Abstract
A substantial body of literature centers on the concept of ‘practice’. This article parses the practice turn in International Relations. It suggests that the meaning of ‘practice’ is a moving target. Sometimes it means process. Sometimes it refers to a particular type of knowledge and related action. And sometimes it is used as a quasi-synonym for institution. There are actually three concepts animating the practice turn: ‘practice’, ‘practical knowledge’, and ‘practices’. These concepts hail from different intellectual pastures and lead to different ways of explaining and understanding international relations. The article introduces the three concepts, explains how each concept entails a particular interpretation of the nature and possibility of change, as well as affords a particular theory of peace(making).
Keywords
International Relations is a social science which studies the relations between more or less bounded polities, 1 which are but a sub-set of all social relations and are embedded in what has been called the ‘human social world’. 2 As a result, social theories inevitably ground theories of international relations. The so-called practice turn stages its intervention at this foundational level. It re-articulates fundamental social-theoretical concepts in order to re-orient our understanding of the nature and dynamics of international relations. 3 The practice turn in our field finds its direct origin in an earlier movement in social theory, exemplified by such titles as Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice, Schatzki et al.’s The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, and Reckwitz’s ‘Towards a Theory of Social Practices’. 4 Part of the promise of the practice turn is to bring international theory and research in line with these broader theoretical developments. 5
Practice theory has been championed, applied, and criticised in International Relations. It has been championed on three main grounds: (1) philosophically, because of its promise to overcome entrenched but unsustainable dualisms, 6 (2) theoretically, primarily because of its potential to account for change in world politics, 7 and (3) methodologically, because it helps us observe world politics as it actually occurs, 8 paying attention to the so-called stuff of world politics, ugly though that signifier is.
Let us provisionally identify practice with ‘doings’, with ‘what actors do and say’, 9 with actual human behaviours. 10 The notion of ‘doings’ points towards the tangible and observable, 11 in contrast to, for instance, the more ephemeral, and forever imputed, ‘preferences’ or ‘norms’. The point of practice theory is that, somehow, we need to keep these ‘doings’ front and centre in our theoretical endeavours. The resulting analyses have been characterised as ‘down-to-earth and perhaps unflattering documentary portrayals’, which privilege the ‘commonplace’ and that which happens ‘on the surface’. 12 It is this starting point, which is taken to warrant the three promises mentioned above.
Outside International Relations, the most important charge against practice theory has come from without the approach. ‘Praxis theorists’, write sociologists Jeffrey Alexander and Jason Mast, ‘have blinded themselves to the deeply embedded textuality of every social action’. 13 Alexander and Mast identify ‘practice’ with the habitual and the everyday and insist that social life equally includes the reflective, the eventful, and the dramatic. Practice theory must fall short of grounding an encompassing social theory because it neglects half of social life’s equation.
Within International Relations, the most important charge against the practice turn concerns its inconsistencies. Friedrich Kratochwil 14 warns of the mutually incompatible meanings of the concept of practice. Nicholas Onuf identifies two models of practice in use – a ‘rules model’ and a ‘powers model’ – but finds that ‘their terms are so poorly specified that the two models collapse into a single incoherent concept of practice’. 15 We find a similar indictment in Erik Ringmar’s review of the practice turn, which concludes that ‘by meaning anything, practices come to mean nothing’. 16
This paper suggests that the practice turn lumps together three concepts. A first concept –practice – I define as all of us doing all of our doings, the myriad of human behaviours, which is forever going on all at once. A second –practical knowledge – I define as my and your, and his and her skill at doing what we do. A third – practices – I define as the things that we do, the organised activities that we encounter and participate in. Depending on what concept one has in mind – practice, practical knowledge, or practices – it is a further contention of the paper, different accounts follow with respect to the three promises of practice theory that were identified above. The three concepts deal with social theory’s traditional dualisms in different ways. They entail a different theory of change and entail different theories – and types of theorisation – of empirical phenomena.
Methodologically, this paper works on instrumentalist premises. The meaning of (theoretical) concepts is taken to lie in the (analytical) consequences that they bring about. 17 I have no desire to save the practice turn by grounding it in sounder, more valid anthropological assumptions. 18 Rather I will parse the practice turn in order to clarify what it brings, does not bring, cannot bring, and could bring to international theory. A first reason to parse the practice turn is precisely that it has been charged with inconsistencies, foremost with respect to the problem of change, with some arguing that change is endogenous to practice, and others insisting that it is exogenous to it. The confusion here is particularly troubling because the practice turn promises a better handle on the problem of change. A second reason is that critics have questioned the analytical value of the approach. In particular with respect to the tidings of war and peace (in Russia-NATO relations), 19 traditional scholars remark that they would predict much the same outcomes for much the same reasons that a practice-based analysis would. 20 Parsing the practice turn, and relating its component elements to the problems of change and peace, should clarify its potential significance. To parse is to decompose but suggests the intention of re-composition. However, to parse is also to pull apart. The whole is judged crooked although the parts may still prove valuable.
