Introduction
International Relations (IR) scholars operate in an academic environment deeply affected by a culture of fields and subfields where drawing boundaries and setting hierarchies of values is often more important than acknowledging common histories, trajectories, and synergies (Bell, Reference Bell2009; Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019). As the Special Issue tries to show, this is especially problematic when it comes to the boundaries and hierarchies set up between IR and area studies (AS) (D'Amato et al., Reference D'Amato, Dian and Russo2022). In fact, competing disciplinary politics within IR and AS have ensured the continuous reproduction of Western and American dominance of IR, favoured IR scholars over AS specialists, and constrained the space of interaction between the two (Acharya, Reference Acharya2014; Bell, Reference Bell2009; Chamlian, Reference Chamlian2019; Fawcett et al., Reference Fawcett, Hall, Hurrell and de Estrada2020; Köllner et al., Reference Köllner, Sil, Ahram, Ahram, Köllner and Sil2018; Katzenstein, Reference Katzenstein2002; Teti, Reference Teti2007). This, in turn, has hindered our ability to conceptualize the relationship between the local and the global (Acharya, Reference Acharya2014; Wiener, Reference Wiener2018; Aris Reference Aris2021) and therefore to best understand the challenges of our contemporary interconnected world (Chan et al., Reference Chan, Mandaville and Bleiker2001; Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019).
In this article, I focus on the common history and developments of IR and European studies (ES)Footnote 1 to emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary conversations and question the utility of boundaries and hierarchies between IR and ES – and more in general between IR and AS. In particular, I draw attention on the latest cross-fertilization between IR and ES, which has been sparked by a group of scholars that have called for a practice turn in IR and established what it is known as International Practice Theory (IPT) (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011a, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011b; Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016; Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2018b).
Focusing on IPT is timely, due to its increasing popularity and influence over IR research agendas and methods (Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2018b: 3). Even if practices ‘have long been a prime object of analysis in IR’ (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011a: 1) and to some scholars ‘practices of one kind or another are what scholars of international relations always have studied’ (Ringmar, Reference Ringmar2014: 2), it took longer to the family of theoretical accounts normally known as practice theory to enter IR theoretical debates (Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2018b). These accounts differ greatly with regards to the way they understand and study ‘practice’ but have something fundamental in common: they are united by the proposition that practice is the basic ordering medium in social life and the site where meaning is established (Schatzki, Reference Schatzki1997: 284). From an ontological point of view, IPT sees ‘international practices’, which are understood as embodied, shared, and patterned actions in social context (Leander, Reference Leander, Klotz and Prakash2008; Cornut, Reference Cornut2017), as ‘the stuff that drives the world and makes it “hang together”’ (Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2015: 449). In terms of research strategy and methods, it implies a shift towards the study of the mundane everyday practices of diplomats, international governmental and non-governmental officials, legal experts, etc. and the use of ethnographic methods. These ontological and methodological moves have led IPT scholars to claim a disciplinary turn (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011a, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011b; Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2015, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2018b; Cornut, Reference Cornut2017).
While criticisms of IPT scholarship have been neither rare nor light (see, e.g. Epstein, Reference Epstein2013b; Frost and Lechner, Reference Frost and Lechner2016; Ringmar, Reference Ringmar2016; Ralph and Gifkins, Reference Ralph and Gifkins2017; Epstein and Wæver, Reference Epstein and Wæverforthcoming), in this article I assess the specific potential of IPT to become a bridge between IR and AS. I take IPT's rendering of EU politics as a point of departure and discuss the possibility for IPT to work as a ‘trading zone’ (Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2018b) where IR and ES/AS can converge to make sense of the interplay of the local and the global. In this context, I argue that while IPT scholars have fruitfully challenged traditional assumptions and distinctions of ‘levels of analysis’ (Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2018b: 2) that characterize both rationalist and constructivists approaches to IR and ES, more theoretical and empirical work is needed to make sense of the co-existence of local and global practices.
As I am myself conducting research that draws heavily on IPT scholarship and thinking tools, this criticism is advanced as an internal and hopefully constructive critique. In fact, it is what I learnt in the course of fieldwork I have conducted in Brussels and remotely since February 2020 to research EU's practices of ‘human protection’ (Bellamy, Reference Bellamy2016), which made me both convinced of IPT's potential to become a trading zone between IR and AS and painfully aware of the challenges ahead. Thus, the key arguments presented in this article want to be conversation openers to engage the IPT community in what I feel is a much-needed discussion.
In the following, I first examine the common history and development of IR and ES to demonstrate that the rise of social constructivism has created a strong common ground between the two. Second, I review some of the key contributions of IPT scholars to flag how they can be understood as being at the same time a product of and a challenge to such a common ground. In this context, I assess the strengths of these contributions and I explain how they build new bridges between IR and ES. Third, I reflect on two interrelated problems pertaining current formulations and applications of IPT to the case of the EU to demonstrate that some more clarity and reflectivity about theoretical and empirical choices is needed to make IPT up to the task of connecting the local and the global in novel and fruitful ways. Finally, I build on Fierke and Jabri's conceptualization of ‘global conversations’ (Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019) to call for a global practice theory (GPT) that could take us beyond those disciplinary pecking orders that separate IR from AS and hinder our ability to appreciate the interconnectedness of the local with the global.
