The Global Politics of Liminality – Spatialities, Temporalities, and (Inter)Subjectivities
Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 55 invites abstracts for its 2026 Symposium on The Global Politics of Liminality: Spatialities, Temporalities, and (Inter)Subjectivities (full theme can be found below). Liminality is a concept allowing us to dive into the in-betweens of the global. This year’s Symposium convenes at the LSE to engage on debates around global politics by foregrounding that which resists categorisation and invites discomfort. We seek to contemplate liminality within and constitutive of the contradictory orders of space, scales, and territories, the temporalities and histories, the (inter)subjective and the conceptual – all of which are consigned to the ‘in-between’ of disciplinary narratives and boundaries. In doing so, the Symposium challenges the politics of categorisation that underpins International Relations theory and opens doors to discussing liminality as constitutive of global politics rather than peripheral to it.
Thematic Call for Abstracts:
As a mode of knowing, International Relations remains oriented toward demonstrating, ordering, and sequencing stabilised categories, units, identities, processes, and timelines. This epistemic commitment produces a disciplinary preference for coherence, legibility, and resolution. Yet the everyday interactions, discourses, practices, subjectivities, temporalities and spatialities that constitute this ‘international’ persistently exceed, unsettle, and redirect such ordering efforts. Liminality – the ‘betwixt and between’, the ‘not quite yet’, or the threshold of (im)perception – thus appears not as an exception, but as a generative yet under-theorised element of the political in IR (Neumann, 2012).
We aim to bring to the fore that which is obscured by a prevailing politics of categorisation and compartmentalisation in IR. Social issues du jour include the rise of the global far right, the increasing legitimation of anti-feminist and anti-queer movements, and ongoing struggles for racial, Indigenous, and social justice. These concerns intersect with, and unfold through, liminal spatial and temporal configurations of global politics, including algorithmic and AI-based governances, and contestation over climate, atmospheric, orbital and deep-sea politics. All are characterised by thresholds and the condition of being ‘in-between’: sites of ambivalence, ambiguity, transition, disorientation, and futurity that hold the potential to disrupt or uphold prevailing temporal, spatial, and sociopolitical orders.
In focusing our Symposium on liminality, we do not seek to stabilise the concept or to impose a linear or directional account of transition. Rather than treating liminality as a stage en route to resolution, we approach it as plural, contingent, and generative of multiple political possibilities. We therefore invite contributions that theorise liminality’s political performativity and potentiality without presuming coherence, closure, linearity or progression. This includes extending its empirical and methodological terrain to waters, skies, polar and orbital spaces, and digital infrastructures through innovative, experimental, and reflexive research practices. Attentive to the liminal constitution of subjectivity, affect and positionality, the symposium welcomes contributions that unsettle established forms, voices, archives, and methods. While this call offers an indicative sketch of liminality, we encourage theoretical, empirical and methodological engagements that complicate, contest and rework the concept across and beyond the subfields of International Relations.
General Information:
An in-person symposium will take place on 2-3 November 2026 at the London School of Economics and Politics Science (LSE). It is designed to highlight and develop critical, theoretical, and boundary-pushing work in the loose disciplinary remit of International Relations. Open to scholars at all career stages, it is a closed-setting event that invites colleagues to share, discuss, and develop their works-in-progress. It presents an opportunity to connect with scholars from diverse disciplinary (sub)fields, help one another fine-tune their work, and potentially have this work published in Millennium.
Those interested in presenting at the symposium and potentially contributing to the special issue should submit an abstract of no more than 250 words by 17 June 2026, 23.59 (BST). Please upload your abstract to this Google Form. If you have any questions or inquiries about the symposium, please contact us at millennium@lse.ac.uk.
We aim to make our decisions by 15 July. If your abstract is selected, an initial draft of (4,000 – 6,000 words) should be ready for review by 14 August. This first draft will be reviewed by the Vol. 55 Editorial Team, and feedback handed back by 4 September. The full draft (8,000 – 10,000 words) of your Symposium manuscript should be submitted by 2 October to ensure that all participants have ample time to prepare feedback, comments, and questions for other participants’ manuscripts. After the Symposium, participants are expected to incorporate the feedback and comments provided by their co-participants, and submit the manuscript to Millennium for blind peer-review. Please note that if your abstract is selected, you are expected to be present in London, UK, to partake in the two full days of in-person discussion.
