The theory of International Relations (IR) is in a state of soul-searching, if not disorientation. The great ‘inter-paradigm debates’ that still marked the discipline in the 1990s and early 2000s have all but disappeared. Proliferation of ever new approaches and increasing fragmentation of debates dominate the disciplinary landscape today. IR theory discussions are now clustering within specific academic schools and subfields that revolve around their preferred ‘ism’ and hardly speak to each other, while much of the mainstream of the discipline is turning its attention to questions of methodology rather than theory. Practitioners of international politics, all the while, find it increasingly difficult to see the relevance of these academic debates for their own work and the pressing political (as well as theoretical) challenges posed by the rise of authoritarianism and populism, escalating climate change and the return of global pandemics.

There is, however, a family of theoretical approaches that hold the twin promise to alleviate the current state of parochialism and fragmentation and to reach out to those who practice international politics and not just study IR. These approaches ground their theorizing in the ‘praxis’, or practice, of international relations. Since much of this interaction is performed in the language of law, this turn to praxis and practice also facilitates much needed cooperation between IR and international legal scholarship.

Situating praxis theorizing

To speak of praxis theorizing instantly raises a few terminological questions, at least from an IR theory perspective, since major segments of IR usually figure under the label ‘practice theory’ in the aftermath of a ‘practice turn’ (Neumann, 2002; Bueger and Gadinger, 2018). Accordingly, the concepts of ‘practice’ and ‘practices’ are much more prevalent than ‘praxis’. The latter, however, played an important role already in an early phase of pragmatist and Wittgenstein-inspired social theory (Bernstein, 1971; Bloor, 1983), and a small segment of IR theory (Kratochwil, 1989: 210; 2018: 410– 40; Onuf, 1989: 35– 65), well before ‘constructivism’ assumed its prominent role as a new IR ‘ism’ in the 1990s.