The Play of International Practice

The core claims of the practice turn in International Relations (IR) remain ambiguous.What promises does international practice theory hold for the field?How does the kind of theorizing it produces differ from existing perspectives?What kind of research agenda does it produce?This article addresses these questions.Drawing on the work of Andreas Reckwitz, we show that practice approaches entail a distinctive view on the drivers of social relations.Practice theories argue against individualistic-interest and norm-based actor models.They situate knowledge in practice rather than "mental frames" or "discourse."Practice approaches focus on how groups perform their practical activities in world politics to renew and reproduce social order.They therefore overcome familiar dualisms-agents and structures, subjects and objects, and ideational and material-that plague IR theory.Practice theories are a heterogeneous family, but, as we argue, share a range of core commitments.Realizing the promise of the practice turn requires considering the full spectrum of its approaches.However, the field primarily draws on trajectories in international practice theory that emphasize reproduction and hierarchies.It should pay greater attention to practice approaches rooted in pragmatism and that emphasize contingency and change.We conclude with an outline of core challenges that the future agenda of international practice theory must tackle. The Practice Turn in International RelationsThe practice turn has, after many fits and starts, arrived in International Relations (IR) theory.(Pouliot 2008; Adler and Pouliot 2011b; Acuto and Curtis 2013; Adler-Nissen 2013b; Bueger and Gadinger 2014).But current work fails to adequately elaborate on the promise of the practice turn.It supplies partial-and sometimes unclear -answers to what distinguishes international practice theories from alternative frameworks, such as rationalism and mainstream constructivism.For example, Adler and Pouliot (2011a:28) suggest not only that practice approaches constitute a new paradigm for the study of IR, but that practice theory provides a "big tent" capable of accommodating all of the wide range of ontological and epistemological stances found in the field.We argue, in contrast, that the practice turn entails a distinctive way of studying the world.Since they take practices as the core unit of analysis, practice approaches provide a different understanding of the international.Thereby, they move away from models of action that focus on the calculation of interests or the evaluation of norms.At the same time, practice theories adopt many of the same assumptions and sensibilities that IR scholars elsewhere describe as "cultural" (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996), "critical" (Ashley 1987), "cognitive" (Adler 1991), or "constructivist" (Guzzini 2000).In seeing "practices" as the stuff that drives the world and makes it "hang together," the everyday practices of diplomats, terrorists, environmentalists, or financial analysts become the object of investigation.Focusing on them allows us to better understand dynamics of order and change.Confusion about the practice turn, as well as the very idea of international practice theory, abounds.We seek to reduce this confusion by laying out its assumptions, promises, and challenges.To do so, we adopt a multilayered strategy.We first clarify how, in ideal-typical terms, practice theory differs from other social-theoretical frameworks.We show that practice theory not only opposes rationalism and norm-oriented theories, but also distinguishes itself from common culturalist approaches.We then introduce and discuss six core commitments of practice theory at the level of ontology, epistemology, and methodology.Practice theory implies emphasizing process, developing an account of knowledge as action, appreciating the collectivity of knowledge, recognizing the materiality of practice, embracing the multiplicity of orders, and working with a performative understanding Christian Bueger is Reader in International Relations at Cardiff University.He holds a PhD from the European University Institute.His research interests include international practice theory, international organizations, maritime security, sociology of science, and interpretive methodology.He is currently the principal investigator of an ESRC funded project on the global governance of maritime piracy which uses participant observation to study global and regional cooperation processes.Further information is available at http://bueger.info.