Who We Think We Are

Brent Steele on vicarious identity, trauma and the stories that shape international politics

If there is one electrified wire running through what might appear to be wildly divergent areas of study for political scientist Brent Steele, it is how individuals, groups, and states build, protect, and repair a sense of self—“who we are”—under conditions of vulnerability and change. While international relations, his general field, traditionally posits that states act on “interests,” Steele’s work seeks to understand where those interests come from and how they shape what he calls “ontological security”: maintaining a coherent sense of self and collective identity in international politics.

Arguably, it is because of this diversity of subjects, not in spite of it, that Steele is the recent recipient of the Quincy Wright Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Studies Association’s Midwest region. A leader in methodological innovation—shading, as he puts it, into “archival research, ethnography, anthropology, relational interviewing, thick description”—Steele connects ethics and history with contemporary crises.

As the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Utah, the distinguished professor has, through his diverse subject matter, become a leading voice on identity, security, and the ethical stakes of conflict in the twenty‑first century, including but not limited to veterans’ politics, protest movements, genealogy, and Indigenous wildfire stewardship.

 

Vicarious Identity/Vicarious Trauma

A critical underpinning of Steele’s current research stems from the literature around vicarious identity (VI) and, as an extension of that, vicarious trauma (VT). “The idea is that there is… an ‘other’—outside of the self,” he says, “that provides something your self can’t, and then you identify with it as if it’s the self.”

Case studies of VI in international relations that have proven seminal in Steele’s work will sound familiar to most Americans. There is the “special relationship,” or parent–child dynamic, between the UK and what was once its New World colonies, leading eventually to a great‑power status shift. More recently, there is Americans’ VI with all things Danish, shaped by Denmark’s nonviolent World War II legacy as well as its post‑9/11 alignment with the United States. And there is the current VI with Ukraine, evidenced by the common sight of that country’s blue‑and‑yellow flag in American neighborhoods.

Americans have also clearly identified with the battlefield performance—as well as the culture, religion, and generational politics—of the much smaller state of Israel, and this is where VI shades into what Steele and his collaborators call vicarious trauma in international relations. Following the Hamas attacks on Israel in October 2023, Steele notes, President Biden framed the massacre by saying, in effect, “This is their 9/11, but it would be like an exponentially larger 9/11 if you think about the population of Israel and what happened that day.”

Vicarious trauma, in Steele’s work, is what happens when people are psychologically and politically affected by traumas they did not directly experience but instead witness, narrate, or identify with. In international relations, VT becomes a powerful tool for explaining why some distant wars, victims, or allies feel so intensely “ours.” The Biden framing, he says, was an attempt “to try to foster and fortify that vicarious identification connection between the U.S. and Israel, to make Israel a similar traumatic victim like the United States.” Similarly, Steele and his colleagues, in a recent paper, cite the treatment of today’s Ukrainian refugees in Britain, using VT to analyze how empathy, solidarity and hospitality are cultivated, strained and eventually curtailed in international politics.

VT is one way ontological security—one’s stable self‑story—gets shaken, defended, and “re‑narrated.” Storytelling, in fact, captures how “interests” are formed and activated in international relations and politics.

 

Narratives on steroids

Genealogy, another area of Steele’s research, is also animated by narrative. “In ontological security studies,” he says, “autobiographical narratives are one way in which we shape our understanding of ourselves. And we do this all the time. … Genealogy is that, on steroids, because we’re told a particular narrative, but then experts can come in… and they can completely disrupt that, so that we actually have to create a new narrative.”

Steele’s discovery of his roots in Northern Ireland is a compact demonstration of why genealogy is political science. After growing up with the story that his family was “English,” he discovered through FamilySearch that his line runs back to County Antrim. When he visited his ancestral home, he saw streets lined not with Irish flags but Palestinian flags, while the Belfast street where he stayed was covered in Israeli and Union Jack flags.

This is “international relations, folks,” Steele tells his students. Genealogy exposes how ancestral stories are entangled with sectarian divides, race, and global solidarities like Irish–Palestinian and British–Israeli alignments.

Looking forward, the former chair of the Department of Political Science at the U has a current book project, Militarized Insecurity (Oxford University Press), which analyzes how military personnel are both symbolic objects and political subjects, using cases ranging from viral reunion videos and honor flights to the Bonus March and post–World War II demobilization protests. In typical fashion, Steele also has a parallel project with environmental politics scholars such as Matt McDonald that explores Indigenous fire stewardship and wildfires in the Anthropocene, highlighting the political and ethical stakes of how societies manage ecological insecurity.

It’s all part of that electrified wire: tracing how we try to close the circuit and stay grounded in a sense of self—the “how” of things in the realm of international relations.

By David Pace

 

You can read an June 2026 interview of Brent Steele at E-International Relations.