ABSTRACT
Within the study of international relations, ‘international practice theory’ has become a well-established perspective that offers new avenues for the study of world politics (Adler and Pouliot 2011a; Adler-Nissen 2013a; Bueger and Gadinger 2015; Kustermans 2015). This chapter surveys the practice turn in the discipline of international relations (IR). We argue that IR has not only covered a quite fascinating range of issues and problems by drawing on practice theory, but has also developed its own innovative version of the practice turn – international practice theory (IPT). By taking practices as the core unit of analysis, IR scholars have demonstrated how practice theory offers a distinctive way of studying the world of global politics. With the turn to practice, they move away from prevalent theoretical foci on interest and norms, or frames and discourse. Practice scholars instead study practical activities in world politics and how they renew and reproduce social order. In particular, the everyday practices of actors such as, diplomats, terrorists, environmentalists, pirates, bureaucrats, and financial brokers have become the objects of investigation. The problems and issues, as well as the theoretical and methodological versions of IPT, provide fruitful insights for the broader practice theory debate. Our survey of practice theoretical debates in IR hence seeks to foster the trans-disciplinary debate between IR and other practice-driven research in the humanities and social sciences. IR’s relation to its disciplinary neighbours has often been seen as troubled. IR has created, on the one hand, a somewhat negative image of itself as a discipline that primarily imports insights from other disciplines. On the other hand, IR is often confronted with the accusation that it is a discipline primarily concerned with the interaction of states under the conditions of anarchy or with the calculation of state interests and balance of power relations. Such an understanding of IR, however, is both quite reductionist and anachronistic. It equates the discipline with one specific line of thought developed in the 1970s – neo-realism and the influential writings of Kenneth Waltz (1979). These realist thoughts, which are deeply rooted in rationalism, were quite dominant in the 1970s and 1980s (see Baldwin 1993 for an overview). Not only is their heyday now long gone, but there was also always a diverse spectrum of other lines of thought in the discipline (Dunne et al. 2010).
