Practice

This chapter considers how global politics can be ‘thought otherwise’ through a focus on practice. Rather than starting from categories such as agency, structure, or rational interests, we can think world politics as a patchwork of overlapping activities, such as military interventions, diplomatic negotiations, financial trading, or media reporting. By focusing on what political actors do, the aim is not to press international relations into predefined boxes of theories or -isms, but to understand how global politics is experienced and made. To introduce practice, this chapter outlines, firstly, how practice has been introduced and defined in IR. There are competing accounts of how practice ‘sits’ in the discipline – which range from seeing practice as its comprehensive ‘glue’ to more pluralistic arguments of complementarity – that are themselves bound up in the practice of constructing a theoretical ‘turn’. Secondly, it discusses key distinctions and similarities of practice-based approaches, including their methodological moves, to see if we can speak of ‘practice theory’ in IR. Third, the chapter illustrates the usefulness of the approach by discussing ongoing research on diplomatic practices in the European Union (EU). Overall, the chapter highlights how the concept of practice can help us to think world politics otherwise by enabling reflexive and rich accounts of how international politics is done, by whom, and under what circumstances.