These two impressive works confront different topics, but they are both united in their examination (in various times and places) of daily practices and routines that lead to impressive outcomes and processes in global politics. They are also united in their refreshing ambition. Ted Hopf’s interest in Reconstructing the Cold War began as a chapter for an edited volume, but then developed into an interest in explaining the “entire Cold War” via a book-length project. Thus Reconstructing the Cold War focuses on the “early years” of 1945–1958, with two more volumes on the remaining years of the Cold War to follow (p. vii). Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot’s ambition for their volume on International Practices is of a different kind. For Adler and Pouliot, a focus on a practice-oriented approach provides limitless possibilities. For starters, it has the potential to “accommodate a variety of theories and paradigms,” including realism, the English School, constructivism, and poststructuralism (p. 19). Further, practice can be used to understand different functions of language (p. 14), provide a more useful way to understand the agent-structure “debate” (p. 15), and further to understand “continuity and change” (p. 16, emphasis original). The question is, with such ambitious purposes, do these books deliver the goods?
In so many ways, the answer is “yes,” Adler and Pouliot set out a very sophisticated introductory chapter that provides an understanding of practices as ”competent performances,” that are considered “socially meaningful patterns of action which … simultaneously embody, act out, and possibly reify background knowledge and discourse in and on the material world” (p. 6). This understanding proves incredibly versatile and flexible for the contributions, and the contributors, that follow. It is also intentional—the editors aim for “dialogue” —so the contributors were ”not encouraged to butt into a specific theoretical approach” but instead to refer to a “modular framework that scholars from different traditions can access from their particular ontological and epistemological perspectives” (p. 18). Yet what proves stylistically most interesting in the volume is how particular contributors take some issue with Adler and Pouliot’s understanding of, or goals for, practice.
Janice Bially Mattern for instance argues that when it comes to practice’s “promise,” Adler and Pouliot don’t go far enough, namely that “the potential contribution of practice theory to IR is nothing less than a full transformation of how scholars approach the field . . . In this way, the practice perspective on IR constitutes an ‘ism’ in its own right” (p. 75, and n. 50). Such clarity of purpose is refreshing, of course (although it is not shared by all contributors; see especially Kratochwil’s conclusion on p. 58), and it is an especially promising modus vivendi in an IR field that I think is characterized accurately by Adler and Pouliot as too atomized and in need of dialogue (p. 11). Yet it also comes with its costs. For as we see in several of the contributions (including especially Bially Mattern’s assessment of “emotions” research to date in IR), some contributors exude a policing language of certainty about what the scope of practice “should be,” and, of course, what it should not (namely, Bially Mattern cautions, it should not be to just “add practice to world politics and stir,” p. 75).
However, it’s not entirely clear, first, how practice can be that distinct a contribution on its own to deserve the status—or perhaps pressured expectations—of an “-ism” all to itself since much of what transpires in the volume sounds suspiciously similar to existing “ingredients” of IR approaches-past. For instance, the themes of structuration theory—routines, agents, structures, and the like—make some implicit and, via references to Anthony Giddens, explicit, appearances throughout the volume. If one were looking to the importance of agents and structures, and language, and materials and ideas mixing together—all of which can be gathered clearly from this volume—they could also look to Onufian constructivism (Nicholas Onuf, World of our Making, 1989), which also used Giddens (among others) to articulate many of the same issues a quarter-century ago. The importance of the body as well as bodily movements and their rhythms (articulated vividly and persuasively in Bially Mattern’s contribution), has always been central to Giddens’s theory, as well as to those who have used it to understand identity and conflict in global politics (Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12(3) [2006]: 341-370). Further, it is not entirely clear how practice is different from norm processes, and in fact the two seem to overlap almost completely (albeit usefully and persuasively) in contributions by Janice Gross Stein (chapter 4, on humanitarian performances) and Jutta Brunee and Stephen J. Toope (chapter 5, on legal practices). When we see so much overlap with perspectives already developed and used, the exalted purpose of the practice framework’s development into an “-ism” seems less pressing, and foreseeable.