Practice
Ordinary language pits practice against theory. Theory is tidy, whereas practice is messy. ‘That might be true in theory’, people tell us, ‘but it does not hold in practice’. The theoretical city, for instance, is the city of modernist planners, but the practical city is the city of countless, crisscrossing footsteps of ordinary men and women. 21 Similarly, the theoretical society is a society centred on and sustained by a small set of core values and objects, whereas actually existing society consists of a chain of ‘everyday activities’ – ‘traffic jams, service lines, summoning phones, blackboard notes, jazz piano in a cocktail lounge, talking chemistry in a lecture format’ 22 – going on all at once. Practice coincides with all of us doing all of our doings. Theory can never do justice to practice.
The concept of practice ultimately expresses a metaphysical intuition. Heraclitus’ (apocryphal) 23 dictum that ‘all entities move and nothing remains still’ summarises the intuition. When critics of the practice turn fault practice theorists for taking insufficient account of extraordinary moments, and more generally of the Sacred, in the social lives of people and groups, 24 they underestimate the quasi-religious significance of this metaphysical commitment. The concept draws attention to the ordinary, to that which happens on the surface, but it does not identify the ordinary with the tepid, or the surface with the superficial. Harold Garfinkel names the continuous chain of everyday activities our ‘immortal ordinary society’ and a ‘wonderful beast’. 25 Michel de Certeau warned that the sum total of ordinary, urban footsteps constituted ‘a force that defies all calculation’, 26 reminding the reader that a ‘goddess can be recognised by her steps’. 27 The political counterpart of the (metaphysical) concept of practice is probably the notion of the multitude. The multitude is always in movement. The multitude invites excitement and fear. We (fear to) lose ourselves in the multitude. We hope (or fear) that the multitude will overpower structures. 28
The concept of practice invites a particular sociological argument. Social facts are rendered as fragile accomplishments. They are recognised not to be things, but dissolve into social process. Stability is traded for stabilisation: There is no moment in which processes of stabilization and shaping give way to different processes of maintenance and reproduction. Social life is almost never stable enough to simply be taken for granted.
29
Practice overwhelms particular attempts at social construction. When stabilisation does succeed, on this view, it must ‘entail an element of force and violence’. 30 ‘The determination of meaning’ must involve ‘an exercise of force, a violent arrestation’. 31 And even then, practice will eventually ‘overflow’ 32 any structural patterns that are being imposed on it. ‘[A]ttempts to tame practice, […], to control its unruliness and instability’ 33 must falter. In a similar vein, Alexander Wendt emphasises the originary role of practice – as an on-going process of bodily doings – in the constitution of social meaning, identities and structures. 34 ‘Structure’, he writes, ‘has no existence or causal powers apart from process’. With Wendt (1992: 413), bodies in movement found and sustain roles, 35 and process (‘or practice’) 36 (onto)logically precedes structure. Cultures of anarchy ultimately emerge from practice broadly conceived – from all of us doing all of our doings. That Wendt ended up identifying ‘practice’ with inter-state action was always justified on pragmatic grounds. 37
Practice and Change
The concept of practice connotes change. Consider these statements.
Discourse is being while practice is becoming from which discourses result and to which they eventually succumb.
38
Practice-qua-performance is a process; change, not stability, is the ordinary condition of social life. […] Stability […] is an illusion created by the recursive nature of practice. […] New ways of thinking or doing necessarily emerge from the contingent ‘play of practice’ (Doty, 1997) […].
39
Clearly, change in practice is endogenous – it is the work of practice itself. (Pouliot 2011: 4)
40
True enough, many observers discern routine behaviour in human practice. Theodore Hopf argues that change is exogenous to practice. 41 Bueger and Gadinger accept that practice is at once change and continuity: ‘Practices are repetitive patterns. But they are also permanently displacing and shifting’. 42 Erik Ringmar, however, insists that such stance is untenable: ‘Practices cannot simultaneously be the origin of one thing – stability – and its opposite – change’. 43
There are two ways out of Ringmar’s paradox. A first way out is to make a distinction between practice as an ontic phenomenon – as the continuous empirical manifestation of all of us doing all of our doings – and practice as an ontological concept – where all of us doing all of our doings becomes the fount of all social facts. Practice as an ontic phenomenon exists only in our observations, so that some will perceive it as stable and others as fluid. Practice as an ontological concept, however, would entail a clearer bias toward change. Even when we perceive continuity, the concept implies, that perception is largely an illusion. Or when we perceive continuity, we attribute it to sources other than practice. Vincent Pouliot, for instance, argues that the failure of the NATO-Russia relationship to develop into a security community was due to the persistence of material and discursive structures, which trumped the budding practice of diplomacy. 44
A second way out of the paradox is to insist on the conceptual distinctions that structure this article and to observe how authors shift between concepts. Hopf’s is an account of habit as a logic of action, not an ontological reflection on the nature of the human social world. Note also that Adler and Pouliot situate the illusion of continuity in the performance of practices, but that they locate the inevitability of change in Doty’s ‘play of practice’, not in the play of practices.
