Everyday international relations: Editors’ introduction
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836719845834 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836719845834
Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(2) 123 –130
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836719845834
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Everyday international
relations: Editors’
introduction
Annika Björkdahl, Martin Hall
and Ted Svensson
Introduction
The connection between the everyday and the international has received growing attention
in the field of international relations (IR) in recent years. To rethink the international in terms
of the everyday, the mundane and the ordinary has brought attention to neglected spaces of
the international and turned the everyday into a site of IR analysis. In an important contribu-
tion to Cooperation and Conflict, Stuart Croft and Nick Vaughan-Williams stated that ‘the
recent turn in IR to the “everyday” as a category of analysis – with its alternative temporal
stress on rhythm and repetition and scalar emphasis on the micro and proximate – is not in
and of itself a corrective to’ the discipline’s ‘elitist bias’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017:
21). What they call for is ‘[a]n alternative genealogy of the “everyday”– one that pays spe-
cific attention to non-elite constructions, meanings and experiences of (in)security and their
attendant rhythms and scales’ (Croft and Vaughan-Williams, 2017: 22). Ty Solomon and
Brent J. Steele have similarly, yet more hopefully, suggested that ‘IR has begun to (re)dis-
cover the lives and people of global politics’ by turning to ‘micropolitics’, that is, to ‘those
features of social life that often slip through our normal schematic or binary frameworks’
(Solomon and Steele, 2017: 268ff); and Michele Acuto, who defines the everyday ‘as the
spatiality of situated, mundane, and habitual practices’ (Acuto, 2014: 346), designates it ‘a
constituent sphere of global governance’ and IR more broadly.
Although this special issue remains open to what ‘everyday IR’ exactly signifies,
what constructions, meanings and experiences matter and to what such a research agenda
ought to be committed, it concurs with the view that there is a need for further considera-
tion of non-elite constructions and, ostensibly, mundane practices. It is therefore a call
for engagements with the challenge to not remain content with IR as ‘a discipline whose
object of study is usually considered separate from how people live their daily lives’
(Montsion, 2012: 930) and to refrain from accepting ‘abstraction sealed off from
unqueried autobiographies, from bodies not interrogated’ (Sylvester, 2001: 553).
Corresponding author:
Annika Björkdahl, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Paradisgatan 5H, 221 00 Lund,
Sweden.
Email: annika.bjorkdahl@svet.lu.se
845834CAC0010.1177/0010836719845834Cooperation and ConflictBjörkdahl et al.
editorial2019
Editorial
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