Introduction

This chapter suggests that we should read Fritz Kratochwil’s praxis approach to the study of international relations (IR) and law as a humanist’s quest for wholeness in a world full of reductionism and fragmentation. The humanist desire for wholeness that is present in Kratochwil’s academic work remains largely disguised in the cloak of an epistemological stance. It underpins his concept of praxis and the related strategy of inquiry, an attempt to grasp human agency in all its facets. Kratochwil’s recent book Praxis (Kratochwil, 2018) emerges from his long wrestling with the question of how we can obtain useful knowledge of the social world, and how we can make competent judgements on matters of IR. I read the book as a largely philosophical exercise in which IR and law furnish most of the examples that illustrate more general problems of generating and applying knowledge. In that respect the book follows the plot of Rules, Norms, and Decisions (Kratochwil, 1989).

For decades, Kratochwil’s critical inquiries and polemics targeted mainly mainstream IR theory, although their implications were by no means limited to that field. He challenged the positivist American mainstream of the discipline on two grounds. Firstly, mainstream IR promotes reductionist conceptions of actors and situations of choice that paint a distorted picture of the social world. Secondly, due to their flawed ideal of parsimony, positivist theories and methods are unfit to explain (let alone understand) the social world adequately. Positivists just paper over the ambiguities and internal contradictions of human agency that are the real conundrums for us to address.

Praxis, then, suggests an alternative conceptualization of the social phenomena that international relations are made of, such as diplomacy, treaty-making, adjudication or warfare. This alternative approach does not have a name in the book. For convenience I call it the praxis approach. The praxis approach can be understood as a plea for strong contextualization. It requires us to consider the historical situatedness, contingencies and multiple constraints under which human beings act. It recommends a qualitative methodology that is sensitive to language use and the subjective world view of social actors.