Keeping these distinctions firmly in mind, it becomes clearer that the concept of practice does, in fact, connote change. Said change is theorised either as happening incrementally, 45 or, more often, erratically. Change is without obvious direction; it does not unfold according to a plan. Change is non-telic.
Two further remarks are in order. First, practice remains a metaphysical notion (with political implications). From an explanatory perspective 46 the ubiquity of process can strike as something of a truism; 47 politically important, but analytically constraining. Unsurprisingly, therefore, many practice-theoretical analyses will explain particular outcomes (events, configurations) with reference to concepts other than practice. With Doty this is the notion of violence, which comes across, in her account, as an outside force imposing itself on practice.
Second, the concept of practice too readily equates process with change. But change and process are not the same thing. Or at least not all change is ‘non-trivial change’. 48 Theodore Schatzki makes a similar point.
[…] an event is not the same thing as change. To be sure, every activity is unique and thereby effects a change in, that is, an expansion of, the total stock of events. Not every activity constitutes change beyond this. […] The realization that many activity events perpetuate existing practices and bundles and effect only negligible changes, if any, opposes the prominent contemporary intuition that becoming – or process – qualifies human life and sociality (when becoming and process are understood as continuous change).
49
The concept of practice assumes change to be ubiquitous, but this remains a metaphysical wager. Empirically, change only exists in our assessment of change. To observe that there is forever an ‘expansion of the total stock of events’, because all of us doing all of our doings is on-going, does not suffice to prove that change is continuous. To demonstrate that, ontologically, social facts suffer from fundamental instability is not yet to observe change. The opposite of change is continuity, not stability.
Also theoretically the concept of practice accounts for change less obviously than is sometimes assumed. Even if we assume that practice is an important cause of change, this leaves unanswered what type of cause of change it is. Within a traditional typology of causes – efficient, material, formal and final – practice is most adequately considered a material cause. Practice is what the human social world is ‘fundamentally’ made up of. But a material cause is ultimately impotent in bringing about change. Matter is what we work on. Matter can resist or constrain our options for us, but it can never organise change itself. It cannot initiate nor deliberately bring about. With practice theorists, matter gains a dynamic, or mucous, quality. It escapes solidity and fixed form.
Maybe practice theorists are right. Maybe the self-dynamic force of practice results in radical historical indeterminacy, in directionless change. Maybe the expectation of mastery and direction is a modern illusion. This suggests that an alternative ‘theory’ of change hides in the concept of practice, whereby change would morph into chance. Chance evokes fear. Earlier people turned chance into a deity and called her Fortuna. One could try to please Fortuna through ritual and cults. Or one could counter Fortuna with virtus, which later became virtue and today is called agency. Ritual and cults are easily recognised as social practices. Effective, virtuous agency, for its part, is often considered the product of practical knowledge.
Practice and Peace
In early applications of practice theory to International Relations, Vincent Pouliot and Emanuel Adler have attempted to theorise security communities from a practice-theoretical perspective. 50 The concept of practice plays a central part in their argument. Pouliot explains the failure of the establishment of a NATO-Russian security community by arguing that the development of diplomatic ‘practice’ was hampered by material and discursive ‘structures’. 51 Adler explains the spread of security communities with reference to a process of cognitive evolution, which he lodges in ‘practice’. 52 He defines a security community as a community of practice, within which self-restraint has become practical reason and within which cooperative security practices have become background knowledge. The further expansion of such community happens, ultimately, in practice.
The macro mechanism that explains the selection and institutionalization of background knowledge, which determines the practices that become prevalent and diffused, is not environmental fitness, as in natural evolution, but meaning investment. By that I mean the endowment of meanings of identity and interests with authority and naturalness of the kind that may only come with practice. Communities of practice expand because recurrent practice contributes to the institutionalization of a practice.
53
Through practice – which Adler’s case study identifies with a continuous stream of everyday activities: meetings, workshops, exercises – ‘knowledge becomes entrenched’, ‘communities of practice cross a cognitive threshold and expand preferentially’. 54 Adler describes the process as dynamic and non-linear, but also as self-‘reinforcing’, 55 thus signalling that change is endogenous to practice. At the same time, Adler describes the causal power of practice in explaining security community expansion as ‘potential’ 56 only and he understands that, for a security community to become a reality, practice needs to be channelled, promoted (by vanguard agents), institutionalised, and received (by culturally attuned audiences). Practice needs to be supplanted with agentic and structural concepts to explain just how and where peace spreads. What this shows is the ultimate impotence of the very concept of ‘practice’ in an explanatory context. Because of its ontological nature, it is a necessary condition for everything (it’s always there), but a sufficient explanation for nothing. It draws attention to matter, but cannot, on its own, bring about form.
