Turning to Practices: What International Relations and European Studies Have in Common

Abstract

Abstract

The so-called Practice Turn in International Relations (IR) has developed a new paradigm in the field, which places the day-to-day activities of practitioners at the forefront and center of IR theoretical discourse. It is proven to be an influential development not just for International Relations (IR), but also for Area Studies (AS), which share a significant amount of IR's knowledge as well as its objects of study. This is most definitely the situation in the field of European Studies (ES), where the research conducted by researchers of International Practice Theory (IPT) has made a significant contribution to bringing more attention to the contextual, banal, and every day practices of EU institutions. This essay examines the contribution that IPT scholars have made to ES in order to evaluate the additional worth of this study programme and its potential to become a "trading zone" where IR and ES/AS researchers can expand their understanding of how the local and the global are connected. It also identifies two challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the existing literature: 1) discovering ways to theorise and empirically observe the transition from the level of situated practises to EU-wide doings (the generalisation challenge); and 2) determining the exact role that interaction plays in structuring and transforming both the global and the local. Both of these challenges have not been adequately addressed in the existing literature (challenge of relationism).