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06.05.2026
Institutskolloquium IfP (13.05.26) – Existentially securing the future in the Anthropocene? Existential threats and the search for meaning
Speaker: Nina Krickel-Choi (Lund University)
Wednesday, May 13, 2026, 16:00 (c.t.)
Room 124, Institut für Politikwissenschaft, or online via Zoom
About the lecture: How does the human need for security manifest in the Anthropocene? While both Holocene and Anthropocene approaches to security have sought to articulate the distinctive security challenges of our times, various techno-optimist projects aimed at ‘saving human civilisation’ raise new questions about the meaning of security in the face of existential threats. How do these projects view the threats we are facing and what assumptions underpin the solutions they propose? Drawing from philosophical Existentialism and focusing on practices related to technological salvation and the (re)ordering of time, this talk makes the case that IR has so far failed to grapple with the distinct human experience of becoming aware of the possibility of human extinction. This matters because this awareness leads to a search for meaning – what I tentatively call ‘existential security’ – which can, in turn, interfere with practices aimed at addressing existential threats (like climate change) and sustain extinction-causing practices.
Nina C. Krickel-Choi is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. Her work is situated at the intersection of International Relations Theory, Critical Security Studies, and Political Psychology, and covers the development and application of ontological security, the emotional dynamics of state sovereignty in interstate relations (particularly regarding territorial conflicts in East Asia), and the socio-psychological impact of the Anthropocene on contemporary security practices. She is currently the PI of the project “Making sense of state climate (in)action: An existentialist study of how states imagine global climate change", a project that mobilises insights from psychological and philosophical Existentialism to investigate practices related to the pursuit of security in the Anthropocene.
The lecture will be held in English
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