A tale of one, two, or more disciplines?
How IR and ES became separate disciplines is an object of contention (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007), not only because of diverging readings of the relevant disciplinary histories but also because of limitations that are intrinsic to disciplinary history writing, which requires a difficult reconstruction of both ‘knowledge-practices’ and ‘knowledge-complexes’ and how they interact (Bell, Reference Bell2009). Moreover, as disciplinary divides are produced and productive of academic knowledge institutionalization and socialization processes, they and their historiographies are all but stable (De Franco et al., Reference De Franco, Engberg-Pedersen and Mennecke2019). Therefore, in this section I attempt a reflective reconstruction of IR and ES’ common history and developments to show that a common ground exists and is fecund of interdisciplinary conversations that can advance understanding of the local–global nexus, more than to establish how those disciplinary divides came to exist in the first place.
By necessity, this will be a partial endeavour because a full review of joint scholarship and approaches is beyond the scope of this article and because I will focus only on the relationship between IR and ES. If we broaden the scope of the analysis, a tale of many disciplines would actually emerge. In fact, while ES’ relation with IR (and comparative politics) is widely discussed, the role of cognate disciplines, such as anthropology, has remained hidden (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016). Thus, the goal here is not to argue that IR is ES’ ‘home turf’, but to show how IR and ES have developed together, through some intense interdisciplinary conversations that ultimately question the utility of disciplinary boundaries (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007; Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016).
This is important not because it is necessary to decide whether EU politics is a matter for ES, IR, political science, or a wider cluster of cognate disciplines (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007: 236). Rather, this discussion is key to raise fundamental questions about the nature of the objects of study (the EU/European integration and international politics) and how they should be studied. In fact, the starting point here is the simple observation that the split between IR and AS – ES included – has constrained our ability to grasp the interconnectedness of the local and the global and that interdisciplinary convergence can mitigate this problem (Katzenstein, Reference Katzenstein2002; Chamlian, Reference Chamlian2019).
Arguably, the first explicit efforts to theorize the process of European integration were made in the 1960s by IR scholars such as Ernst Haas, Leon Lindberg, and Stanley Hoffmann, who employed general theories of economic and political integration such as neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism to debate over conceptions of European integration as either a gradual, self-sustaining, and unavoidable process, or a nonlinear result of national strategic preferences (Pollack, Reference Pollack2001; Kreppel, Reference Kreppel2012). Mainstream disciplinary history considers this phase as being ES’ ‘launch era’ (Pollack, Reference Pollack2001; Keeler, Reference Keeler2005), but how it produced a disciplinary split is actually a contested issue. For example, it has been argued that the centrality of the application of neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism to the European case and the gap between these approaches and the rest of IR in the launch era should be questioned (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007). The case was not that neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism were the only approaches used at the time to understand the European phenomenon, nor that they were applied only to the European integration process because in fact they were not (Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016). Instead, their prevalence was guaranteed by ‘disciplining actions’ (Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016), claims, and processes that took place within both IR and the emerging field of ES and contributed to create the impression that the body of works on European integration had a very different character from the broader IR literature of the time. On the one hand, the narrative of the IR's great debates contributed to create the impression that state-centred approaches dominated IR and made it unsuitable to explain the hybrid legal and institutional system of the European Economic Community (EEC) (Bourne and Cini, Reference Bourne, Cini, Cini and Bourne2006; Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016; Tiilikainen, Reference Tiilikainen2019). On the other hand, the dominant portrait of the integration scholarship as revolving around neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism constituted ES as a new process-oriented field (Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016).
Later, as the EEC became the European Community (EC) and then the EU, the way scholars engaged with it changed too. In the mainstream account of ES's history a ‘doldrums era’ driven empirically by the stagnation of the integration process is said to be followed by a new ‘renaissance/boom era’ of integration studies due to the relaunching of the integration process between the 1980s and the early 2000s (Keeler, Reference Keeler2005). In the boom era, a more apparent split between IR and ES is said to have taken place (Keeler, Reference Keeler2005) through the creation of specific venues of disciplinary knowledge building, such as specialized journals (e.g. The Journal of European Public Policy), professional associations, and their derivative conferences (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007: 240). From within these venues a narrative emerged that scholars should look at the EU as a ‘normal’ political system and draw more decisively on comparative and American politics literatures, which pushed IR increasingly to the margins of EU studies (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007; Kreppel, Reference Kreppel2012; Tortola, Reference Tortola2014).
