavoidable. 

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We demonstrate the contribution of this framework to two key realms in IR and climate action: Loss and Damage from climate change, and the questioning of socio-economic paradigms underlying climate action. We conclude by highlighting the practical utility of this framework for moving from climate anxiety to climate action in IR research, and for opening new interdisciplinary research channels on climate change in IR.