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There are several pretty constant critiques that the practice turn in IR attracts: the mis/use of social theories of practice, especially, but not exclusively of Bourdieu; the unwillingness to engage seriously with alternative explanations; the inability to provide an adequate account of non-trivial change; the unsatisfying quality of non-ethnographic methods to get at practices; and the contested ontological priority of practice. The authors in this volume address these issues, and more, in the chapters that follow.
This book brings together the key scholars in the international practice debate to demonstrate its strengths as an innovative research perspective. The contributions show the benefit of practice theories in the study of phenomena in international security, international political economy and international organisation, by directing attention to concrete and observable everyday practices that shape international outcomes. The chapters exemplify the cross-overs and relations to other theoretical approaches, and thereby establish practice theories as a distinct IR perspective. Each chapter investigates a key concept that plays an important role in international relations theory, such as power, norms, knowledge, change or cognition. Taken together, the authors make a strong case that practice theories allow to ask new questions, direct attention to uncommon empirical material, and reach different conclusions about international relations phenomena. The book is a must read for anyone interested in recent international relations theory and the actual practices of doing global politics.
The literature on “everyday nationalism” foregrounds constructivist practice theory as well as interpretivist methodologies. Our project—Making Identity Count—does something similar but with an aim to advance the study of International Relations rather than the study of nationalism. Here, we suggest that these two approaches are basically complementary, and that a theoretical and methodological cross-fertilization between them may yield new insights in both fields.
Existing theories predict that the rise of China will trigger a hegemonic transition and the current debate centers on whether or not the transition will be violent or peaceful. This debate largely sidesteps two questions that are central to understanding the future of international order: how strong is the current Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge? We argue that the future of international order is shaped not only by material power but also by the distribution of identity across the great powers. We develop a constructivist account of hegemonic transition and stability that theorizes the role of the distribution of identity in international order. In our account, hegemonic orders depend on a legitimating ideology that must be consistent with the distribution of identity at the level of both elites and masses. We map the distribution of identity across nine great powers and assess how this distribution supports the current Western neoliberal democratic hegemony. We conclude that China is unlikely to become the hegemon in the near term.
The IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Cox's neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramsci's conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects would likely founder against daily practices of resistance. In this article, I show how mass common sense can be an obstacle to an elite hegemonic project aimed at moving a great power into the core of the world capitalist economy. In contemporary Russia, a ruling elite with a neoliberal project is being thwarted daily by a mass common sense that has little affinity with democratic market capitalism. Scholarly work on future Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian participation in constructing a new hegemonic order would do well to pay attention to the mass common senses prevailing in those societies
Theory should determine method. How one theorizes about some outcome should drive which methods one chooses to assess the relative validity of competing claims about that outcome. In this chapter, how I theorize identity drives my methodological choice of discourse analysis. Had I chosen some variable other than identity, say objective military power, or had I chosen to theorize identity differently, say as the subjective perceptions of decision makers, then the method chosen would have been different. Because I theorize identity as an intersubjective social structure, the method I choose must somehow recover this intersubjective reality as experienced by its subjects. Intersubjectivity is the reality generated within a community, society, or group, of shared understandings of the world out there. It cannot be reduced to either objective reality – that is, the reality that is out there independent of our perceptions of it, or subjective reality, the reality each one of us perceives as individuals. If it were the latter, then one need only look into the heads of individual decision makers to find out what they believed. If it were the former, one need only catalog the objective indicators presumed to be causal for any particular theory.
In what follows, I present a constructivist theory of identity that is at once social, structural, and cognitive. I explore three logics of social order – consequentialism, appropriateness, and habit – and relate them to the theory of identity I apply to the study of a state's foreign policy choices.