In 1909, Arnold van Gennep wrote a book on the rites of passage where he discussed what he called the liminal phase (from Lat. limes, border, pl. limites) through which boys in a number of cultures had to pass in order to become men. With his Dutch name, his German birth, his move to France with his divorced mother at the ripe age of six, and his interest in the Arab world, he was nothing if not a man in transition between different life worlds. His scholarly life, too, was a life of transit; from haute école to haute école, from France to Switzerland. To top it all, when the institutionalisation of the social sciences in France was finally hitting its stride with the emergence of Durkheim's année-school, van Gennep was marginalised. There was no closure to his scholarly travels. Van Gennep remained liminal, remained in becoming. In his own terms, his rite de passage never ended. He went from pre-liminality to liminality – a condition that his greatest follower, the symbolic interactionalist anthropologist Victor Turner characterised as existing betwixt and between socially recognised positions – without entering the post-liminal phase of having been fully incorporated into one of those already existing positions. Van Gennep made it his life to deal with the uncertainties and the danger that any social order ascribes to those who are between categories. With this Forum, liminality arrives within the discipline of International Relations (IR) in earnest. The rest of this Introduction will give some historical background that situates the Forum's three post-structural protagonists, note how their undertaking is part of a wider thrust towards process-oriented and relation-oriented work within the social sciences and introduce the pieces.

In the last couple of years, Critical Realism has established itself as an alone-standing intellectual movement in International Relations (IR). It not only seeks to challenge the idea of the middle ground on which most of the more moderate versions of constructivist thought base their convictions, but it also seeks to provide own answers to basic scientific problems around the relationship between facts and values, causation and causality, or agents and structure. If one would want to characterise Critical Realist positions, one has to point to their attempted resurrection of ontology. Taking inspiration, in particular, from Bhaskar's Possibility of Naturalism and subsequent works, different strands of Critical Realism are tied together in their conviction that epistemology has had too much influence on scientific debates ever since Kant changed the structure of philosophical reasoning by asking how objects were determined by concepts rather than the other way round. The prevalent focus on epistemological questions is not only biased and asks the wrong questions, but it starts from false premises in the first place, as Wight and Patomäki once put it: every theory of knowledge must also logically presuppose a theory of what the world is like (ontology) for knowledge (epistemology) to be possible.

This article claims that the revolutions in the Arab world foster insight into more than the spread of liberalism. Fukuyama's end of history has not just reached the Muslim world faster than expected. These revolutions show that strong religion and liberal democracy are compatible: they are postsecular revolutions. As already the revolutions of 1989 proved in some respect, in contrast to the secular ideals of the French Revolution, revolution and religion can go hand in hand in a postsecular way. Praying and making revolution does not need to end in a religious autocracy as 1979 in Iran. Religious citizens stood up praying for democracy and the rule of law against secular regimes which legitimised themselves as a bulwark against sinister forces of religion. Analysing the revolutions of 1989, Jürgen Habermas speaks of ‘catching-up revolutions’ which brought nothing new to the course of history. Yet after 9/11 he started to develop his idea of a postsecular society in which secular and religious citizens are equally entitled to make their arguments in a public sphere. Criticising the early Habermas with the later, the article argues that the postsecular revolutions of 1989 and 2011 are preparing the ground for a postsecular democracy.

This article critiques constructivist approaches to the international relations of the Middle East and sets out an alternative interpretation of the role of ideas based on political economy and the sociology of knowledge. It cautions against using constructivism as a way of ‘building bridges’ between IR and Middle East Studies and disputes the claim that the norms of ‘Arabism’ as a putative regional identity are in contradiction with those of sovereignty. The article shows that this assumption is based on the combined influences of modernisation theory and Orientalist assumptions about the power and continuity of regional culture that have persisted in Middle East IR. This is despite the fact that there is no reason to believe the Arabs constitute a more ‘natural’ nation than do the Syrians, Iraqis or Egyptians. The political role and resonance of ideas can be better established by viewing the modern history of the Middle East in terms of domestic structure and social change, and in particular emphasising the role of rising middle classes in revolutionary nationalist movements. The findings of this article raise questions for the utility of ‘moderate’ constructivist interpretations of International Relations as a whole.