Practical Knowledge
Returning to ordinary language, it is common to associate ‘practice’ with the world of crafts and professions. 57 One becomes a true crafts person or a valued professional only through practice, through on the job training. Bookish knowledge needs to be supplanted with practical knowledge, with skill developed through experience.
Discussions of practical knowledge will often hark back to Aristotle, who distinguished five ‘things by which the soul attains the truth’, or five types of knowledge: ‘art [techne], science [episteme], prudence [phronesis], wisdom [sophia] and intellect [nous]’. 58 Of these, techne and phronesis are types of practical knowledge, meaning that they concern activity in situations or with respect to outcomes that ‘admit of being otherwise’, respectively making [poiesis] and political action [praxis]. Aristotle insists on the differences between poiesis and praxis; the end of the former being to bring about tangible objects, the end of the latter being to have political society fare well. Phronesis, then, is a person’s skill to deliberate about what, in concrete situations, will advance the common good. 59 Techne, for its part, is a person’s skill to ‘contrive and contemplate how something […] may come into being’. 60 Practical knowledge, whatever its object, always concerns a person’s skill – my and your skill, his and her skill – at doing what she’s doing, where it is understood that doing is always concrete doing, doing that pertains to situations that admit of being otherwise.
The concept of practical knowledge originally belonged to ‘the realm of ethical speculation’. 61 This becomes obvious from Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis and techne, which is embedded in a discussion of the contribution of the (intellectual) virtues to sustaining a city where people fare well. The moral promise of practical knowledge has not been lost on international theorists. Evaluating the ‘return of practical reason to international theory’, Hayward Alker opined that this return ‘contain[ed] the possibility of […] a new (yet very old) kind of rationality, with enormous, but uncertain healing potential’. 62 Similarly Chris Brown associates prudence with the rediscovery of a proper sense of tragedy and the cultivation of a particular ethical-political attitude. 63 Practical knowledge, David McCourt writes, should help us ‘address problems of international political praxis’. 64
The concept of practical knowledge has also migrated from the realm of ethics to that of social theory, where it features in a debate about the logics of action. Social theorists that value the concept seize on the fact that practical knowledge always pertains to concrete doing. ‘By practical reasons’, explains Jacob Hintikka, ‘I shall simply mean reason in so far as it is occupied with human action, human doing [praxis] and making [poiesis], and with the results of such action’. 65 Practical knowledge informs – shapes, sustains, directs – practical action. Some social theorists believe that most human action is practical action and that practical knowledge must be central to any theory of action. If moral and political theorists argue that practical knowledge should inform practical action (for the benefit of the common good, or, when it concerns techne, so that the work of craft becomes more beautiful and sturdy), social theorists observe that practical knowledge does indeed inform most human action.
Most of what people do, in world politics as in any other social field, does not derive from conscious deliberation or thoughtful reflection […]. Instead practices [sic] are the result of inarticulate, practical knowledge that makes what is to be done appear “self-evident” or commonsensical.
66
Practical knowledge is a skill acquired through experience. It ensures that we know how to go on, it enables us to handle situations. Practical knowledge is social to the extent that is acquired through an irreducibly social process (often of mimesis) and within an irreducibly social environment, 67 but individual to the extent that it accrues to people. Practical knowledge is unevenly distributed. The phronimos has gained a lot of practical knowledge. Politically, this allows him to dominate others (in Bourdieusian terms) or, less negatively, authorises him to exercise rule (in Aristotelian terms). The concept of practical knowledge betrays an elitist bias: only a few can ever become prudent, the many will forever be whimsical.
In International Relations the practice turn has largely centred on the concept of practical knowledge. Some contributions flag the ethical importance of the concept. They identify it with prudence. 68 Others flag the explanatory significance of the concept. They engage debates about the logic of action. Some among them stress the habitual and reproductive character of practical action. 69 Others emphasise the creative and improvisational character of practical action. 70 Practical knowledge, in both instances, is neither really phronesis nor really techne. In International Relations, and in social theory more generally, practical knowledge has come to mean the ability to navigate a social milieu successfully, to secure one’s position of power, 71 to manage one’s social image, 72 or even to work the bureaucracy skilfully. 73 In international negotiations, practical knowledge means that one exercises power by drawing up ‘crafty compromises’, by ‘skilfully framing’ events, by ‘making creative use of’ procedures, by soothing the annoyances of other delegates through ‘repair work’, by ‘exploiting’ situations, or, when so necessary, by ‘resigning to one’s losses’. 74 Practical knowledge hovers somewhere between tactical and strategic skill. 75 It is prudence for modern man. 76
Practical Knowledge and Change
Practical knowledge is knowledge of the materials that one is working with, or of the people that one is interacting with. It is knowledge of the world that one is operating in, its past and (as a consequence) its possible futures. It is knowledge of social conventions, of the opportunities they offer and the taboos they impose. Some aspects of practical knowledge are without definite object: experience instils a sense of timing and a generalised appreciation of the particularity of situations. Here practical knowledge (phronesis) morphs into intellect (nous): a situation is grasped. Decisive action becomes possible.
