The concept of ontological security has grown extensively in the International Relationsliterature, owing to the new explanations it generates for states’ security- and identity-relatedbehavior. In the process, however, the concept has become sprawling, vague and incoherent,due to the multitude of different understandings of the concept. To improve the concept’sadequacy, counter the risk of conceptual stretching, and provide the foundation for a commonresearch agenda, this essay constructs a typology to divide and classify the ontological securityliterature in IR. The typology’s main contribution is the dimension of ontological insecuritymechanisms, understood as the different ways that the ontological security of an agent can bethreatened, and the different types of existential anxieties that follow. To test and illustrate thistypology, the essay conducts an empirical case study of Russia’s engagement in the conflict inSyria since 2015. The results strongly indicate the presence of all ontological insecuritymechanisms, thus clearly implying that Russian behavior in Syria is driven by ontologicalsecurity concerns. The findings also demonstrate the typology’s usefulness and fruitfulness inmore closely specifying the nature of the ontological insecurity in particular cases.

This research question is whether the social and political fear was used in the Syrian case to mobilize the Alawi minority and how. Therefore, this research is deductive research directed toward testing how applicable is the social theory of fear in the Syrian conflict. Whereas the Syrian regime has highly relied on the Alawi minority to sustain its existence in power. This in turn resulted in high casualties within the minority and bad living conditions for both the minority and the country total. However, this did not lead the regime to lose the support of the Alawis. Much of the research made on the topic presented the Alawi minority as the regime loyalists because of being privileged. This research gives a different view on the reasons which led this specific minority to support the Syrian regime. Where it presents a different approach to study the case through qualitative interviewing of a purposive sample, then analyzing the data through the narrative analysis method. The findings of this research fill the research gap presented by simply claiming Alawis are loyalists for being privileged. On the contrary, this research denies this assumption and presents findings that prove the usage of the social fear mechanism and in what method. This research does not only contribute to filling the gap in the existing research, but also to the theory of social fear applying to a further dimension than the author had explained. When it comes to the field of conflict studies, the research presents the mechanism that caused this conflict to become protracted and bloody. Those mechanisms if early detected may help avoid conflicts of the same nature in the future.