ABSTRACT
For a generation now, the ‘linguistic turn’ has invigorated social inquiry, the discipline of IR included. Over the past 15 years in particular, a number of text-based approaches have emerged – with discourse analysis being perhaps the most dominant among them. Like any balanced approach to social analysis, the linguistic turn, as well as its subset discourse analysis, has had to own up to the challenge of studying how humans make their own history, but not under conditions they themselves have chosen. The seminal thinkers for discourse analysis, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault, both went about this by focusing on language in use – on discursive practices. Their followers in International Relations (IR), however, have not always been as diligent in bringing the aspect of practice to the foreground. In this chapter I contend that, especially in IR, we have to remind ourselves that the linguistic turn and the turn to discourse analysis involved, from the beginning, a turn to practices. For IR this means the linguistic turn is a turn not just to narrative discourse and rhetoric, but to how politics is actually effected. The analysis of discourse understood as the study of the preconditions for social action must include the analysis of practice understood as the study of social action itself. This turn to practice will strike certain scholars as unnecessary. They may
argue that, since the world cannot be grasped outside language, there is nothing outside discourse, and for this reason the analysis of language is all we need to account for what is going on in the world. Such a response would, however, miss the point, for what is at stake is not the question of whether anything exists ‘outside’ language. Practices are discursive, both in the sense that some practices involve speech acts (acts that, in themselves, gesture outside narrative), and in the sense that practice cannot be thought to be ‘outside’ discourse. My concern here is a different one, namely how best to analyse social life, given that social life can only play itself out in discourse. This concern stems from an impatience with what could, perhaps unkindly, be called ‘armchair analysis’, by which I mean text-based analyses of global politics that are not complemented by different kinds of contextual data from the field, data that may illuminate how foreign policy and global politics are experienced as lived practices.