However, ES’ shift towards comparative politics should not be overestimated as a substantive literature criticizing the ‘normalization’ of the EU also exists within ES (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2007). Moreover, the booming integration process provided an obvious playground for IR approaches going beyond realism's power-based determinism and exploring the importance of rules, norms, and institutions (Pollack, Reference Pollack2001). This led to frequent collaborations between research enterprises as different as the rationalist liberal institutionalism of Keohane, Martin, or Caporaso (Caporaso, Reference Caporaso1992; Martin and Simmons, Reference Martin and Simmons1998; Keohane, Reference Keohane2002; Martin, Reference Martin2017), Moravcsik's own liberal intergovernmentalism (Moravcsik, Reference Moravcsik1997; Reference Moravcsik1999; Keohane et al., Reference Keohane, Stephen Macedo and Moravcsik2009), Europeanization theory (Borzel, Reference Borzel2002; Featherstone and Radaelli, Reference Featherstone and Radaelli2003), and constructivism (Risse, Reference Risse1996, Reference Risse2005, Reference Risse2012; Flockhart, Reference Flockhart2013). Thus, while some scholars emphasize this third phase of ES’ development as a definitive split between IR and ES, others note the emergence of a common core curiosity and the increasing convergence towards common epistemological concerns and methods to the point that distinctions separating rationalist and constructivist/reflective approaches to the study of the EU appear more sensible than traditional disciplinary divisions (Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016; Chamlian, Reference Chamlian2019).Footnote 2 In line with the latter narrative, a different history has been written that breaks with the ES/IR divide and focuses on the different phases of the development of integration theory (explaining integration, analysing governance, and constructing the EU) as an alternative to the mainstream three-phase narrative of the chronological evolution of ES (Diez and Wiener, Reference Diez, Wiener, Wiener, Borzel and Risse2018).
In this context, it has been emphasized that the very growth of social constructivism, together with an increasing prevalence of Europe-based scholars engaged in EU research and favouring a ‘pluralist approach’ (Rosamond, Reference Rosamond2014) to EU studies (Andrews, Reference Andrews2012; Kreppel, Reference Kreppel2012: 636), produced a strong common ground between IR and ES, which led to key theoretical and empirical breakthroughs in the last two decades of the 20th century (Tiilikainen, Reference Tiilikainen2019) and questions disciplinary divides.Footnote 3 First, the broad conceptualization of states' preference-formation should be considered as an important development emerging from common discussions in IR and ES about the dense and diverse institutional composition of the EU (Tiilikainen, Reference Tiilikainen2019: 480). This agenda has united IR and ES scholars over their quest for explanations of EU institutional expansion and brought attention in both disciplines to the role of institutions and norms in the formation of national identity and interests (see, e.g. Moravcsik, Reference Moravcsik1997; Risse, Reference Risse2005). Second, research conducted since the late 1990s and revolving around the EU's external action (see, e.g. Manners, Reference Manners2002, Reference Manners2006; Diez, Reference Diez2005; Pace Reference Pace2007; Krotz and Maher, Reference Krotz and Maher2011), while originally seeking to differentiate the EU's distinctive identity from that of a state, led to a profound reconsideration of how contingent and everchanging traditions, conventions, and cultural self-understandings, affect states’ international profile and policies and the very functioning of what is normally called the ‘Westphalian system’, therefore challenging realist assumptions (Flockhart, Reference Flockhart2013). Third, thanks to – and not despite – its rooting into comparative politics, ES functioned as a transmission belt for ideas, concepts, and approaches seeking to bridge the study of domestic and international politics, therefore furthering the constructivist agenda (Warleigh, Reference Warleigh2006).
In the next section, I will discuss how the ‘practice turn’ in IR is a product of this common ground and how it does not simply further existing conversations between IR and ES scholars but changes the terms of the discussion and opens specifically to a novel exploration of how the local and the global connect.
IPT's new rendering of EU politics
In a powerful article contributing to a Special Issue of the Journal of Common Market Studies devoted to ‘dissident’ approaches to EUS (Manners and Whitman, Reference Manners and Whitman2016), Adler-Nissen called for a ‘practice turn’ in ES (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016). Here she introduced IPT as a new constructivism of sorts challenging simultaneously traditional constructivist as well as rationalist approaches to IR and argued that such theoretical development should be of interest to ES as it provides a much-needed theory of the everyday of European integration and institutions (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016).
Since then, research employing practice theory in the study of the EU has produced a burgeoning literature that can no longer be labelled as ‘dissident voices’. On the contrary, research applying IPT to the European case accounts for some of the key works and authors constituting IPT scholarshipFootnote 4 and some of the best-known IPT scholars would most probably define themselves as being IR and ES scholars at the same time.Footnote 5 Retrospectively, Adler-Nissen's call for a practice turn in ES seems somehow misplaced because the amount and relevance of IPT works on the EU suggest that the practice turn in IR has rather strong roots into ES.
