Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T16:29:25.553Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The challenge of liminality for International Relations theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

MARIA MÄLKSOO
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The concept of liminality favours a broad interpretation, lending itself easily to disciplinary contexts outside of the original framework of cultural anthropology. Developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner by exploring the rites of passage, liminality points to in-between situations and conditions where established structures are dislocated, hierarchies reversed, and traditional settings of authority possibly endangered. The liminal state is a central phase in all social and cultural transitions as it marks the passage of the subject through ‘a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state’. It is thus a realm of great ambiguity, since the ‘liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. Yet, as a threshold situation, liminality is also a vital moment of creativity, a potential platform for renewing the societal make-up.

Type
Forum
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 481 - 494
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 van Gennep, Arnold, The Rites of Passage (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Turner, Victor W., The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1969)Google Scholar.

2 Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 80–1.

3 Szakolczai, Arpád, ‘What Kind of Political Anthropology? An external insider view’, International Political Anthropology 1:2 (2008), p. 280Google Scholar.

4 For the application of the notion of liminality to the study of liminal experiences of societies writ large, see Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ‘The Order-maintaining and Order-transforming Dimensions of Culture’, in Eisenstadt, S. N. (ed.), Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Szakolczai, Arpád, Reflexive Historical Sociology (London: Routledge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, The Genesis of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar, and Sociology, Religion and Grace. A quest for the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar; Wydra, Harald, Continuities in Poland's Permanent Transition (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Macmillan, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Norton, Anne, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. In IR, the concept of liminality has been put to use in different empirical contexts by Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)Google 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; Kuus, Merje, Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe's Eastern Enlargement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mälksoo, Maria, The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries (New York & London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar, ‘Liminality and Contested Europeanness: Conflicting Memory Politics in the Baltic Space’, in Ehin, Piret and Berg, Eiki (eds), Identity and Foreign Policy: Baltic-Russian Relations in the Context of European Integration (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 65–83Google Scholar.

5 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 83.

6 In addition to many post-structuralists in IR, the significance of boundary maintenance in the development of political distinctiveness has been vividly demonstrated by anthropologist Cohen, Abner, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

7 Cf. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994)Google Scholar; Bakhtin, Mikhail M., Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

8 Ciută, Felix, ‘Security and the Problem of Context. A Hermeneutical Critique of Securitisation Theory’, Review of International Studies, 35:2 (2009), pp. 301–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Cf. Kurki, Milja, Causation in International Relations: Reclaiming Causal Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 245–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Cf. Wight, Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Der Derian, James, ‘Virtuous war/virtual theory’, Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays (London & New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 254Google Scholar.

11 Cf. Benjamin, Walter's work on passages and his idea of non-linear time in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Belknap Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

12 Cf. Walker, R. B. J., ‘History and Structure in the Theory of International Relations’, in Der Derian, James (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Palgrave, 2001[1989]), pp. 321–3Google Scholar.

13 Vrasti, Wanda, ‘The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 37:2 (2008), p. 300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See further Durkheim, Émile and Mauss, Marcel, Primitive Classification, trans. Needham, Rodney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963)Google Scholar.

15 Cf. Negri, Antonio, ‘Giorgio Agamben: The Discreet Taste of the Dialectic’, in Calarco, Matthew and DeCaroli, Steven (eds), Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 109–15Google Scholar.

16 Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, trans. Hardt, Michael (Minneapolis & London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 67–8Google Scholar.

17 Cf. Szasz, Thomas S., Ideology and Insanity (New York: Anchor, 1970), pp. 197–8.Google Scholar

18 Bigo, Didier, ‘Internal and External Security(ies): The Möbius Ribbon’, in Albert, Mathias, Jacobson, David, and Lapid, Yosef (eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 115Google Scholar.

19 Cf. Edkins, Jenny, ‘Whatever Politics’, in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben, pp. 90–1Google Scholar.

20 Cf. Hansen, Lene, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London & New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Bahar Rumelili, ‘Liminal Identities and Processes of Domestication and Subversion in International Relations’, in this RIS Forum.

21 Cf. Richard Ned Lebow, ‘German Jews and American Realism’, Constellations (forthcoming), offering a captivating account of the initial psychological state of the German scholars who emigrated in the United States in the 1930s.

