The advancement of international practice theory since the early 2000s is one of the most important theoretical developments not only in international relations but also across the social sciences. The core moves of international practice theory include centering analysis in activities, taking the material dimensions of doing politics more strongly into consideration, exploring the opportunities that new social theoretical vocabularies provide, and experimenting with novel method mixes. The theory also asks scholars to work and collaborate differently with political practitioners, not only as a methodological tool but also to bring about progressive change. These substantial moves have led to revised theoretical approaches in conversation with constructivism, discourse theory, and sociological institutionalism.

International practice theory has also led to major new insights; for instance, in the study of international security interested in how threats emerge or about how communities of nonviolence are formed and maintained. Others have shown how the focus on activities, often of mundane character, provide new insights for international institutions, such as the distribution of authority, hierarchy, or the role of expertise and new technologies in international negotiations. In the study of interventions, scholars have shown the highly improvisational character of international activities and the everyday negotiations that aid provision or that state-building relies on.

Contributing to this rich and lively field of research, Magnus Ekengren provides an interesting new analytical framework, an important methodological reflection, and an exploration of the European Union’s foreign policy action in Kosovo and Haiti. The book provides an important intervention into EU studies, a field that too often lacks theoretical sophistication, as Iver Neumann notes on the book’s back cover. Yet, throughout the history of political science, the EU has played an important role as an empirical object in advancing norm-oriented constructivism, poststructuralism and discourse theory, as well as relational, assemblage, or practice theoretical accounts. Ekengren continues this tradition. What he adds, most importantly, is inspiration for how to conduct methodologically reflexive theorizing in this field.

Ekengren sets up the book in a classical disciplinary triad. He argues that a “realism-intergovernmental school,” centered on the dominant role of great powers (p. 2) and a constructivist “normative-structural power school” anchored in norms, values, and identities (p. 2), does not provide sufficient explanations for the EU’s collective activities, because they “come close to structural determinism” (p. 11). He posits that a new theory grounded in transnational communities of practice is better equipped to do so, because it brings us closer to the reality of the actual conduct of EU representatives.

Understanding theory as a “vocabulary” that can facilitate “bottom-up investigations” (p. 28), Ekengren draws on and synthesizes ideas from classical and well-known practice theoretical thinkers, in particular Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and Etienne Wenger. Given these sources and their substantial influence in the political sciences and EU studies’ debate on practices, there is, however, perhaps less novelty in his approach than he claims.

In setting up his argument, Ekengren unfortunately misses an important opportunity. In striving for simplicity and analytical clarity, he does not systematically engage with the substantial body of literature that analyzes EU actions from a discourse- and language-oriented standpoint. Exploring the similarities and divergences of practice-driven explanations to this kind of research could have been a major contribution, because the boundaries between both research programs—in particular, in the discussion on the EU—are unclear and might have more analytical potential than is often claimed.

However, Ekengren, as he spells out in a lengthy and noteworthy appendix, is a diplomat-turned-researcher-turned theorist. Unsurprisingly, hence, the great value of this book lies less in the mastery of disciplinary conversations, new philosophical sources, or deep theoretical sophistication than in its methodologic reflexivity and empirical insights. His theoretical argument is grounded in the idea that the actions of EU representatives are constrained and enabled by the different kinds of routine practices of transnational communities, which manifest differently across concrete local situations. EU foreign policy action is then interpreted as a “cluster” (p. 9) of the several interactions between the (1) actions of the representative, (2) the transnational communities of practice, and (3) the local situation. Conceptually, Ekengren adopts the notion of communities of practice as developed by Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot as a blend of insights from Pierre Bourdieu and Etienne Wenger. He distinguishes between a diplomatic, humanitarian, and defense community of practice. His other conceptual workhorse is the concept of locale that he takes up from Anthony Giddens to describe those situations where structuration takes place and relations between actors and communities are formed.

Importantly Ekengren does not suggest that this framework has the potential to amount to a generalizable theory. Rather he posits that these are sensitizing concepts that allow for elaborating mechanisms regarding what drives EU action in particular situations. His goal is to “strike a workable balance between pre-empirical assumptions of what drive EU foreign policy action, and an inductive approach that strives to avoid the exclusion of empirical facts” (p. 20). Methodologically, his approach might be better described by the term “abduction” than “induction.” Indeed, his reflexive discussion of methodological issues (in chapters 1 and 2, as well as the appendices) provides an important account of what abduction may mean in research practice, given that it is too often seen as an abstract philosophical principle. His study is an important outline of how to move reflexively between the literature, concept development, empirical study, and comparison to the specification of mechanisms and abstraction.

Drawing on document analysis, 48 in-depth interviews with practitioners, and his own experience as a diplomat for the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he devotes the bulk of the book to detailed empirical reconstruction of EU activities in Kosovo and Haiti. As Ekengren argues, the interventions in those two crises were formative experiences for the EU’s foreign policy. Each chapter starts out from a summary discussion of activities and then zooms in on concrete locales of interaction. Throughout we learn how the EU is struggling to gain recognition among the relevant communities of practice in these locales. Recognition emerges as the core concept in the study.

This concept is then taken up in the conclusion, which elaborates on the idea of a theory of the translocal recognition cycle. In other words, this book follows an abductive research logic to the letter. The book starts with a problem, specifies an initial theoretical framework, conducts empirical work, and then ends with a refined theory.

Ekengren’s outline of how recognition determines the space for action in particular local situations will be an interesting inspiration not only for EU studies but also for the broader discussion of the interactions among international organizations, states, and local communities. In summary, this book provides an important intervention in EU studies on the one hand. On the other hand, its methodological reflections will be an important read for the debate on how to put practice theories into research practice and how to relate theorizing, concepts, and empirics productively into an abductive research logic.