It is indeed worth reflecting on the fact that some of the key conceptual tools of IPT have been developed iteratively through situated research on EU politics and institutions. The burgeoning literature building on Wenger's understanding of communities of practice, for example, is somehow dependent on those key initial works by Adler that focused on the European example (see, e.g. Adler, Reference Adler2004), Reference Adler2008, Reference Adler and Katzenstein2009) and continues to be much anchored onto the observation of EU politics (see, e.g. Bicchi, Reference Bicchi2011; Hofius, Reference Hofius2016). The same can be said about other flourishing bodies of IPT research such as those exploring diplomatic practices (Mérand, Reference Mérand2006, Reference Mérand2010; Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2014a; Mérand and Rayroux, Reference Mérand and Rayroux2016; Adler-Nissen and Drieschova, Reference Adler-Nissen and Drieschova2019) and transnational governance (see, e.g. Bigo, Reference Bigo, Kelstrup and Williams2000; Kauppi, Reference Kauppi2003, Reference Kauppi and Kauppi2018; Kauppi and Madsen, Reference Kauppi and Madsen2014; Ekengren, Reference Ekengren2018). In other words, IPT is – at least to some extent – a product of the constructivist common ground between IR and ES as well as an example of how fecund a ground it can be.
Having reviewed this literature and building on Adler-Nissen's original article (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016), I believe it is possible to identify three areas where attention to practices has produced novel and valuable contributions to EU studies that demonstrate IPT's potential to become a trading zone where IR and ES/AS scholars can together recast the way we conceive the interaction between the local and the global. In the following, I briefly discuss these three contributions and offer some examples of the scholarship that shaped them. To orientate the reader through the muddy waters of the different IPT approaches, I specifically discuss scholars building on Bourdieusian sociology (Bourdieu, Reference Bourdieu1990), Wenger's conception of communities of practice (Wenger, Reference Wenger1998), and Foucault's governmentality (Foucault, Reference Foucault, Senellart, Ewald and Fontana2007).
Focusing on the everyday of European integration and EU institutions
While most EU scholarship develops from assumptions about given factors' explanatory power to understand EU politics (e.g. agent's motives and resources, cost/benefits ratio, ideas, and norms), practice theory questions the utility of such predetermined choices and suggests that it is the unfolding of everyday practices that needs to be studied as it produces the bigger phenomena and social realities that we label as ‘EU politics’ or ‘European integration’. Thus, instead of working with predetermined variables, practice theories employ thinking tools and sensitizing concepts that allow to approach practice abductively and reject ‘the idea that objects or structures have a fixed, stable identity or that closure is achieved at some point’ (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016: 94).
To capture the everyday of the EU, IPT scholars have looked at it through the lenses of different concepts. Studies focusing on the EU as a community of practice have, for example, shed new light on how the everyday of EU practitioners brings about a ‘EU way’ of doing things and transcends national boundaries and differences through a high degree of mutual engagement and the establishment of shared repertoires of practice. First opened by Adler (Reference Adler2004, Reference Adler and Katzenstein2009), this stream of IPT research has produced a number of flagship publications looking at the EU as such or at specific EU departments, units, or delegations as communities of practice and investigating to what extent they support or hinder coordination with other international organizations and/or EU member states (EUMS) (see, e.g. Bicchi, Reference Bicchi2011, Reference Bicchi2016; Græger, Reference Græger2016).
Foucault's concept of governmentality, instead, has been used to make sense of the EU normative agenda and demonstrate the normative relevance of those governing techniques, which make up for the EU's everyday operationalization of international norms such as human rights (Huelss, Reference Huelss2017). Similarly, the EU's democracy promotion tools have been studied to show that they shape the model of democracy that the EU promotes as well as the power relations between the EU and the local democratizers (Kurki, Reference Kurki2011).
As for the studies inspired by Bourdieusian sociology, they have ventured into an exploration of how the EU's internal and external actions contribute to transnational governance (Kauppi and Madsen, Reference Kauppi and Madsen2014; Ekengren, Reference Ekengren2018; Kauppi, Reference Kauppi and Kauppi2018) and produce a field of security practice where the internal and the external are hardly distinguishable (Bigo, Reference Bigo, Kelstrup and Williams2000). In this context, the everyday of EU politics appears shaped by the practical predisposition and background knowledge of the practitioners involved more than by any intrinsic characteristics of the problem they try to respond to or intergovernmental dynamics. It has been shown, for example, how EU officials and diplomats during the aftermath of the Arab Spring acted on the basis of dispositions and background knowledge that had developed over several decades of EU's Mediterranean policies (Bremberg, Reference Bremberg2016) and how, more in general, individual EU representatives respond to specific local context and situations by bringing in their embodied and unconscious ‘memory’ of earlier experiences (Ekengren, Reference Ekengren2018). It has been also discussed how resources like connections, reputation, poise, charm, and presence matter in formal and informal meetings as they structure complex distinctions between well-informed and relaxed insiders – normally representatives of ‘old’ EUMS – and ill-informed and ill-at-ease outsiders – normally the representatives of ‘new’ EUMS (Kuus, Reference Kuus2014, Reference Kuus2015). Finally, the diplomatic practices of negotiations within COREPER have been brought to light to show how long-standing routines and habits are affected by changes in the use of information and communication technology (Adler-Nissen and Drieschova, Reference Adler-Nissen and Drieschova2019).