22 Cf. Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Huysmans, Jef, ‘International politics of exception: competing visions of international political order between law and politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 31:2 (2006), pp. 135–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See, for instance, Edkins, Jenny, ‘The Rush to Memory and the Rhetoric of War’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31:2 (2003), pp. 231–50.Google Scholar

24 Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception, trans. Attell, Kevin (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 50Google Scholar.

25 Agamben, State of Exception, pp. 65–6.

26 Sakwa, Richard, ‘Liminality and Postcommunism: The Twenty-First Century as the Subject of History’, International Political Anthropology, 2:1 (2009), p. 122Google Scholar.

27 Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology, pp. 215–27.

28 Bauman, Zygmunt, ‘After the Patronage State. A Model in Search of Class Interests’, in Bryant, Christopher G. A. and Mokrzycki, Edmund (eds), The New Great Transformation? Change and Continuity in East-Central Europe (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 17Google Scholar.

29 See Thomassen, Bjørn, ‘Uses and meanings of liminality’, International Political Anthropology, 2:1 (2009), p. 21Google Scholar.

30 This problem is further analysed in the context of the contemporary ‘memory wars’ between Russia and its former satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe in Mälksoo, Maria, ‘Nesting Orientalisms at War: World War II and the “Memory War” in Eastern Europe’, in Barkawi, Tarak and Stanski, Keith (eds), Orientalism and War (New York: Hurst & CO., forthcoming 2012)Google Scholar.

31 Arpád Szakolczai has described the Soviet communism as a specific kind of permanent liminality, as under this regime ‘the Second World War never ended’. Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology, p. 223.

32 Thomassen, ‘Uses and meanings of liminality’; Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology; Wydra, Continuities in Poland's Permanent Transition.

33 Thomassen, ‘Uses and meanings of liminality’, p. 20.

34 Thomassen, ‘Uses and meanings of liminality’, pp. 20–3. Turner often pointed to liminality as an ‘original state’ of a kind, the formless reality out of which new forms emerge, the zone of new beginnings. The crux of the matter is touched upon in his famous essay ‘Betwixt and Between’ as follows: ‘Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise’. See Turner, Victor W., ‘Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’, The Forest of Symbols (New York: Cornell University Press, 1987 [1967]), p. 97Google Scholar.

35 Cf. Connolly, William E., ‘Suffering, Justice, and the Politics of Becoming’, in Campbell, David and Shapiro, Michael J. (eds), Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

36 Sakwa, ‘Liminality and Postcommunism’, p. 122.

37 Thomassen, ‘Uses and meanings of liminality’, p. 22.

38 See Dobry, Michel, ‘Critical Processes and Political Fluidity: a Theoretical Appraisal’, International Political Anthropology, 2:1 (2009), pp. 74–7Google Scholar.

39 Dobry, ‘Critical Processes and Political Fluidity’.

40 Ibid., pp. 80–1.

41 Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology, p. 218.

42 Cf. Barkawi, Tarak and Brighton, Shane, ‘Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique’, International Political Sociology, 5:2 (2011), pp. 126–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Barkawi and Brighton, ‘Powers of War’, p. 140.

44 Cf. Barkawi, Tarak, ‘On the limits of new foundations: a commentary on R. Harrison Wagner, War and the State’, International Theory 2:2 (2010), pp. 317–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Shaw, Martin, Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of Total War and Peace (London: Pluto, 1988), p. 11Google Scholar.

46 Cf. Szakolczai, Reflexive Historical Sociology, p. 223.

47 Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975])Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., p. 125.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., pp. 130–1.

51 Žižek, Slavoj, ‘The Reality of the Virtual’, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 9–10Google Scholar.

52 Der Derian, ‘Virtuous war/virtual theory’, p. 255.

53 Cf. Szakolczai, ‘What Kind of Political Anthropology?’, p. 278.

54 Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David L., International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York & London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

55 Cf. Symes, Colin, ‘The Paradox of the Canon: Edward W. Said and Musical Transgression’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27:3 (2006)Google Scholar.

56 Ibid.

57 Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference, p. 17.

58 Ibid., pp. 94–7.

59 Ibid., p. 158.

60 Cf. Romsics, Gergely, ‘The legacy of classical realism and the “ethical turn”’, Foreign Policy Review, 4 (2007), p. 102Google Scholar.

61 Cf. Edkins, ‘Whatever Politics’, p. 77.

62 Turner, Victor W., ‘Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 6:4 (1979), p. 466CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Ibid., p. 494.