The road (not) taken? How the indexicality of practice could make or break the ‘New Constructivism’
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Timo Walter |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066118779664 |
| Subject Matter | Prizewinner: EJIR Best Article 2019 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118779664
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(2) 538 –561
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066118779664
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The road (not) taken? How
the indexicality of practice
could make or break the ‘New
Constructivism’
Timo Walter
University of Erfurt, Germany
Abstract
The ‘turn to practice’ has become a methodological keystone for the project of a ‘New’
Constructivism within International Relations. This project aims to use the observable level
of everyday, practical activities as a prism for making empirically tractable the processes of
world-making that constitute international order. In making the logic of practice the starting
point for substantive theorizing, this New Constructivism seeks to provide a methodological
platform for more empirically grounded, analytically open conceptions of international
order. More ‘experience-near’ modes of inquiry would thus allow us to come to terms with
the increasingly heterogeneous and unruly nature of the International, and help avert further
fissuring of an already divided discipline. While sharing the view that more experience-near
modes of inquiry promise much in this regard, this article argues that the New Constructivism
is in danger of going down a methodological blind alley that severely undermines its ability to
achieve its objectives. It shows that the one-sided, meta-theoretically motivated emphasis
on the (alleged) direct observability of practice orders in their natural contexts severely
stunts our ability to make their logic explicit in concrete empirical analyses. To highlight
these dangers, the article provides a close analysis of the methodological implications of
the indexicality of meaning (its dependence on ‘socially organized occasions of its use’). It
closely examines how recent applied practice-theoretical work in International Relations is
handicapped by a deeply engrained misconception of indexicality. This shows that we need
to accept reflexivity as a necessary ingredient for interpretation, and thus for making explicit
the practical logics that constitute the International.
Keywords
Constructivism, indexicality, methodology, practice turn, reflexivity, theory and
practice
Corresponding author:
Timo Walter, Universität Erfurt, Staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Nordhäuser Straße 63, 99089 Erfurt,
Germany.
Email: timo.walter@uni-erfurt.de
779664EJT0010.1177/1354066118779664European Journal of International RelationsWalter
research-article2018
Article
Walter 539
Introduction
Over the past few years, what began as a narrow, if ambitious, methodological call to
‘return practice to the linguistic turn’ (Neumann, 2002) has developed into a far-reaching
project for a ‘New Constructivism’ (McCourt, 2016). This ‘New’ edition would restore
empirical inquiry to the heart of the Constructivist project within International Relations
(IR) by firmly anchoring the analysis of the ‘International’ and its changing nature as a
social order in a close examination of the practical activities by which it is enacted and
reproduced. In providing a methodology for producing ‘experience-near’ (Jackson and
Nexon, 2013) knowledge, it would correct ‘scholastic’ (Pouliot, 2007: 365) biases towards
meta-theoretical debates and ‘armchair theorizing’ (Neumann, 2002), and provide a plat-
form for anchoring theorizations of the International in its constitutive everyday contexts.
Since its first articulations, the practice turn and calls for a New Constructivism have
retreated from the somewhat strained claims to dissolve the discipline’s meta-theoretical
and philosophical ‘wagers’ (Jackson and Nexon, 2013) at the figurative stroke of a pen,
which had attracted some of the most emphatic criticisms (e.g. Ringmar, 2014). What
has received less critical attention is the methodological strategy that underpins this
‘practice turn’. By this, I do not mean particular methodological choices or specific pro-
cedures adopted by particular practice analysts. Rather, I am interested in the reasons for
and the consequences of the pivotal claim that practice and the ‘implicit understandings’
or logic underlying and ordering it can be observed directly, preferably by some form of
immersion in or proximity to its ‘natural’ contexts.
It seems that the time is ripe for asking some hard questions about this methodological
strategy. From initially rather eclectic forays into different varieties of practice theory,
subsequent debates have produced a discernible core understanding of what the IR prac-
tice turn is all about — but that has not yet hardened into any definite form of normal
science. This seems an apposite moment to ask whether the strategy that is becoming
apparent can deliver on the promises and objectives that it formulates for itself.
The starting point and motivation for such a ‘New Constructivism’ arguably stems
from the difficulties that IR has experienced in coming to terms with the changing nature
of international order, and the accompanying theoretical and meta-theoretical throes that
this has provoked within the discipline. The changing empirical landscape of the
International has been mirrored in a confusing variety of deeply entrenched camps and
‘-isms’ (Lake, 2011), which have put increasing strains on meta-theoretical and meth-
odological but also substantive empirical and theoretical dialogue (Adler and Pouliot,
2011; see also Sil and Katzenstein, 2010). The evolving and increasingly heterogeneous
forms of orders that now make up the ‘International’ (Neumann and Sending, 2007)
continue to undermine attempts to formulate a consensual model of inquiry that could
reconcile scholarly methodological and theoretical concerns with connectivity to practi-
tioners’ perspectives (e.g. Friedrichs and Kratochwil, 2009). The proliferation of novel
actors and forms of authority, and the emergence of a patchwork of partial but intercon-
nected orders, have translated into strong (meta-)theoretical pressures to ‘foreground
ontology’ (Jackson, 2008) in order to identify appropriate building blocks for a theoriza-
tion of such multiple formats of International order. Empirically, it has entailed pressures
to examine more carefully the practical forms of intersubjective ‘world-making’ (Onuf,
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