Matt Sweetwood from Liberty, in the US state of Missouri, fell in love with a German girl he met at university. He followed her to Germany, where they are now happily married and living with three sons in Potsdam. Sweetwood has lived in Germany for over ten years, but the countryâs people and their culture remain something of a mystery to him. Professionally, he writes, directs and edits documentary films. In his most recent feature, he set out to discover the essence of the German people. He decided that the key to German identity lies in understanding one of its best-known cultural assets: beer. For his documentary Beerland, he spent months travelling around, visiting breweries, drinking clubs, and ordinary taverns. He found that Germans can be serious and silly, tradition-bound and visionary, all at once.
The idea that we might be able to understand the German people by studying and experiencing one of their most recognisable habits and cultural goods â drinking beer â seems intuitive; anyone who has had the opportunity to spend an evening at a German tavern will understand this immediately. What appears obvious for a documentary maker or the everyday traveller seems to be of limited value when we seek to understand world politics, however. Although international relations (IR) theory is also concerned with national identities, we are nonetheless advised to look elsewhere when studying the discipline. âGo and study the speeches of famous politicians!â, we are told. âExamine national interests!â or âcalculate power and balancing behaviour!â are just some of the conventional guidelines that any student of IR will be familiar with. And yet, is there anything we may learn from Sweetwoodâs eye-opening quest? Can the account of a documentary filmmaker suggest new directions for IR scholars?
Whilst working at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Iver Neumann faced a similar problem to Sweetwood. How does one come to understand what the work of a diplomat actually involves? Hardly anyone had written about what these mandarins do when they undertake their mĂ©tier. And yet, wasnât it obvious that IR should be able to say something about what diplomats do?
Searching for an argument that would be intelligible for IR researchers, Neumann (2002) introduced a body of thought that he described as âpractice theoryâ in a 2002 article. He declared it to be vital that IR return to studying the doing and sayings of those involved in world politics. Neumann was certainly not the first to highlight the importance of turning to practice; indeed, earlier generations of IR scholars had already proposed that practice should be a core category in IR theory. His article sparked interest in giving centre stage to the concept of practice, however, as well as rethinking how it may be theorised and studied empirically.
Neumann was not on his own. A broad movement of scholars from across the social sciences had started to think about practice and how the investigation of doing and sayings can provide us with a better understanding of the world. Together , these scholars suggest that the attention to practice requires a âturnâ; that is, a practice turn. This metaphor suggests that practice theory is not merely a new theory, but involves substantial shifts in thinking about the world and the nature and purpose of social science.
What, then, does it mean to study international relations through the lens of practice? Scholars focusing on practices as a core unit of analysis do not want to begin with fixed assumptions of what people are like, how they behave or what logic they follow. Nor do they start with claims about the nature of the international system or of global politics. Instead, they consider an account that starts by paying attention to what actors do and say, and how these activities are embedded in broader contexts. They ask what knowledge is required to perform world politics, and how actors work together to make the international. They attempt to pay attention to the things and technologies used in producing the international. To focus on practices is also an attempt to break with some traditional assumptions and distinctions of âlevel of analysisâ usually taught in introductory IR courses. Practice theorists argue that many of our traditionally learned dichotomies are more of a hindrance than a help. These include the division between agency and structure, micro and macro, subject and object, individual and society, mind and body or the ideational and the material.
How then, may we conduct meaningful research if these are unproductive assumptions? Does practice theory seek to throw all received wisdom overboard?
Both Matt Sweetwood and Iver Neumann naturally began their investigations with background knowledge of their âcasesâ. They had clear objectives: Sweetwood wanted to understand German identity, while Neumann addressed diplomacy . Sweetwood prepared for his movie in reading about the historical evolution of beer as a cultural aspect of German life. Neumann relied on literature on diplomacy in world politics, for instance, Ernest Satowâs Guide to Diplomatic Practice, widely regarded as the authoritative text in the worldâs foreign ministries (Neumann 2012: 1â3).
Satow defines diplomacy as âthe conduct of official relations between the governments of independent statesâ (quoted after Neumann 2012: 1). Yet, for Neumann, definitional or theoretical knowledge was not sufficient in understanding how diplomacy works. Sweetwood dealt with the same problem; the cultural history of Germany provided him with an overview of the range of national brewing and beer drinking traditions, but it did not lead him to a richer understanding of German culture as lived experience, and told him little about how to understand the German people.
Sweetwood and Neumann recognised that to understand their objects, books were not enough. Rather than trying to be âobjectiveâ and âdistantâ observers, they had to engage with their objects of investigation. This required not only observing practices, but also learning , adapting and becoming active. Sweetwood not only learned how to drink beer, he also studied in a small brewery in Bavaria. Through this experience, he began, for instance, to understand why an established family tradition of independence may be stronger than the drive for profit by contracting out to a major company. The survival of small independent breweries over several decades was an issue that had puzzled Sweetwood, since he was used to the monopolised US beer market.
Neumann , meanwhile, became a diplomat, working for the foreign ministry. Through this experience, he learned, for instance, that writing a diplomatic speech is not an isolated action of one individual thinker, followed by forwarding the piece to a higher political level. Instead, it is a group undertaking that involves talking with different individuals and slowly finding a common thread through bureaucratic procedures and routines. Practice theory involves observing the practices of others, talking about these practices, participating in and reflecting upon them all at once. The aim is not to reduce and present abstract explanations of social phenomena, but to come to a deeper understanding of how the world works in and through practices.
If âpractice theoryâ has only recently been introduced to IR , the concept of âpracticeâ is certainly nothing novel . The term âpracticeâ is part of everyday language and is used colloquially in IR. Often , practice is also contrasted with theory. In this case, by practice, we mean what ânormalâ people are doing , and by âtheoryâ we refer to abstract generalisations â or what academics are doing. The notion of âpractice theoryâ breaks down this separation, and indeed argues that practice and theory ...