This article theorises containment as a diplomatic response mode for states when faced with potentially harmful attacks on their international identity and reputation. Despite widespread agreement in International Relations (IR) scholarship that identities matter in the context of state security, studies of crisis management have paid little attention to ontological security crises. Scholarly literature on public diplomacy has concerned itself mainly with proactive nation branding and reputation building; work on stigma management has privileged the study of how ‘transgressive’ states respond to identity attacks by recognising, rejecting or countering criticism. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we make the case that states do not perform as uniform entities when faced with ontological security crises – government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats have varying roles and action repertoires available to them. Second, we argue that containment is a key but undertheorised part of the diplomatic toolkit in crisis management. Unpacking containment as a crisis management response mode, we combine insights from IR scholarship on emotions and diplomacy with insights on therapeutic practices from social psychology. We substantiate our argument with a case study of how Norwegian government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats responded to escalating international criticism against Norway’s Child Welfare Services following a wave of transnational protests in 2016. A key finding is that whereas the dominant response mode of government ministers and bureaucratic officials was to reject the criticism, diplomats mainly worked to contain the situation, trying to prevent it from escalating further and resulting in long-term damage to bilateral relations.

本文将包容性作为国家应对其国际身份和声誉的潜在有害攻击时的外交应对方式的理论。尽管国际关系（IR）奖学金获得了广泛的认同，即身份在国家安全的背景下至关重要，但是危机管理的研究却很少关注本体论安全危机。有关公共外交的学术文献主要涉及积极的国家品牌建设和声誉建设。关于污名管理的工作优先研究“侵略性”国家如何通过承认，拒绝或反击批评来应对身份攻击。我们的贡献是双重的。首先，我们假设国家在面对本体安全危机时不会表现为统一的实体-政府代表，官僚官员和外交官具有不同的角色和行动方法。其次，我们认为，遏制是危机管理外交工具包中的关键但理论不足的部分。我们将遏制作为危机管理的应对模式，将IR学者在情感和外交方面的见解与社会心理学对治疗实践的见解相结合。我们通过一个案例研究来证实我们的观点，该案例研究是在2016年发生跨国抗议之后，挪威政府代表，官僚官员和外交官如何应对国际社会对挪威儿童福利服务的批评不断升级。一个关键的发现是，政府部长的主要回应方式官僚官员拒绝批评，外交官主要是为了控制局势，