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Communitas and forms without foundations: Romania's case of interlocking liminalities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

MARIA-RUXANDRA STOICESCU
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Extract

As Maria Mälksoo and Bahar Rumelili's contributions in this Forum show, the concept of liminality has either been ignored or understudied in International Relations (IR) theory. To a certain extent, liminality suffers from the same ills as the condition it refers to, since liminal actors, by finding themselves simultaneously inside and outside structures, puzzle and challenge them. It has been shown that through the lens of liminality it is possible to read deeper into the social construction of identities on the international scene, into the question of ontological security, and into actors’ capacities of consolidating or subverting structural arrangements. When considering liminality for a particular case, its position as a concept within IR theory must be kept in mind. It challenges the linearity and neatness of many IR categories, and also, questions certain tendencies in IR theory that make it a rather self-referential system of concepts with the worrying capacity of developing a world entirely divorced from field realities; it is equally important to look at liminality as a way of seeing things which is inspired and informed by the fluctuating facts of social dynamics.

Type
Forum
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 509 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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37 It could be said, and many have, that in this sense liminality is not so different from hybridity, which has to a certain extent been its main theoretical rival, at least in IR. However, one of the main differences between the two notions is that whereas hybridity points to a new construct, a mix, producing ambivalence and ambiguity, liminality – in most cases studied – offers tools for deconstruction and ways of understanding how things do not mix, and yet can still exist together side by side. Hybridity has more diffuse effects, and does not challenge political structures as much as cultural ones, whereas liminality takes on the question of structure developing a life of its own, by resetting the focus on the potentiality of actors’ agency and its effects.