This and the following chapters offer substantive applications of a relational/systemic understanding of international systems. This chapter looks at how international actors are differently placed (and shaped) by their authority, status, and roles; by the principles, norms, and rules that govern their actions; and by the institutions and practices in which they participate. The chapter offers three illustrations. First, I suggest that international systems can profitably be understood as having constitutional structures composed of principles and practices of international legitimacy, principles and practices of domestic legitimacy, foundational functional practices, and hegemonic cultural values. Second, I look at the great variety of types of security systems, including (various types of) systems organized around unit autonomy, systems of hierarchical subordination, and transnational security communities. Finally, I look at the transformation of post-World War II international society through norm-driven processes that abolished aggressive territorial war and overseas colonial empires.

The large-scale implementation of remote work appears as a fundamental shift into the traditional understanding of the relationship between time and work. Drawing on sociomateriality literature and more especially on the concept of temporal structuring, this chapter suggests that remote workers ‘work the time’ by different practices, to (re)create adequate temporalities to work. The analysis results from an exploratory qualitative study conducted between May 2020 and April 2021 in Montreal with 17 remote workers who were already working remotely before the Covid-19 pandemic. It gives an overview of the temporal practices of remote workers, who are mainly blocking time (i), navigating between temporalities (ii) ritualizing them (iii) or an interwoven of all of them to try to create time to work (and thus, for non-work as well). It appears that remote workers work the time to be flexible. However, they still do it in the clock time of organizational life. They also experiment with temporal tensions, which leads them to exercise a fourth practice that is indispensable to the other three, that of labeling times.

This chapter proposes a way of thinking about virtue theory that draws from Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, but also moves beyond them. The central question is what a virtue theory might look like which is not universalistic, but rather culturally inclusive, pragmatic, and situational. A theme throughout is the importance of thinking about education as the process through which virtues are formed, sustained, and improved over time.

This chapter explores the concept of global policymaking from a variety of angles. We begin by reviewing the development of global policymaking as a distinct field of research. We then define the concept of global policy as world-spanning courses of action over issues of common concern, and tease out its methodological and epistemological implications. The third part contrasts two approaches to global policymaking – that of global public goods, inherited from economics, and that of bricolage, which takes its cue from sociology and anthropology. We side in favor of the latter, as we believe that it better captures the processual and political nature of global governance. We emphasize the “making of” global policy and global governance in order to answer a fundamental question: How are world-spanning collective courses of action over issues of common concern actually generated? By paying closer attention to political processes, we show that the key challenges of global governance do not primarily consist in the search for more efficient solutions to technical problems.

The best way to grasp the politics of global governance is by understanding the making of global policies, that is, global policymaking. Contrary to conventional wisdom, which conceives of this process as the rational production of global public goods, we emphasize the patchwork nature of global policymaking. Our perspective analyzes the bricolage of universal values and political practices that structure global governance. This perspective not only builds on but also transcends existing literature studies on regime complexes and fragmentation, orchestration, informal governance, and experimentation, as well as legitimation and contestation. The United Nations forms a great empirical site for the study of global policymaking, sitting at the apex of major international dynamics. Our three case studies – the making of the Sustainable Development Goals, of the Human Rights Council, and of the Protection of Civilians doctrine – span the key subfields of development, human rights, and security.

Chapter 4 examines the historical trends of how the three health issues of obesity, opioid use disorder, and depression in older adults have increased in prevalence over the last several decades. The chapter describes the current guidelines and practices for how health care is delivered for these patient populations and draws from perspectives and stories from health care settings.

Chapter 12 examines Hegel's characterization of human society as the "living good," which expresses his version of the analogy between societies and organisms. For him the analogy implies that societies both incorporate processes of life (in carrying out the activities necessary for material reproduction) and possess the same structure as biological life (that of a "self-positing" subject, which maintains itself by positing "contradictions" internal to itself and then negotiating them so as establish its own identity). Hegel also insists on the differences between life and social being: the presence in social life of self-consciousness and the capacity for freedom. Thus, societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good via specialized, coordinated functions, which, unlike the activities of organisms, are infused with ethical content deriving from their potential to be consciously self-determined. Analyzing Hegel's master–slave dialectic illustrates these ontological claims.

Is logic intrinsically normative? Given that we often make errors in reasoning, one might hold that logic is not about how we do think but about how we ought to think. However, logical laws say nothing about thinking. How does logic gain normative traction on psychological processes such as belief formation or reasoning? To answer this question, the chapter begins by examining the debate between descriptivists, who hold that logic simply describes truth-preserving entailment relations, and normativists, who hold that logic is intrinsically normative. Husserl was a descriptivist, and Heidegger’s early work follows him. But Heidegger’s phenomenological account of the truth-predicate as grounded in the comportment of assertion, and his analysis of the “hermeneutic as” that grounds such comportment, affords a different perspective on the debate. Logic provides constitutive norms for the practice of reason-giving, a kind of rationality – being answerable to others – that is not an essential property of, but is nevertheless demanded by, Dasein’s being as “care.” The chapter concludes by showing how Heidegger’s phenomenological approach can affirm the main claims of descriptivism while insisting that “the reign of logic” in philosophy “disintegrates into the turbulence of a more original questioning.”

In this chapter, I first consider Alasdair MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian notion of “practices.” For MacIntyre, practices refer to special forms of human activity that harbor what he calls internal goods, goods to which practitioners progressively gain access as they acquire more experience. Part of what it means to enact a leisurely state of mind is to become attentive to the internal goods of our practical engagements. At the same time, the activities in which we can cultivate and enact leisure should not only be thought of as “practices,” in the MacIntyrean sense. Attending only to such practices would narrow the range of human engagement in which leisure can be experienced. More provocative is the philosopher Albert Borgmann’s  notion of a focal practice, which resonates with MacIntyre’s account, but includes a broader range of activities that count as worthwhile practices. While Borgmann’s account of focal practices covers what MacIntyre has in mind, it also includes simple activities such as cooking, walking, and reading. Borgmann shows that even, and especially in such engagements, we can experience and further cultivate leisure. Drawing from both MacIntyre’s and Borgmann’s insights, I sketch out three tangible ways to cultivate leisure.

This introduction lays out the book’s aims and its approach to studying reparations. The book uses the notion of ‘practices’ as an analytical lens to make visible forms of social actions that together and simultaneously enable and constrain reparations. The book examines these practices through four phases of the ‘social life’ of reparations: norm-making, engagement with conflict-affected populations, as well as adjudication and implementation of reparations. Accompanying the introduction is a brief background to the case studies that are at the core of this book, namely the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The book focuses on the first two cases at each court that have reached the reparations stage: at the ICC, the cases against Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga relating to the situation in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo; and at the ECCC, Cases 001 and 002 involving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those most responsible for crimes committed in Cambodia during the 1970s.