Understanding international practices from the internal point of view
| Author | Mervyn Frost,Silviya Lechner |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088215596765 |
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2016, Vol. 12(3) 299 –319
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088215596765
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Understanding international
practices from the internal
point of view
Mervyn Frost and Silviya Lechner
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
The article is written in response to a recent flurry of studies on international practices.
In investigating this theme, International Relations scholars have drawn on diverse
traditions in sociology, philosophy and organisational theory such as Bourdieu’s theory
of practice, Dewey’s and James’ pragmatism, communities of practice approach and
actor-network theory. One preliminary question presupposed by these investigations
however is, what standpoint (if any) enables us to make sense of international practices?
Our central thesis is that the proper understanding of practices – including international
ones – requires the internal point of view (practice internalism). To make our case, we
develop an analytic distinction between two basic standpoints: practice externalism,
represented by Adler and Pouliot’s approach to international practices, and practice
internalism, represented by Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch. Following Winch,
we argue that the practice of social science is externalist, and point to the limitations of
an analysis of international practices predicated on externalist, social scientific premises.
Keywords
international political theory, interpretation, language-games, Peter Winch, practices,
Wittgenstein
Introduction
This article aims to provide a conceptual analysis of practices from what we term the
internal point of view. Even though in what follows international practices within the
field of International Relations (IR) will receive special attention, our principal aim is to
elucidate the more basic, philosophical problem of practices. David Stern articulates this
problem aptly:
Corresponding author:
Mervyn Frost, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: mervyn.frost@kcl.ac.uk
596765IPT0010.1177/1755088215596765Journal of International Political TheoryFrost and Lechner
research-article2015
Article
300 Journal of International Political Theory 12(3)
What is a practice? No short answer will do here. At the very least, a practice is something
people do, not just once, but on a regular basis. But it is more than just a disposition to behave
in a certain way: the identity of a practice depends not only on what people do, but also on the
significance of those actions and the surroundings in which they occur. This is only to begin to
answer the question, how we are to understand ‘what people do’ when they are engaged in a
practice, or just what a practice amounts to. (Stern, 2003: 186)
What complicates matters is that different IR scholars have drawn on different disci-
plines and vocabularies in developing their positions within the currently burgeoning
debate on international practice theory also known as the ‘practice turn’ in IR (Adler and
Pouliot, 2011a, 2011b; Brown, 2012; Bueger, 2012; Bueger and Gadinger, 2014; Jackson,
2008; Kessler and Guillaume, 2012; Kratochwil, 2006, 2011; Neumann, 2002; Pouliot,
2008, 2010; Ringmar, 2014).1 For example, Pouliot (2010) has based his international
practices approach on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977 [1972], 1990 [1980]) theory of practice,
Kratochwil (2011) has connected his view of international practices to the tradition of
American pragmatism (Dewey, 1981; James, 1995 [1907]; Peirce, 1932–1935) and
Bueger and Gadinger (2014) have identified the importation into IR of five strands of
practice theory originating in sociology – Bourdieu’s praxeology, actor-network theory,
community of practice, narrativism and Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism. Such disparate
articulations of practices leave us wondering what, if anything, makes a practice-based
approach coherent.
To restore coherence, we propose a return to the internal point of view. Our central
thesis is that the proper understanding of practices requires the internal point of view
(internalism). To understand something is to recognise or make sense of it as a this or a
that. Internalism, as presented here, is a fundamental standpoint for making sense of any
social practices whatsoever, be they local or global, domestic or international, coopera-
tive or conflictual. Practices, as a first approximation, are distinctive action domains
inside which multiple individuals participate by being guided by common standards of
action such as rules or norms. These rules and the attendant usages requisite for follow-
ing the rules are ‘intelligibles’ that have meaning (Oakeshott, 1975). The premise is that
we cannot qualify as participants in a practice unless we are able to understand what its
constitutive rules and usages mean. We may seek to understand a practice for two prin-
cipal reasons: either because we wish to understand what other agents, who are practice
participants, do or have done in the past, or because we aspire to become participants
ourselves. Either way, a proper understanding of any practice demands an internalist
perspective.
To support our case, we differentiate between two basic standpoints for making sense
of practices – the external and the internal one. Upon explication, they will be shown to
be incongruent and not merely different. Their opposition resembles that between
Verstehen (‘understanding’) and Erklären (‘explanation’), between hermeneutics and
natural science, but is not identical to it.2 Our starting assumption is that the primary
object to be understood or explained is a practice – a domain of intelligent activity that
is already understood by its participants. Irrespective of whether we are engaged in the
explanation of practices (practice externalism) or in the understanding of practices (prac-
tice internalism), such practices belong to the intelligent world of Verstehen.
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