A pragmatic methodology for studying international practices
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | Vineet Thakur,Sasikumar S Sundaram |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088219879177 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088219879177
Journal of International Political Theory
2021, Vol. 17(3) 337 –355
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088219879177
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A pragmatic methodology
for studying international
practices
Sasikumar S Sundaram
University of São Paulo, Brazil
Vineet Thakur
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Abstract
Practice turn marks an important advancement in International Relations theorizing.
In challenging abstract meta-theoretical debates, practice theorizing in International
Relations aims to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics.
Scholars from different positions such as constructivism, critical theory, and post-
structuralism have critically interrogated the analytical framework of practices in
international politics. Building upon these works, we are concerned with a question of
how to examine the context of international practices that unfolds in multiple ways in
practitioners’ performances. Our central thesis is that a distinct pragmatic methodology
offers an opportunity to keep with the practice turn and avoid the problematic
foundational moves of mainstream practice theorizing. This involves foregrounding
three interrelated processes in examining practices: the role of exceptions in the normal
stream of performances, normative uptake of the analysts, and the semantic field that
actors navigate in political performances. We argue that this methodology is predicated
on its usefulness to interpret practices through reflective social-science inquiry.
Keywords
Methodology, normativity, practice turn, pragmatism, reflexivity
Introduction
In recent years, the practice turn in International Relations (IR) marks an important
wager to get close to the lifeworld(s) of the actual practitioners of politics. Iver Neumann
(2002) defines practices as “socially recognized forms of activity, done on the basis of
Corresponding author:
Sasikumar S Sundaram, Department of Political Science, University of São Paulo, 315, Av.Prof.Luciano
Gualberto, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo 05508-900, Brazil.
Email: sundaram7684@gmail.com
879177IPT0010.1177/1755088219879177Journal of International Political TheorySundaram and Thakur
research-article2019
Article
338 Journal of International Political Theory 17(3)
what members learn from others, and capable of being done well or badly, correctly or
incorrectly” (2002: 630; also see Ralph and Gifkins, 2017: 633). Practice theory consists
of various strands of theorizing drawing upon different vocabularies from pragmatism,
constructivism, assemblages, to post-structuralist positions for understanding the signifi-
cance of everyday practices of political actors in international politics.1 The different
orientations and the concomitant heterogeneous ways of studying practices have offered
important advancements for our understanding of the meaning of political action and the
dynamics of social change. They all foreground the point that practice is where politics
is actually effected and thus focusing on the everyday stuff that drives the world “allows
us to better understand dynamics of order and change” in international politics (Bueger
and Gadinger, 2015: 449).
The problem arises when we shift the focus from the question of why attention to
international practices is important to how, if anything, can one conduct empirical
research in keeping with the manifold performances of practitioners. Here mainstream
practice theorizing in IR seeks an unmediated access to practices of actors.2 This leads to
three important epistemological concerns with regard to how the mainstream practice
theorists: (a) reduce background knowledge of practitioners to habits, (b) treat meaning
as an objectively stable entity in relations between practitioners and observers, and (c)
despite claims to the contrary, privilege stable practices to empirically verify its effects
over the dynamics of change (Frost and Lechner, 2016; Grimmel and Hellmann, 2019;
Ralph and Gifkins, 2017; Schindler and Wille, 2015; Walter, 2018). Specifically, our
concern is that practice theorizing that seeks an “unmediated” access to the lifeworld(s)
of the practitioners is unreflective of the normativity of international practices. Instead of
offering yet another theory on how to reconstruct the unobservable meaning structures or
bring new coherence to different types of practice theorizing, we foreground reflexivity
as central to practice theorizing and thus suggest a pragmatic methodology for examin-
ing the context of practices.
We propose an analytical triangle of Exceptions–Analysts–Concept Functions as a
pragmatic way for a reflexive study of practices in international politics. First, exceptions,
in keeping with John Dewey (1981–1990), are understood as problematic situations where
a normal course of activity is interrupted, compelling actors to exercise moral judgment in
order to re-evaluate the situation in and through practices. Such a pragmatic conception of
the exceptional situation adds a moral component to the interruption of practices and not
merely treats them as “disruptions” or “breaches,” as Garfinkel (2002) or Latour (2005)
suggests. Manifested through explicit or implicit claims of practitioners, exceptions offer a
window to examine their political judgment in practices (not mere habits) and their naviga-
tion of power dynamics (not merely their tacit sense of the game). Second, the role of
analysts as observers of practices and exceptions is seldom discussed. An analyst confronts
an abundance of details in studying performances and is thus constantly making choices in
interpreting practices. In an exceptional situation, the analyst is compelled to reveal their
normative standpoint. By emphasizing the role of analysts in interpreting exceptional situ-
ations, we bring in reflexivity into social-scientific inquiry through their normative uptake
rather than aiming to offer an unmediated glaze into the logic of practice. Exceptions and
the analysts’ uptake on it reveal normative judgments of the evaluators rather than exposing
political hypocrisy or irrationality of the practitioners. Third, foregrounding exceptions and
the role of analysts into the logic of practices allow a mapping of the semantic field and
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