In the quest for a better understanding of local/global dynamics, IPT's focus on situated practice is important because the local and the global come to be understood as neither different geographical sites of practice nor different historical moments in an expanding world (Wenger, Reference Wenger1998: 131). Instead, they can be seen as related levels of participation in a practice that always coexist and shape each other (Wenger, Reference Wenger1998), constituted through assemblages of practice (Brandenburg, Reference Brandenburg2017; Bueger, Reference Bueger2018), or produced at the intersection of different fields of practice (Bigo, Reference Bigo, Kelstrup and Williams2000; Leander, Reference Leander, Klotz and Prakash2008).
Recasting conceptions of power and agency through a relational ontology
Practice theoretical approaches build on a relational ontology that implies a novel understanding of both power and agency as emergent from practices and observable through agents' interactions. On this view, social interactions are the fundamental building blocks of social life (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2016: 95), and therefore neither power nor agency can be assessed as general capabilities or resources: they are deeply contextual. This is important to advance understanding of the interconnectedness of the local and the global because, once again, it requires observing how the global is structured through situated interactions in national as well as transnational settings and how both power and agency emerging from such encounters assume global relevance through the configuration of different transnational fields of practice (according to a Bourdieusian approach), the expansion of linkages across different communities of practice (according to a community of practice approach), or the deployment of governance techniques (according to a Foucauldian approach).
In the extant IPT literature, the EU's agency is depicted as emerging from a two-way relationship between transnational practices and translocal action and the specific practical sense of how to act that comes with it (Ekengren, Reference Ekengren2018: 20). In the specific field of counter-piracy practice, for example, research has shown how the EU managed to become a core actor off the coast of Somalia through daily practical work, which was recognized as ‘competent’ by other actors in the field (Bueger, Reference Bueger2016).
The ‘power’ of the EU is also described in terms that fundamentally challenge the way in which EU foreign policy is normally studied, that is, departing from classical explanations based on capability-expectation gaps, normative power Europe (NPE), etc. (see, e.g. Hill, Reference Hill1993; Manners, Reference Manners2002, Reference Manners2006; Diez, Reference Diez2005; Larsen, Reference Larsen2020). The very notion of NPE has been revisited on the basis of the community of practice concept and therefore recast as ‘a transnational polity with a security community of practice in its midst’ that breaks ‘ground with the concept of modernity from a power-politics perspective’ (Adler, Reference Adler and Katzenstein2009: 74). Thus, NPE operates via practices of ‘cooperative security’, on the basis of self-restraint, and through its ‘magnetic attraction’ (Adler, Reference Adler and Katzenstein2009: 72).
Similarly, the power of the European External Action Service (EEAS) has been evaluated not through the lenses of traditional power-based analysis of EU foreign policy, but in terms of the EEAS's challenge to the state's monopoly of symbolic power in the European diplomatic field (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2014b). By exploring how the EEAS and the national foreign services struggle over the appointments of Heads of Delegations and consular affairs, it has been argued that the EEAS ‘questions the state as “a central bank for symbolic credit”’, making national foreign services unease, despite its limited material power (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2014b: 659).
Focusing on how theories and practices interact
Even if by and large, IPT emphasizes the role of practical, embodied, and reflexive knowledge in everyday practices, it is also interested in metatheoretical reflections on how scientific knowledge is co-constitutive of policy practice (Bueger and Gadinger, Reference Bueger and Gadinger2007; Bueger, Reference Bueger2012). This opens to considerations about how the local and the global are sites of knowledge production and how theory and practice are entangled in the social construction of what is local and what is global in the first place. With respect to a better understanding of EU politics, practice theoretical approaches develop on the basis of awareness of the fact that the social sciences play an important role in shaping ideas and practices of European integration (Adler-Nissen and Kropp, Reference Adler-Nissen and Kropp2015) – and vice versa (Chamlian, Reference Chamlian2019). This has significant implications also on the specific ES’ agenda, which has so far neglected the interconnectedness of theories and practices of European integration and politics and has still to develop a full understanding of how EU's policies and instruments in support of scientific research are key components of the EU's global ‘actorness’.
The limits of IPT's view of Europe
As discussed above, the focus on practice as patterned actions in a context, the conception of power and agency as emergent from social interaction, and the careful consideration of different sites of knowledge production make IPT a likely candidate to become a trading zone for IR and ES/AS scholars interested in rethinking the local–global nexus. However, two interrelated challenges can be noted, which IPT needs to address to advance interdisciplinary understanding of how the local and the global connect.
