Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T20:40:00.044Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Liminal identities and processes of domestication and subversion in International Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

BAHAR RUMELILI
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the course of his ethnographic study of the Ndembu tribes, the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner focused on the elaborate rituals that marked various phases of social transition, such as puberty and marriage. Also drawing on the work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage, Turner identified the entities going through social transitions as liminals, that ‘are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. According to Turner, the defining attribute of liminal positions is their ambiguity and indeterminacy because they ‘elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’.

Type
Forum
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 495 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, [1969] 1995), p. 95Google Scholar.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., pp. 108–9.

4 Ibid., p. 167.

5 Ibid., p. 128.

6 Turner was primarily interested in the subversive enactments of liminality because they challenged the prevailing structuralism in sociology. The framework that I offer encompasses both reproductive and subversive enactments of liminality.

7 Higgott, Richard A. and Richard Nossal, Kim, ‘The International Politics of Liminality: Relocating Australia in the Asia Pacific’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 32:2 (1997), pp. 169–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rumelili, Bahar, ‘Liminality and Perpetuation of Conflicts: Turkish-Greek Relations in the Context of Community-Building by the EU’, European Journal of International Relations, 9:2 (2003), pp. 213–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mälksoo, Maria, ‘Liminality and Contested Europeanness: Conflicting Memory Politics in the Baltic Space’, in Berg, Eiki and Ehin, Piret (eds), Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic-Russian Relations in the Context of European Integration (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 65–83Google Scholar; Maria Ruxandra Stoicescu, Liminality in International Relations: A Discursive Analysis of Romania, Ukraine, and Turkey (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Geneva, 2008); Yanik, Lerna, ‘Constructing Turkish “Exceptionalism”: Discourses of Liminality and Hybridity in Turkish Foreign Policy’, Political Geography, 30:2 (2011), pp. 80–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Higgott and Nossal, ‘The International Politics of Liminality’, p. 172.

9 Wendt, Alex, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finnemore, Martha and Sikkink, Kathryn, ‘International Norm Dynamics and Political Change’, International Organization, 52:4 (1998), pp. 887–917CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Risse, Thomas, Ropp, Stephen C. and Sikkink, Kathryn (eds), The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Towns, Ann E., Women and States: Norms and Hierarchies in International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 42–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 In a rare instance, Emanuel Adler acknowledges that ‘given that we are discussing collective cognitive phenomena, there may be controversy about boundaries and membership. These controversies arise because states may be members of more than one community-region as a result either of their “liminal” status (e.g., Turkey) or of concentric circles of identity.’ Adler, Emanuel, ‘Imagined Security Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations’,Millennium, 26:2 (1997), p. 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Towns, Women and States, pp. 27–8.

14 Der Derian, James and Shapiro, Michael J. (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1989)Google Scholar; Shapiro, Michael J. and Alker, Hayward R. (eds), Challenging Boundaries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

15 Jackson, Patrick T., The Conduct of Inquiry: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and its Implications for International Relations Research (London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

16 See in particular, Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; Ling, L. H. M., Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)Google Scholar.

17 Bhabha, Homi K., ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi’, Critical Inquiry, 12:1 (1985), p. 159CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 145.

19 Kapoor, Ilan, ‘Acting in a Tight Spot: Homi Bhabha's Postcolonial Politics’, New Political Science, 25:4 (2003), pp. 561–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 On how state sovereignty resolves the tension between temporal and spatial categories, see Walker, R. B. J., Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. On the inextricability of temporal and spatial differentiation, see Prozorov, Sergei, ‘The Other as Past and Present: Beyond the Logic of “Temporal Othering” in IR Theory’, Review of International Studies (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

21 Ruggie, John G., ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations’, International Organization, 47:1 (1993), pp. 139–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Blaney, David and Inayatullah, Naeem, ‘Neo-Modernization? IR and the Inner Life of Modernization Theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 8:1 (2002), pp. 103–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: the East in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Kuus, Merje, Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe's Eastern Enlargement (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Mälksoo, Maria, ‘From Existential Politics towards Normal Politics: The Baltic States in the Enlarged Europe’, Security Dialogue, 37:3 (2006), pp. 275–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 See, in particular, Zielonka, Jan, Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

26 On how this categorisation sustains an imperial order, see Behr, Helmut, ‘The European Union in the Legacies of Imperial Rule? EU Accession Politics Viewed from a Historical Comparative Perspective’, European Journal of International Relations, 13:2 (2007), pp. 239–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Many studies note the remarkable historical continuity in the European discourses on Turkey. See in particular, Neumann, Iver B. and Welsh, Jennifer, ‘The Other in European Self-Definition: an Addendum to the Literature on International Society’, Review of International Studies, 17:4 (1991), pp. 327–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naff, Thomas, ‘The Ottoman Empire and European States System’, in Bull, Hedley and Watson, A. (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Ulusoy, Kivanc, ‘The Changing Challenge of Europeanization to Politics and Governance in Turkey’, International Political Science Review, 30:4 (2009), pp. 363–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Rumelili, Bahar, ‘Constructing Identity and Relating to Difference: Understanding the EU's Mode of Differentiation’, Review of International Studies, 30:1 (2004), pp. 27–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sjursen, Helene, ‘Why Expand? The Question of Legitimacy and Justification in the EU's Enlargement Policy’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40:3 (2002), pp. 491–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 For a historical analysis of how Turkey's representational practices have shaped and negotiated discourses on European identity, see Morozov, Viatcheslav and Rumelili, Bahar, ‘The External Constitution of European Identity: Russia and Turkey as Europe-makers’, Cooperation and Conflict (forthcoming)Google Scholar.

30 Rumelili, Bahar, Constructing Regional Community and Order in Europe and Southeast Asia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See Barlas, Dilek and Guvenc, Serhat, ‘Turkey and the Idea of a European Union During the Inter-War Years, 1923–39’, Middle Eastern Studies, 45:3 (2009), pp. 425–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yilmaz, E. and Bilgin, Pinar, ‘Constructing Turkey's “Western” Identity During the Cold War’, International Journal, 61:1 (2005), pp. 39–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zarakol, Ayşe, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

32 Bilgin, Pinar and Bilgic, Ali, ‘Turkey's “New” Foreign Policy towards Eurasia’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 52:2 (2011), pp. 173–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rumelili, Bahar, ‘Turkey: Identity, Foreign Policy, and Socialization in a Post-Enlargement Europe’, Journal of European Integration, 33:2 (2011), pp. 235–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 For detailed analysis of these developments, see Rumelili, ‘Turkey: Identity’.

34 Onis, Ziya, ‘Multiple Faces of the “New” Turkish Foreign Policy: Underlying Dynamics and a Critique’, Insight Turkey, 13:1 (2011), pp. 47–65Google Scholar.

35 Abizadeh, Arash, ‘Does Collective Identity Presuppose an Other? On the Alleged Incoherence of Global Solidarity’, American Political Science Review, 99:1 (2005), pp. 45–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Norton, Anne, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.