Focusing on the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, this book demonstrates how collective identity depends on the construction of outsider states, such as Morocco, Turkey, and Australia, as different. It then analyzes how these regional organizations can consequently aggravate conflicts involving outsider states.

This volume highlights the ways in which the prospect of peace can generate anxieties and consequently set in motion social and political processes that reproduce and reactivate conflicts.

In analysing this issue, the volume builds on the notion of ontological security and its recent applications to international relations theory. Although conflicts threaten the physical security of the parties involved, they also help settle existential questions about basic parameters of life, being, and identity, and thus over time become sources of ontological security. The prospect of peace,...