The concept of practical knowledge affords a theory of meaningful change – change from formless into formed matter. The concept wagers that a skilled person can bring about meaningful change, that change can be a product of directed human intervention. ‘As for fostering sociotechnical change’, Theodore Schatzki writes: This is an art born of experience and study. It requires among other things, a knack for timing, insight into likely responses to activities and measures, and a sense of the range of histories and possibilities.
77
Practical knowledge envisages the possibility of organising change, of taming practice without recourse to violence. Nonetheless, the expectation never becomes overtly liberal. A sense of tragedy limits the scope for organised change: ‘happenstance and contingency are accorded prominence in the evolution of social affairs’. 78 The idea is precisely that the phronimos – the person of great practical knowledge – encounters and works upon an unruly, resistant world. Enforcing change is not possible, 79 only fostering change is.
Some theorists of practical knowledge go further and theorise the impossibility of truly meaningful change, precisely because change would depend on the practical knowledge of a particular person.
The agent engaged in [practical action] knows the world but with a knowledge which […] is not set up in the relation of externality of a knowing consciousness. He knows it, in a sense, too well, without objectifying distance, takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up with it; he inhabits it like a garment [un habit] or a familiar habitat. He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of habitus, a virtue made of necessity which implies a form of love of necessity, amor fati.
80
Both accounts – Schatzki’s and Bourdieu’s – theorise change in terms of agentic interventions. This makes sense in light of practical knowledge being an asset or good accruing to people. Both accounts also explicitly signal the limits of agentic interventions as sources of change. Schatzki situates those limits partly in the surrounding environment, marked by happenstance and contingency, and partly in the very notion of practical knowledge, which always risks being insufficiently developed. Bourdieu situates the limits of agentic interventions more firmly within practical knowledge: the more developed the habitus is, he seems to imply, the less chance that meaningful change can be brought about. 81 An important reason for that shift from tragedy to fatalism lies in their diverging accounts of practical knowledge. Crucially, Bourdieu is keen to identify practical knowledge with inarticulate knowledge, whereas Schatzki allows for representation – ‘a skill born of experience and study’ – in practical knowledge too, and insists that practical knowledge should not collapse into common or background knowledge. 82
A tension between possibility and reluctance supplements that between tragedy and fatalism. Sometimes practical knowledge brings about form where first there was formless matter. At other times practical knowledge helps retain a certain form in spite of material evolutions. The phronimos does not only recognise that change is difficult to impose on an unruly world. He also understands that the world itself can change, from its own accord. In these situations he will counsel adaptation in order to forestall more radical, upsetting change. Consider, for instance, Hans Morgenthau’s advocacy of a world state in reaction to the nuclear revolution. 83 Or consider the shrewd defence of status privilege in reaction to processes of societal democratisation. 84 The latter example flags the elitist bias inherent in the concept of practical knowledge. Agents imbued with practical knowledge can foster change, but they are few and will only foster change that coincides with their (conception of the general) interest. Practical knowledge emerges as a direct answer to practice: it pits agency against chance and the phronimos against the mob.
Practical Knowledge and Peace
Laura Ring’s account of ‘everyday peace in a Karachi apartment building’, 85 describes how women congregate in the women’s quarters – the zenana – of their apartments and explains how their interaction there helps mediate the ethnic tensions that mark the city. Ring situates ‘peace’ in an uninviting environment. ‘The dangerous, slippery, disordered circumstance of proximate living must be transformed, through practice, into ham sayagi [i.e. sharing the shade, neighborhood]’. 86 Ring identifies ‘practice’ with practical action and explains how it builds on practical knowledge, not in the least of how to ‘handle’ – not suppress – emotions. Ring (2006: 111) stresses that women are the agents of that knowledge; that ‘peace’ is the ‘product of relentless labor […] carried out by women’.
[…] while men’s anger is dangerous and uncontrollable, something to be avoided and feared, women’s anger is necessary and tactical. Women’s anger and its expression through violence, are represented as intelligent, reasoning, directed, controllable and restrained. Women’s anger is moral and productive; it is in fact a tactic of containment.
