I have applied the anthropologist Victor Turner’s insights about liminal actors that are betwixt and in-between social categories to make sense of Turkey’s identity and foreign policy position in international relations. In an article published in the European Journal of International Relations in 2003, I have analyzed the foreign policy discourses in Greece and Turkey to argue that both countries find themselves in insecure liminal identity positions with respect to Europe, and this leads them to accentuate perceptions of threat and legitimize violence toward one another. In a special forum on liminality in international relations published in Review of International Studies in 2012, I have further developed the application of liminality theory to international relations by clarifying how liminal positions are constructed by discourses on world politics, how liminal positions are practiced by actors constituted as liminal, and how liminality and its practice potentially has unsettling and subversive effects on international structures and hierarchies. Subsequently, in an article in Journal of European Integration in 2011 and a book chapter in the volume Decentring Democracy, I have analyzed how Turkish foreign policy in general and especially towards the Middle East, is shaped and constrained by its liminality. Most recently on this topic, I have co-authored an article on how Turkey’s liminality affected Turkey’s nation-branding strategy in the last decade (Geopolitics 2017).