The ‘generalization’ challenge
Most IPT research seems to follow the practical guideline that ‘defining what counts as an international practice and what does not is best left to practitioners themselves in their actual performance of world politics’ (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011a: 6). Such a proposition hides the interpretative work that is still necessary to identify practices out of practitioners' accounts of given actions (Epstein and Wæver, Reference Epstein and Wæverforthcoming). It also hides the interpretative work that it is needed to transform the idiosyncratic performances that constitute practices into entities with some degree of stability across time and space (Hui, Reference Hui, Hui, Schatzki and Shove2017). Most importantly for this discussion, it inhibits reflection on what it takes for practice to be ‘international’, and what does indeed mean that practice can be local, or global.
In the IPT literature focusing on the EU, lack of reflectivity on this issue translates into a tendency to jump – without explanation – from situated practices to EU-wide patterned ways of doings things. Even when the fragmentation of EU practice is emphasized, this always comes with some degree of generalization. The community of practice approach, for example, while holding the promise of a better understanding of the EU's institutional complexities, is divided between research offering unitary visions of the EU as one single community in the interaction with other international actors and the vision of a fragmented reality made of more complex constellations of communities of practice (c. e.g. Adler, Reference Adler and Katzenstein2009; Bicchi, Reference Bicchi2011, Reference Bicchi2016; Lequesne, Reference Lequesne2015; Græger, Reference Græger2016). The difference between the two visions lays only in how far research goes with the generalization of practice, but they both lack convincing explanations of how situated practices can become far-reaching.
Other IPT approaches to the EU display the same ambiguity about how contextual and situated practices are and to what extent we can imagine practices and communities to be ultimately generalizable to the whole of the EU. For example, authors employing the concept of assemblage have produced insightful case studies where the specific dynamics of specific assemblages of practices (and agents) in given regions/crises have been used to characterize a certain way of ‘doing Europe’ in broader policy fields (see, e.g. Bueger, Reference Bueger2016; Brandenburg, Reference Brandenburg2017).
Understanding how to move from situated to more widespread practices has been a key concern underpinning my own research. In fact, my analysis of EU diplomatic practices has underscored the existence of different EU diplomatic actors (or communities of practice) with different social and symbolical capitals, performing different understandings of ‘doing diplomacy’ and competing among each other over the definition of the ‘genuine diplomat’ (De Franco, Reference De Francoforthcoming). Making sense of these findings has not been easy as they contrast with unitary visions of an EU diplomatic corps in a competition with national diplomatic services (Adler-Nissen, Reference Adler-Nissen2014b), but also with work emphasizing a ‘limited fragmentation’ of practice and drawing boundaries between practices and communities according to geographical locations (Bicchi, Reference Bicchi2016; Hofius, Reference Hofius2016), or seniority in EU institutions (Kuus, Reference Kuus2014, Reference Kuus2015; Lequesne, Reference Lequesne2015).
In social research, this problem is normally explained in terms of micro and macro levels of analysis (Turner and Boyns, Reference Turner, Boyns and Turner2001) and this is also how a few IPT scholars have been reflecting on it (see, e.g. Bicchi and Bremberg, Reference Bicchi and Bremberg2016; Ekengren, Reference Ekengren2018). It has been argued that a macro approach to the EU as a single community and a micro approach emphasizing the EU as a ‘community of communities’ are compatible (Bicchi, Reference Bicchi2011: 1119), but it is unclear why this is the case. It is true that the EU can be conceived as ‘a “community without unity” in which senses of belonging emerge in the absence of a homogeneous “we”’ (Hofius, Reference Hofius2016: 941), but this hardly solves the problem of understanding how we move from the situatedness of practice to its generalization to a wide range of actors, sites, and temporalities.
To understand this problematique and why it is relevant to my argument, it is key to realize that from a practice perspective this issue is actually not about the micro–macro gap (Turner and Boyns, Reference Turner, Boyns and Turner2001), but about the local–global nexus. Following Latour, in particular, the global is precisely that social space that comes into existence because of the recursivity of practice across time and space and, vice versa, the local is that space of interaction that is made possible by those partitions, frames, umbrellas, fire-breaks that constitute a veritable but porous boundary between the local and the global (Latour, Reference Latour1996).
This argument is very much related to IPT claim to overcome traditional dichotomies, such as the one between agents and structure (Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011a). In fact, Latour's theorization of how the local and the global come about is very much based on the co-existence of agents and structure. In Latour's own words:
‘Neither individual action nor structure are thinkable without the work of rendering local – through channelling, partition, focusing, reduction – and without the work of rendering global – through instrumentation, compilation, punctualization, amplification’ (Latour, Reference Latour1996: 234).
Against social theorizing starting from either the agent or the structure, practice theory can look at the rendering of the local and the global and their interconnectedness to make sense of the all of society (Latour, Reference Latour1996: 234). However, this is not what IPT scholars have done so far. Take for example Adler-Nissen and Drieschova's analysis of ‘track-change diplomacy’ (Adler-Nissen and Drieschova, Reference Adler-Nissen and Drieschova2019): while the authors spend almost a half a page to produce a convincing argument about the generalizability of their results based on a number of characteristics of the EU as a multilateral venue, they leave somehow on the margins a necessary discussion of how situated and embedded in layered historical transformations the diplomatic practices they study are and if it makes sense to imagine their recursivity at a more global level.