87
Two features characterise practical knowledge’s theory of peace. First, it is agentic. Peace does not emerge from an impersonal process, but is tied to real, individual people, acting self-consciously and more or less competently. There is a certain knack to veer into a type of heroism. Because it is individual people that hold practical knowledge, an explanation of peace that centres on practical knowledge will often end up celebrating particular people, in group or individually. With Ring it is Karachi women. With Kissinger it is the likes of Metternich and Richelieu. 88 In both instances, their students value their practical knowledge and write about them with a hagiographic streak. Second, the concept of practical knowledge affords an impure conception of peace. Ring, for instance, accepts spitting and beating as falling within the remit of peace, and, like classical realists (who observe the unresolvable dilemma of reconciling order and justice), identifies peace as ‘an unstable state between festival and war’. 89 Both the agent-centred explanation and the impure conception of peace result intrinsically from the concept of practical knowledge: the first because practical knowledge accrues to individual people and to some more than others, the second because practical knowledge entails an appreciation of the non-universality of situations.
Practices
Let us once more return to ordinary language, which includes a meaning of practice that identifies it with custom. ‘Pope Urban II’, an historian mentions, defined ‘torture as a practice of barbarians’. 90 We encounter strange practices – things that people(s) do – when we travel. Ethnography finds its colonial origin in recording these practices. ‘As European powers expanded and colonised large areas of Africa and Asia, they encountered new cultural practices and beliefs’, which (proto-)ethnographers would describe and categorise as ‘primitive practices’. 91 Our own practices we find modern. We name them institutions instead of customs, but they are no less the things that we do.
Practice appears here as a countable noun. We observe a practice, this practice or that practice. Our first concept – practice, or all of us doing all of our doings (uncountable) – represented a metaphysical intuition with sociological implications. Our second concept – practical knowledge, or my and your, and his and her skill at doing what we do – represented an ethical wager, which had morphed into an action-theoretical argument. Our third concept, for its part – practices, or the things that we do – takes up a more modest position. The concept operates at the ontic level of reality. To observe practices is to carve up social reality into more-or-less coherent slices of activity. ‘Related rules, skills and goods’, that is, ‘constitute a field of objects, which an agent-observer could describe as a practice’. 92 (Onuf, 2010: 120; emphasis added). Praying and pilgrimage are practices in this sense, and so are tax-collection and warfare. Practices assume a degree of coherency or organisation. They admit of a form and converge on an end. Practices matter, not in the least because they mediate our experience for us.
A sociology centred on practices is, firstly, a descriptive endeavour. One describes a set of doings and sayings, but also the ends, the rules, the affective stances, the concepts, the practical and general understandings that link that group of doings and sayings together into an arrangement, 93 that define the set, that constitute the doings and sayings as a practice.
In a second moment, a sociology centred on practices will want to account for said practice by interpreting its content, its attributes, and its characteristics. It recognises that practices have origins, typically hybridise, and bring about (redistributive) effects, but will insist that ‘cultural things’ have ‘properties’ too, 94 and that these properties matter to people, that these are properties we should account for. Marshall Sahlins recognised the historicity of cultural practices, but wished to emphasise their thing-like quality. He recognised that practices helped people meet their individual needs, but stressed their social form. ‘Historical customs’ were not to be confused with ‘dispositions’; neither ‘forms with desires, structures with subjectivities, in the vain hope of reducing on to the other’. 95
Sahlins saw ethnography – understood here as the non-diachronic description of a society’s practices – as a necessary complement to genealogical reconstructions of these same practices, because he understood that customs are ‘a-temporal, being for the people conditions of their form of life as constituted, considered coeval with it’. 96 Practices are, at least from the agents’ point of view, the things that they do, relative certainties in a world which we fear to be in constant flux.
Practices are things, or thing-like, in three analytically meaningful senses. First, like objects they are situated in space. They are tangible or can be rendered tangible through our descriptions of them. They are ‘moderate-sized specimen of dry goods’. 97 Second, like tools they have a form and a function. Practices are practical. People make use of them, or, put less subjectively, participate in their use. Third, like arte-facts, practices are animated. People experience them as living things; they endow them with (a) spirit – hau or mana, 98 one could also call it authority 99 – when making or repairing them (and might abandon them when they come to be experienced as soulless). Practices, like artefacts, have an aesthetic aspect to them. They are experienced as meaningful (or meaningless) because of their properties.
Practices abound in world politics. Interpretations of practices – interpretations of the thingness of practices 100 – are much scarcer in International Relations scholarship. Practices are studied, certainly, and are seen to shape the international order. 101 But the practice turn’s primary interest is typically with what this or that international practice brings about, what outcome it effects, what windows of opportunities it creates, less so with interpreting its meaning. The approach is typically explanatory and political, not hermeneutic and cultural. Concluding his practices-centred ethnography of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a study that hovers between political science and anthropology, which begins with noting the cross-cultural importance of familial metaphors in diplomacy but ends with an explanation of how sub-state diplomacy developed in the Norwegian High North, Iver Neumann reflects on this difference. ‘It must be possible’, he writes, ‘to speak about political processes and negotiations of identities more anthropologically, without worrying about what is actually being decided. But I have to face up to it: I cannot let go of my infatuation with outcome’. 102 Neumann’s self-diagnosis has wider validity.