While the recent interest in affects and emotions in world politics is encouraging, the crucial relationships between affect, emotion, and discourse have remained largely under-examined. This article offers a framework for understanding the relations between affect and discourse by drawing upon the theories of Jacques Lacan. Lacan conceptualises affect as an experience which lies beyond the realm of discourse, yet nevertheless has an effect upon discourse. Emotion results when affects are articulated within discourse as recognisable signifiers. In addition, Lacanian theory conceptualises affect and discourse as overlapping yet not as coextensive, allowing analyses to theoretically distinguish between discourses which become sites of affective investment for audiences and those that do not. Thus, analysing the mutual infusion of affect and discourse can shed light on why some discourses are more politically efficacious than others. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of American affective reactions to 11 September 2001.

Is social theory possible without a positive ontology? Do we need ontology as the very first step toward/of theorisation? Is or isn't ontology a consequence of the theorisation process? Is a meta-theory/theory delineation nothing more than a rhetorical/discursive artifice? If that were the case, why should we give priority to one assumption/consequence (for example, ontology) over others? What are the conditions of possibility and/or limitations for giving priority to any ontological assumption? It is almost unthinkable among social scientists nowadays to envision a formulation of social theory that does not posit an ontological beginning point, that is, by making explicit/implicit assumptions on the most basic entities – subjects, objects, agents, structures, and/or processes – that one takes to be the foundations of the (world-) view being explored or posited. This is usually considered a theoretical necessity of, as much as a desire for, soundness driven by our conception of what theorising means, or should mean. The issue is even put at the heart of what politics is, or is about. ‘Politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’, says Wight. He, and, well before him, Walker, and Wendt, as well as most of today's social scientists, all assert that theories necessarily presuppose a basic positive ontology upon which all other considerations are built and that there is no social theory without ontology.

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.

The purposes of this article are twofold: (1) to consider the extent to which Dialogue of Civilisations (DoC) initiatives, as alternative visions of post-secular world order, are likely to address insecurities that they identify; and (2) to point to other insecurities that are likely to remain unidentified and unaddressed in the process. In their present conception, DoC initiatives risk falling short of addressing the very insecurities they prioritise (the stability of inter-state order) let alone attending to those experienced by non-state referents, which they overlook. The article advances three points in three steps. First, I point to how projects of civilisational dialogue have bracketed civilisation, thereby leaving intact the Huntingtonian notion of civilisations as religiously unified autochthonous entities. Second, I argue that while contributing to opening up space for communication, DoC initiatives have nevertheless failed to employ a dialogical approach to dialogue between civilisations. Third, I tease out the notion of security underpinning DoC initiatives and argue that the proponents DoC, in their haste to avert a clash, have defined security narrowly as the absence of war between states belonging to different civilisations. Theirs is also a shallow notion of security insofar as it fails to capture the derivative character of security and insecurity.

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’.

The field of International Relations (IR) although in many quarters still immersed in the epistemological trenches surrounding the fourth debate between positivism and post-positivism saw the emergence of a renewed interest and debate about the state and rigour of ‘our’ ontological assumptions. One currently very prominent contribution to this emerging or re-emerging interest in ontological questions can be found in the Critical Realist (CR) approach.

This contribution investigates in some more depth a limited set of the premises on which Wight's argument for a ‘scientific realist’ approach to the study of International Relations (IR) rests, an approach, which, according to him, raises the hitherto unacknowledged centrality of ontological premises to all forms of knowledge and human action. Positing ‘Politics as Ontology’ (the book's subtitle) permits, so Wight's argument goes, the conduct of social science in a way which renders most epistemological and methodological disagreements obsolete, since the latter can be shown to be enabled only by competing, mutually exclusive, relatively incompatible, or unreflectively fragmentary ontological commitments. On this view, clarifying the respective ontological commitments, which underpin – tacitly or explicitly – competing theories yields the prospect of demonstrating relatively precisely what it is that enables disagreements at the levels of epistemology and methodology to arise in the first place. Programmatically, Wight seeks to establish the scientific realist account as a consistent, critical, fallibilist, unified account of scientific practice, reintegrating social and natural sciences in a reconceptualised naturalist scheme.

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.

Discussing matters of philosophy of science within the boundaries of an academic field, which seems to have a fairly well-delineated subject matter, a carefully circumscribed universe of cases to struggle with, is a distinct deviation from normal science. Yet, meta-theoretical quarrels have been lurking on the boundaries of International Relations (IR) ever since the field constituted itself as a relatively autonomous academic enterprise. Never at the centre of the discipline, philosophy of science debates have still been among the most tenacious ones, so there doesn't seem to be a need to justify or legitimate such intellectual pursuits. Suffice it to say that among the many niches of International Relations as a discipline there may also be one dealing with meta-theoretical inquiry.