Millennium especially welcomes submissions from early career researchers and scholars based in underrepresented regions and institutions within the Academy. Some bursaries are available, which can cover some (though not all) of the costs associated with attending the Symposium such as travel, accommodation, and/or visa expenses. Please indicate in the submission process if you would like to be considered for a bursary, and fill out this additional Google Form. If you are able to claim institutional support, we kindly ask that you refrain from opting-in for bursaries.
A selection of contributions will be published as part of a Special Issue in Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 55 (3) following the symposium and a successful peer-review process.
We look forward to reading your submissions.
Anastasia, Kazimier, and Madita
Editors, Vol. 55.
Guiding questions:
Spatiality
- How do liminal spaces and spatialities (skies, waters, digital infrastructures, for example) disrupt territorial, scalar, and jurisdictional assumptions in IR?
- How do these spaces reconfigure relations between public/private, civilian/military, secure/insecure?
Temporality
- How do we reconcile liminalised histories into critical theory?
- Does liminality end, and how would we know when it does?
- What happens when liminality is theorised not as an episodic, but as a constitutive condition of the International?
(Inter)subjective
- What affective politics emerge from liminal temporalities and spatialities?
- What forms of agency, resistance, or precarity arise from actors rendered as liminal subjects in contemporary global politics?
Conceptual
- Is it possible to render these accounts into a coherent concept of liminality? What are the limitations of doing so?
Indicative reading list
Agathangelou, A. M. 2024. Decolonizing IR’s Environmental Racial and Colonial Temporality: Frantz Fanon, John Akomfrah, and the Politics of Invention. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 52(3), 707-738.
Ademolu, E. 2024. Birds of a feather (don’t always) flock together: Critical reflexivity of ‘Outsiderness’ as an ‘Insider’ doing qualitative research with one’s ‘Own People. Qualitative Research, 24 (2), 344-366.
Bhabha, H. K. 1991. “Race”, Time and the Revision of Modernity. Oxford Literary Review, 13(1/2), 193–219.
– 1994. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency” in The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 245-282.
Boncompagni, A., & Coliva, A. 2024. Liminal Identities and Epistemic Injustice: Introduction to the Special Issue. Social Epistemology, 39(4), 341–346.
Dwyer Corbyn, S. and Buckle, J.. 2010. The Space Between: On Being an Insider-Outsider in Qualitative Research, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8 (1), 54-63.
Enloe, C.H. 2010. Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. Berkeley, Calif.: University Of California Press.
Gani, J. and Khan, R. 2024. Positionality Statements as a Function of Coloniality: Interrogating Reflexive Methodologies, International Studies Quarterly, 68 (2), 1-13.
Henry, M. 2004. `Where are you Really from?’: Representation, Identity and Power in the Fieldwork Experiences of a South Asian Diasporic. Qualitative Research, 3 (2), 229-242.
Ling, L.H.M. 2014. Imagining World Politics. Sihar & Shenya, A Fable for Our Times. London: Routledge.
Mälksoo, M. 2024. The challenge of liminality for International Relations Theory, Review of International Studies, 38 (2), 481-494.
Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. California: University of California Press.
Menjívar, C. 2006. Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 111(4), pp.999–1037.
Neumann, I.B. 2014. Introduction to the Forum on Liminality, Review of International Studies, 38 (2), 474-478.
Page, T. 2017. Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice, Feminist Review, 115 (1), 13 -29.
Schulz, P. 2024. “How did you become interested in this?” On personal and academic entanglements, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 27 (2), 481-496.
Shepherd, L. 2023. The self, and other stories: being, knowing, writing, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Tsoni, I. 2016. ‘They Won’t Let us Come, They Won’t Let us Stay, They Won’t Let us Leave’. Liminality in the Aegean Borderscape: The Case of Irregular Migrants, Volunteers and Locals on Lesvos, Human Geography, 9 (2), 35 – 46.