To the extent that practices exist in the world – as moderate-sized specimens of dry goods, at the ontic level of reality, where the common sense realist dwells – and happens in that world, they must have some causal efficacy. In combination a bundle of practices might even have decisive causal efficacy in bringing about large-scale historical developments. 103 But to reduce practices to their effects, to primarily treat them as causal factors, is to deny their particularity as practices. It is to deny the thingness that defines them.
Practices and Change
Practices change. Take embassies, which evolved from ambulant to resident institutions. 104 Or take humanitarianism which from its earlier, more inspired days transformed into a thoroughly professionalised endeavour. 105
Sometimes we judge practices’ change to be non-trivial. The concept of practices entails a criterion to judge the quality of change. Because practices matter by mediating people’s experience of their action and environment, a purported shift in experience indicates a meaningful change in practice. Drone warfare, for instance, can be said to differ substantially from trench warfare because soldiers in the trenches experienced war so differently from soldiers in drone control facilities do today.
There is a methodological complication to this argument. The complication springs from the fact that practices – the things that we do – while in an important sense material, ever only exist, as practices, in our reconstructions and reckoning of them. ‘Related rules, skills and goods constitute a field of objects’, I have already quoted Nicholas Onuf as saying, ‘which an agent-observer could describe as a practice’. 106 Practices are directly observable in their behaviorist dimension, but never directly observable as practices, as meaningful sets of doings and sayings.
‘Change’ fares even worse. It is possible to experience change but experience is forever contestable. Meaningful change, moreover, ever only exists in the stories that we tell about change. Change can be (thought of or talked about as) progressive, regressive, cyclical, revolutionary, or haphazard. Consider Rogers Brubaker’s review of Marcel Mauss’ ‘objectivist’ analysis of the nation (which treats the nation as ‘a thing being done’ 107 ), wherein Mauss compared the nation as a way of organising polities to earlier, tribal ways of political organisation. 108 Brubaker emphasises that in spite of a knack for evolutionism in early French sociology, Mauss insisted on the similarities between (primitive) tribal and (modern) national ways of doing politics. Brubaker finds Mauss’ observations to be ‘sardonic’ and detects ‘irony’ in the comparison. Even if ontologically Mauss understood change to be ceaseless, 109 he likewise understood that the observation of change in practices always happens as a plotted narrative of their historical development.
Practices change but our observation of their change is never direct. It is always mediated by a particular narrative structure or philosophy of history. How practices change, the direction or meaning of their change and the impulses driving their change, remains a matter of appreciation, of irreducible theorisation.
The question nevertheless arises if the very concept of practices implies a particular bias in favour of this or that view of historical development, of its likelihood, motor or direction. Practices being things, there is at least a metaphorical suggestion that practices will change with difficulty. Things (as objects) have solidified. Things (as artefacts), moreover, are infused with meaning and authority. Theorists of social practices point up that practices will often be lodged in traditions 110 and that practices come with their own ‘practice memory’, 111 which informs people’s experience and performance of practices, facilitates a sense of attachment, and constrains the future development of the practices in question. If practices do change, on this view, it will be because of broader cultural, societal or technological developments, which exert their influence on them. 112 These developments we observe, and we equally take note of their influence on this or that social practice. Developments are often bemoaned. We are taught to cherish memories. We at least used to be told to respect traditions. The concept of practices betrays a conservative bias. It finds that ‘human activity is laden with the past’. 113 It betrays a romantic streak when, as happens regularly, it finds value in this. 114
A sociology of social practices does not have to succumb to a conservative politics. It is easy enough to imagine an evolutionist sociology of social practices, as exemplified by some of Emile Durkheim’s work. The cultural politics of a sociology of social practices are ultimately underdetermined by its central concept. At the same time, though, there would appear to be political significance to the concept’s incapacity to theorise the causes of change. Within a sociology of social practices, change befalls us. We can do little more than observe and interpret it (and attribute it to broader changes in the environment). 115
Practices and Peace
What kind of account of peace does our third concept, practices, afford? One option would be to explain peace – the (durable) absence of war – as a by-product of an interrelated set of practices. Dieter Senghaas explains peace as the outcome of a ‘civilisatory hexagon’, including such social practices like power monopoly, political participation and the rule of law. 116 Truer to the concept of practices would be an account of peace, not as an outcome of this or that practice, but as a practice, a thing being done, in its own right.
The Greek comedian Aristophanes developed such an account in The Acharnians. Dicaeopolis, a farmer and citizen of Acharnia strikes an individual peace agreement with the Spartans, in spite of his city being allied with Athens. Having reached the agreement, he orders his wife and children to prepare a rite. Baskets of fruit are offered to the Gods and an erect phallus is carried around. Throughout the rite, the family sings songs that are shot through with obscenities. The rite – the practice – prefigures the coming condition of peace. When a woman from a nearby town comes to offer her two daughters so that they can share in Dicaeopolis’ peace, Aristophanes sets up a scene where the daughters get dressed up as sows. The word the poet uses for ‘sows’ equally meant reproductive organs. Aristophanes’ peace-as-practice was a decidedly carnal activity.
