Change in international practices

Abstract

This article builds on the practice turn’s welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scope conditions for reflection during ongoing practice, which increase the probability of a change in practices, I also elaborate mechanisms by which ongoing practices may yield an endogenous source of change. I illustrate some of these conditions for change from recent International Relations scholarship on practices in world politics.

Partisan views of Russia: Analyzing European party electoral manifestos since 1991

“…As scholars of Russian foreign policy have extensively noted, Russian relations with, and attitudes toward the West have changed significantly since 1990s (Haukkala, 2015;Hopf, 2016Hopf, , 2018McFaul, 2018). While there has been earnest, extensive cooperation between the East and the West in economic as well as security issues (for example the cooperation on removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine, see Bernauer, Brem, & Suter, 1999).…”

Practice Theory and International Relations: A reply to our critics

“…One of the points raised by Stappert is that we have not considered the full range of theorists that have contributed to the ‘practice turn’ in IR. She points to two empirical papers on the Cold War (Schindler and Wille 2015) and maritime security (Bueger 2013), and a third one (Hopf 2018) that was published after our book. In the material we have read so far, there is no evidence of a compelling, theoretical account which rebuts our central points in the book about the need for understanding (international) practices from the internal point of view, about the merits of descriptivism, about the centrality of constitutive rules and rule-following.…”

How Did We Do That? Histories and Political Economies of Rapid and Just Transitions

“…Looking for primary drivers of major disruptions inevitably reveals a partial and incomplete picture. Social scientists and historians tend to overlook daily 'micro-disruptions', focusing instead on the big bang of reflective agency (Hopf 2018). It is indeed the case that 'major transitions' are only easily identifiable because of a series of 'minor transitions' that have occurred in a concerted manner.…”