Abstract
In this chapter, the author links high levels of youth anxiety with a security dilemma affecting people in the Global North. Using examples from Australia and Canada, it is argued that some wealthy societies experience a dual ontological-physical security dilemma whereby the enactment of a dominant national identity is directly linked to practices that harm the self and others. Meanwhile, political efforts to transform those identities pit younger people against older generations opposed to such change. The result is the (re)production of insecurity for everyone, but particularly younger people who will bear the brunt of current failures to effectively address the sources of contemporary global and human insecurity. Thus, a commitment to ontological security-seeking can result in the maintenance of harmful and destructive practices linked to that identity. The chapter ends by discussing the International Relations classroom as a site where security, state practices, national identity, anxious young people, and possibilities for social transformation intersect.
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Notes
- 1.
Millennials are those born between 1980-1994 and Generation Y/iGen those born between 1995-2012. See Twenge et al. 2019, 187.
- 2.
Indeed, this chapter could have inverted the cases and examined climate change in Australia and white settler colonialism in Canada.
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Greaves, W. (2021). Youth Anxiety and Pathological Security-Seeking in Turbulent Times. In: Smith, H.A., Hornsby, D.J. (eds) Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_12
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