That said, there is a lot to commend in the Adler and Pouliot volume, and it is to their credit that they have gathered not only a set of contributors who have slightly different takes on practice but sought out contributions that both clarify and contend with their framework. Kratochwil’s chapter especially provides in lucid historical and philosophical detail the history of the practice approach (derived, as Kratochwil demonstrates, from some traditions of American Pragmatism). The Duvall and Chowdhury concluding chapter (p. 13) takes critical aim at the editors’ formulation of “practice” as (only?) “competent performance.” Further, it is precisely when we view a potential contribution of the practice framework as no more (or less) than “adding practice to world politics and stir” that a real purchase to the volume comes through, as it does in Richard Little’s contribution (chapter 7) on how practice helps reconfigure the relationship (and ontological primacy) of the international system/society dichotomy that permeates the English School approach to. For Norris Ripsman (chapter 8), an attention to how practice can “enhance neoclassical realism further” (p. 222) seems more than enough to valorize practice’s contribution to IR theory. The point here is that the ingenuity of the contributions comes precisely from their ability to reconfigure empirical processes past and present through the practice framework in ways that allow scholars to embody the dialogue the editors seek.
However, if practice scholars are going to move the debate forward by creating IR’s next “-ism,” they will need to pay more attention—at least as much as is done through the excellent contributions by Janice Gross Stein (chapter 4), Neumann and Sending (chapter 9), Lene Hansen (chapter 11), and Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams (chapter 12) —to the exclusionary and hierarchical nature of practices themselves. International practices are shaped, developed, and legitimated (sometimes violently so) by political actors in positions of authority. If we only focus on the stability provided in and through practices and their performances, without asking the “difficult and troubling practices” they mask or hide, as Janice Gross Stein posits (p. 105), we may miss how the practices themselves are unsettled and depend upon being situated in what Hansen titles “politico-epistemic domains” (p. 295). The practice one chooses to render as “meaningful” is itself a political move—one that is simultaneously inclusive and exclusive.
Ted Hopf’s book also examines a set of practices and also focuses our attention to a variety of sites, although from a much more historically detailed angle. Examining the the early Cold War years, Hopf explains the changes in Soviet policies and posture during and after Stalin’s death. Whereas “systemic constructivism,” realism, and liberalism fall short in explaining these changes, Hopf uses what he titles “societal constructivism” (a “middle-range approach”) to engage the construction of Soviet identity both domestically and against external “others,” most especially against the United States following the 1947 Marshall Plan..
Hopf’s painstaking archival and historical research unveils the circulations of identity construction throughout Soviet society during the examined years. Like the contributions to the Adler and Pouliot volume, such an examination of identity practices reveals agency where we might least expect it. Soviet “identity” was enacted in—and (via what Hopf terms in an almost Gramscian twist) “counter-hegemonic possibilities” were located at—not only the elite levels of Soviet politics, which extended both “inward” to the Soviet citizen but outward to significant “others,” especially in the Eastern European Soviet bloc. Such practices were additionally and sometimes especially enacted at the more subterranean or seemingly apolitical sites of the artist, writer, or playwright. This here is the promise of “societal constructivism,” for Hopf reveals how such actors used—and one might say even manipulated—predominant discourses of the Soviet state by imposition, reinforcement, infusion, competition, and circumvention (pp. 26–27), which had a bearing on the shift from identity discourses of “danger” (during Stalin) to more open and fluid discourses of “difference” (after Stalin). The result is a study with rich narratives that prove a riveting read and disclose an extremely persuasive argument and set of provocations about the Cold War and the complex process of identity construction more generally, focusing not only its ontology and direction, but its location (elites, domestic society, Eastern European allies) and reproduction in fascinating historical detail. In his conclusion, Hopf acknowledges societal constructivism’s limitations, and as such his middle-range approach can be seen as a very useful complement to systemic constructivism (and vice versa).
A minor thorny issue is the packaging, but not the substance, of Hopf’s insightful analysis. Specifically, Hopf prefers to structure his arguments within the language of neopositivism—his work is different from other constructivist studies as it is “falsifiable” with “variables that vary” (p. 27). This leads to hypotheses that can be tested in subsequent chapters, especially chapters three and four. Yet in this respect, to paraphrase Patrick Jackson, it is not entirely clear that Hopf needs to use “the language of hypothesis-testing . . . to describe what [he is] doing” (Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, 2011: pp. 114–115) when he traces narratives so rich, systematic, and eye-opening that bear upon so many iconic events and processes in the early Cold War years (including the initial Sino–Soviet split). Indeed, the empirical presentation would be just as—and perhaps even more—convincing in the language of “analytical narratives” rather than neopositivism.
It is a testament to Hopf’s meticulous research, his brilliant structuring of his argument, and his inherently accessible writing style that such situating does little if anything to detract from an extremely empirically rich and provocative study. Much like the Adler and Pouliot volume does for the many who now seem stimulated to resurrect and re-evaluate practices past, present, and future, Hopf’s book leaves readers interested in a fresh take on the entire Cold War yearning for the two volumes to follow.