Studying the EU as a space of global–local connectivity from a practice–theoretical perspective should then be an opportunity to observe how the local–global nexus is a multiscalar phenomenon that requires careful consideration of the localization and globalization of practice. This is no easy task though as it requires the development of specific theoretical lenses building on existing tools such as communities or fields of practice, but departing quite fundamentally from extant generalization reasoning that have so far led practice theory scholars to assume that practice is easily transposable and generalizable – for example through cultural schemas and anchoring processes (see, e.g. Swidler, Reference Swidler, Cetina, Schatzki and von Savigny2001; Adler and Pouliot, Reference Adler and Pouliot2011a).
The challenge of relationism
A second challenge IPT needs to address pertains the way in which IPT scholars implement the relational ontology that they claim to be key to their endeavour. In principle, such an ontology comprehends relations as primary to entities. However, having observed how IPT has so far implemented relationism, I believe a careful consideration of the exact role of interaction and its ability to compose all society is direly needed (Latour, Reference Latour1996: 229). IPT's understanding of relationism seems based on an individual ontology which conceives international actors like the EU as unable to achieve any goal without passing through interactions with partners, but also as fundamentally pre-existing and never really altered by interaction. Such understanding of relationism is not the only one possible though, as more transformative and radical understandings exist, as in Barad's for example (Barad, Reference Barad2007), which might be better suited to grasp local–global connectivity.
Thus, relationism entails a conceptualization challenge that so far has not been dealt with reflectively enough. I had a taste of this problem in the course of research about the much-contested development of the European Peace Facility (EPF) when I understood I could not conceive it as just the result of a negotiation among EUMS mediated by EU institutions. Instead, I needed to look at such development as contingent to the state of the so-called AU–EU strategic partnership and as transformative of the agency of both the AU and the EU within that partnership (De Franco and Gelot, Reference De Franco and Gelotforthcoming). Furthermore, since the EPF, which substitutes an earlier funding instrument called African Peace Facility, is considered by many as fundamentally changing the nature of EU's external action (Deneckere, Reference Deneckere2019; Godefroy and Chinitz, Reference Godefroy and Chinitz2019) and breaking expectations based on NPE conceptualizations, I had to understand to what extent AU–EU interaction is transformative of EU's global practices.
In effect, the challenge posed by relationism is also empirical. In the extant IPT literature about the EU the relational ontology seems to apply mainly to the dynamics between EU institutions, on the one hand, and EUMS on the other (see, e.g. Bicchi, Reference Bicchi2011; Adler-Nissen and Drieschova, Reference Adler-Nissen and Drieschova2019) while EU's interactions with other international actors and organizations remain relatively marginal. To develop a better understanding of relationism we need more work in line with research on transnational fields or assemblages, but more reflective on what relationism entails than these extant literatures have been so far.
The challenge of developing an understanding of relationism that accounts for transformative interaction is interrelated with the previous challenge because it is fundamentally about carefully considering the role of interaction in the structuring of practice and its recursivity from the local to the global and vice versa. Thus, when we study the relationship between the EU and other international actors it makes a substantive difference to conceive the EU as a unitary – even civilizational – community or as a constellation of communities. In Græeger's work (Reference Græger2016), for example, the claim that some loose EU–NATO communities of practice are emerging is based on a case studies of two CSDP missions that overlooks the significance of fractures within and across those organizations' practices.
Flagging the generalization and the relationism challenges means to stress how in its current applications IPT is fundamentally reproducing IR's traditional disconnect between the local and the global. This is problematic, not only because it is at odds with the explicit ambitions of at least some strands of practice theory (see, e.g. Wenger, Reference Wenger1998), but also because it somehow diminishes the innovative value of IPT's contribution to both IR and ES.
Moving towards a GPT
A shift from an international practice theory to a global practice theory (GPT) can be a way to create a new conversation between scholars of IR and ES (and AS more in general) and move both disciplines closer together in an attempt at furthering our understanding of the interplay of the local and the global. This is not just a matter of lexicon: GPT could contribute substantially to the way ‘the global’ is conceptualized in the first place and obtain important gains from shifting attention to those specific organizations and locales that entail a dialectic between the local and the global.
This idea builds on Fierke and Jabri's work in favour of research focused on what they call ‘global conversations’ (Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019). To them, studying global conversations entails moving decisively from the kind of individual ontology based on the notion of ‘inter’ relations that characterizes IPT and IR more in general, to a relational ontology making better sense of the global as the interconnected space of politics we live in. In fact, ‘a conversation is an exchange between multiple parties that changes all who are involved’ (Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019: 510): it is a form of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007). On this view, conversations among IR scientists as well as policy makers are understood as transformative of the boundaries of difference that constitute the world, including cultural differences between various locales and distinctions between national and international, internal and external, global and local.
