This article aims to understand the ‘non-western self’ and the different ways its ontological insecurity can manifest, through the example of Turkey, by contrasting Kemalism’s modernising vision with Erdoğan’s current populism. We argue that the constructions of political narratives in Turkey (and by implication in other similar settings) derive from two interrelated aspects of the spatio-temporal hierarchies of (colonial) modernity: structural insecurity and temporal insecurity. Modern Turkey’s ontological insecurity was constructed spatially on the one hand, as liminality and structural in-betweenness, and temporally on the other, as lagging behind the modernisation of the West. After discussing how Kemalism offered to deal with such insecurities in the twentieth century, we then analyse the AKP period of the twenty-first century as an alternative attempted answer to these problems and explain why efforts to dismantle the Kemalist framework collapsed into its populist mirror image. The example of the Turkish case underlines the importance of focusing on the different ways in which the structural and temporal insecurities of ‘the non-western self’ take shape given point and manner of entry into the modern international order.