The agency of states in the EU’s and Russia’s shared neighbourhood has often been overlooked, with dominant frameworks reducing them to passive objects of great power competition—a view that warrants critical reconsideration. This study argues for a rethinking of their role through the concepts of liminality and ontological security, which foreground the indeterminate and ambiguous identities in search of stability that characterise these “in-between” states. Liminality, as both an imposed subject position and a potential resource, enables agency to emerge from their in-betweenness—with both liminality and agency being subject to rearticulations in response to destabilising events. Within the shared neighbourhood, Armenia and Georgia—two countries historically situated at the crossroads of competing powers—are examined as key cases of how in-between states navigate competing hegemonic spaces. The aim is to explore how they reproduce, resist and subvert dominant discourses, and how their discursive agency is shaped through encounters with the EU, Russia and other regional Others. This sets the stage for a deeper inquiry into how state agency is not only constrained but also enabled by being at the interstices of structures that seek to define them.