This is very much in line with Latour's suggestion to look at the local and the global as always co-existing and constantly re-arranged through practice (Latour, Reference Latour1996). In fact, for IPT a shift towards a relationism of ‘intra-action’ would entail also approaching the generalization challenge in a novel way: by studying the sites of global conversations as fundamentally structuring the transition from local to global and vice versa. It would also mean treating boundary-making as a fundamental object of study to understand the complexity of global–local dynamics and their role in reproducing states, regions, the West/non-West distinction, or neo-colonial relations of power (Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019: 514), which is very much in line with Wenger's suggestion to look at how practice is ‘an emergent structure in which learning constantly creates localities that reconfigure the geography’ (Wenger, Reference Wenger1998: 131).
Furthermore, a focus on ‘global conversations’ makes it possible to account for the part language plays in giving practice some stability and coherence across time and space, therefore allowing for the transition from the local to the global (and vice versa) (Gahrn-Andersen, Reference Gahrn-Andersen2019). It entails scrutinizing those practices that are constitutive of both the local and the global through language use, without having to refer to wider concepts, such as culture, to assume practice's transposability and generalizability (as in e.g. Swidler, Reference Swidler, Cetina, Schatzki and von Savigny2001). It would also mean to move more decisively towards a relational ontology that is more in line with constructivism's founding project (Epstein, Reference Epstein2013a) and grasp the agency of those actors – including the EU – that have a relevant role in those processes where agency and identity are structured in and through language. From this vantage point, an analysis of the EU as a constellation of communities of practice might become sharper and more precise and the issue of the generalization of practice might be mitigated because ‘doing the EU’ (or any other regional organizations, or ‘local’ actor) would become a matter of situated entanglements where EU practitioners intra-act with other parties in a process of mutual (re)definition.
Finally, as I call for a GPT focused on global conversations, I also offer a way to overcome the problem I flagged at the beginning of this article: the artificial and counterproductive nature that characterizes academic disciplinary fractures and pecking orders between IR and AS. This is because GPT's attention to global conversations would entail a shift in epistemological terms. The concept of ‘global conversations’ problematizes the frequent emphasis in IR on cultures and regions as the predefined ‘otherness’ that the dominating ‘Western’ academia should have dialogues with – a logic that applies also to some calls to bridge IR and AS (Aris, Reference Aris2021). The concept also problematizes those disciplinary divides that enforce given narratives and methods and liberates ‘epistemology from prescribed edicts that claim the universality of validity and criteria of judgement, as well as from “standpoint” epistemology, where the subject invoked is somehow predetermined in gender, class, or cultural terms’ (Fierke and Jabri, Reference Fierke and Jabri2019: 517).
Conclusion
This article has built on a review of the different contributions of IPT scholarship to the understanding of EU politics to demonstrate that the emergence of IPT is not just telling of the existence of a constructivist common ground between IR and ES but also possibly transformative of that common ground. In particular, the article has emphasized IPT's potential to become a trading zone for IR and ES scholars to further our understanding of how the local and the global are interconnected. In this context, the article has assessed strengths and weaknesses of the extant applications of practice theories to EU politics to underline two challenges that IPT needs to address to fully realize this potential: (1) finding ways to theorize and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practices to EU-wide doings (generalization challenge); and (2) assessing the exact role of interaction in structuring and transforming both the global and the local (challenge of relationism).
It is worth stressing that underlining these two issues does not want to be a sterile provocation, but a way to prompt a reflection on what can be achieved if those challenges are addressed. Clearly IPT scholars have made some efforts to employ a fully fledged relational ontology (see especially Bremberg, Reference Bremberg2016; Bueger, Reference Bueger2016; Brandenburg, Reference Brandenburg2017), they have expressed concerns about the issues of generalization of practices (see, e.g. Bicchi and Bremberg, Reference Bicchi and Bremberg2016) and findings (see, e.g. Ekengren, Reference Ekengren2018), and have started looking in the direction of boundary-making as structuring practice (Hofius, Reference Hofius2016). Nevertheless, more work is needed to make sense of the local–global nexus and transform IPT into a trading zone for IR and AS scholars. This would be an important development also to overcome the problem I flagged at the beginning of this article: the distinctions and pecking orders separating IR from AS.
I close by inviting the IPT community to seriously consider the option of working towards a GPT that can further practice theory's appeal for both IR and AS scholars by paying attention to those global conversations where the rendering of the local and the global can be located and observed without having to assume any form of practice ‘generalizatiFunsi
Funding
The research has been funded by the Danish Research Council (Danmarks Frie Forskningfond), Grants nos. 8019-00105B and 6165-00015B.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the editors of the Special Issue, Silvia D'Amato, Matteo Dian, and Alessandra Russo as well as the two anonymous reviewers of IPSR/RISP for their terrific comments and suggestions. I am also indebted to Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen for having helped me find the right track when it was most needed.