Aristophanes theorises peace to the extent that he offers ‘a view of’, or ‘a looking at’ the phenomenon. This is what a sociology of social practices does too, although it would have to theorise peace on the basis of a more systematic, comparative observation of the phenomenon. It would have to account for differences – e.g. the shift from carnal to pious and ultimately to business-like conceptions of peace – as well as for similarities – e.g. peace often being situated in bounded ‘islets of peace’, 117 where punitive violence can figure prominently. Some have concluded, on the basis of this kind of research, that peace is a kind of ‘sublimation: violent impulses and anxieties are cathartically released through ritual inversions and anti-structural ceremonies’. 118 Whether modern ways of doing peace have escaped this incantatory aspect must be the subject of study and, ultimately, of emplotment.
Conclusion
The main contention of this paper has been that the practice turn in International Relations works with three different conceptualisations of its central concept, ‘practice’. The following synoptic table summarises the main differences.
A Synoptic Overview.
Definition
I have defined practice as ‘all of us doing all of our doings’ to signal the overwhelming nature of practice, which is everywhere and continuously on-going. Practical knowledge I have defined as ‘my and your, and his and her skill at doing what we do’ to accentuate that practical knowledge, unlike background and common knowledge, accrues to individual people. Practices I have defined as ‘the things that we do’ to emphasise that, methodological complications notwithstanding, practices exist in the world for us and that we experience them to matter.
Intellectual Provenance
Practice expresses the metaphysical intuition that all is process. Practical knowledge embodies the politico-ethical intuition that a society will fare well when its citizens develop their (intellectual) virtues. The sociological use of these two concepts is derivative. The concept of practices, for its part, was always a means to organise proto-sociological reflection.
Theoretical Mantra
Social life allegedly unfolds ‘in and through practice’. 119 It has thus far been left unclear what the precise meaning of that mantra is. My argument suggests that we need to disaggregate the motto. The concept of practice entails that social life unfolds ‘through practice’, through a myriad of everyday doings. The concept of practical knowledge points up the chasm between theoretical fancies and how (and why) things pan out ‘in practice’. The concept of practices invites us to consider a range of social phenomena ‘as practices’, 120 as though they were things that people do.
Causation
Practice, being the ‘stuff’ of social life, is the material cause of any event or outcome that we observe, but always fails to explain particular outcomes. Practical knowledge, being constitutive of agents’ skill, can be thought of as the efficient cause of social change, but its contribution to an outcome must in many ways remain an assertion. Practices, because they constitute an arrangement and embody a function, offer the formal and final causes of what people do. What practices themselves are being caused by is less clear. Typically, the ‘environment’ is taken recourse to.
Change
If practice celebrates the ubiquity and on-going-ness of change, or at least of ‘process’, practical knowledge and practice are less appreciative. The first of these concepts introduces the possibility of fostering change but remains reluctant about it. The second insists that meaningful change ever only emerges in stories about said change. As to the driving forces behind change, the concept remains silent. It would seem that change simply befalls us.
Politics
Practice, because it connotes movement, resonates with a revolutionary conception of politics, which puts its faith in the power of the mob. Practical knowledge, because it accrues to individual people, and to some more than to others, often leads to a preference for elite rule – as a direct answer to the whimsies of the mob. Practices, being vested – as customs and institutions – with inter-subjective authority, promise to contain both mob and elites.
Peace
Practice explains peace – the durable absence of war – with reference to a process of cognitive evolution that happens and ‘potentially’ self-perpetuates ‘through practice’. Practical knowledge explains peace as the work and merit of a limited number of flesh-and-blood people. It recognises that peace will often be compromised. Practices present peace as a bounded practice, where violence happens as an intrinsic aspect of peace-making.
Where does this leave the practice turn? I do not think that there is one coherent practice turn, and given the argument in the paper, I do not think that there can ever be one. The common denominator that remains – an appreciation of the importance of deeds or ‘doings’, of the fact that the social world is populated by tangible people who are busy doing stuff – is too thin (and theoretically underdetermined) to sustain a turn of any kind. We should generally become more cautious in our use of the notion of a turn. Theoretical turns are proliferating, but they are no longer the names bestowed on historical intellectual developments. A turn is mostly a rallying cry now. With so many turns being declared, it is all getting a bit silly: one more reason to have parsed – pulled apart – the practice turn. Its parts turned out to be more meaningful than the whole. 121
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improvement. For their feedback on earlier versions of the paper, I am grateful to Tanja Aalberts, Morten S. Andersen, Tomas Baum, Christian Bueger, Benjamin de Carvalho, Frank Gadinger, Iver Neumann, Nicholas Onuf, Erik Ringmar, Maarten Van Alstein, and Aydin Yildirim.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.