Contestations about the contents and validity of laws and legal principles are fundamental to the (international) legal profession. After all, when engaging with legal norms, disagreements about their meaning and validity a central part of the day-to-day work of legal professionals specialising in international law, including legal counsel representing governments, international judges, legal officers working for international organisations and non-governmental organisations, and legal academics. We propose a practice-oriented approach to empirically research such interpretive legal contestations by groups of legal professionals. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we contribute to IR norms research by drawing on not only IR practice theory, but also Bourdieu-inspired research within the Sociology of International Law and ongoing discussions on legal realism in International Legal Theory, including what we have called European New Legal Realism. After outlining how to implement our approach using either a Bourdieusian perspective or the concept of communities of practice, we use normative contestations in and around climate change law to illustrate its added value. Such an approach not only promises to make interpretive legal contestations visible empirically, but also emphasises how interpretive legal contestations matter as they reflect underlying power dynamics and may result in normative legal change in practice.

This chapter introduces micro-sociological lenses to the study of international meetings showing how a micro-sociological study can produce insights into the workings and dynamics of concrete, inter-bodily interaction in international meetings. The chapter analyzes micro-sociological dynamics of rapprochement, conflict, domination, and low-intensity interaction in international meetings and dives into specific cases of international meetings, including in the UNSC, the EU, and bilateral meetings. The chapter further discusses and exemplifies the micro-sociological significance of gender; that is, how macro-political structures of male domination are manifested in concrete situations as well as how female diplomats often have a larger room for maneuver. The meetings analyzed in the chapter raise critical questions about frontstage/backstage aspects of international encounters, micro-sociality versus performativity, as well as the interplay between in-meeting dynamics and structural conditions/effects of the meetings. The discussion of these questions in the chapter will illustrate the complex nature of micro-dynamics in international meetings.

This chapter investigates how both direct and structural violence unfold in concrete situations. Analyzing examples from Palestine, I show how structural violence is enacted in concrete situations of domination and, building on empirical research from the Arab Uprisings, I develop a micro-sociological model for direct violence. The chapter shows how violence is difficult because it goes against the human tendency to become attuned and fall into each other’s bodily rhythms. Hence, violence usually happens from afar or when a victim is dominated. Once violence is initiated, however, it attains its own rhythm and momentum, making it difficult not to respond to an attack with another attack. The chapter further discusses how violent situations are not only shaped by inter-bodily dynamics but also by embodied habitus, emotional energy, and material availability. Coupling this with insights regarding micro-interactions of violence, I develop a micro-sociological model of violent situations.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. It assesses the value – both descriptive and normative – of defining practice as pre-reflexive or habitual. Dewey was clear: habits can be useful, but only if those subject to their hold can improvise when practice produces unwanted consequences. Applying this to International Relations, the chapter shows how a failure to adequately reflect on the situational value of an ideological commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ – what Bourdieusian-informed Practice theory might call a Western ‘habitus’ – contributed to the maladapted response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar. This again points to the centrality of reflection, deliberation, judgement and learning to the Pragmatist approach. The chapter develops that argument by examining how Dewey’s ‘pedagogic creed’ aimed to put individuals and societies in control of their habits and how his critique of the unhelpful hierarchies in formal education was extrapolated to form a theory of social learning, which included an emphasis on the role democracy plays in facilitating the reflexivity and deliberation.

In the ‘future of work’ in particular and organizations more generally, the future is a ubiquitous companion and serves as a key point of orientation for actions. However, at the same time, the future is elusive, as its open-endedness undermines attempts to fully predict and ‘manage’, but also examine this temporal mode. In response to the intricate challenge of exploring the role of the future in organizations, we argue that practice theory can help us gain a deeper understanding of how organizational actors engage with the future. By revisiting key principles of practice theory and their relationships with time and the future, we propose to explore ‘future work’, i.e., the situationally enacted, performative, heterogeneous, and relationally entwined bundle of practices through which organizational actors engage with events that are to come. We conclude by discussing the implications of gaining a practice-based understanding of the future in organizations and suggest avenues for future research.

While existing scholarship is correct in stressing that policymakers pursue their interests on the global stage, the overall result is definitely not one of Pareto-optimizing rational design. We argue that global policies form protean patchworks of governance practices and competing universal value claims. Governance practices can be defined as socially meaningful patterns of action that are constitutive of the policymaking process, including its shifting playing field. Values, which capture the ideological dimension of policymaking, refer to the normative beliefs that inform the definition of global problems and the formulation of solutions. We use preliminary evidence to illustrate the value of our framework. We then offer methodological advice to assist in the empirical study and operationalization of governance practices and universal value debates. By identifying prevalent practices, our framework captures the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, while also making sense of historical shifts in dominant modes of global governance. When it comes to value debates, our framework illuminates the persistence of social conflict as the normal and expected condition of global policymaking. Normative patchworks are generated by global governors out of multidimensional ideological cleavages.

This chapter flashes back to the first days of Sophie’s employment at the ICJ registry, and sees her and her girlfriend Norma mull over the socio-professional features of the international judicial community. The chapter lays the theoretical foundations of the book and provides the reader with pointers to interpret the unfolding of judicial proceedings. The international judicial community has a twofold structure, at once cooperative and competitive. On the one hand, its members work together to secure control on courts and tribunals and insulate their internal activities from outside interference. On the other hand, community members ceaselessly strive to maximize their relative capital in a ruthless struggle for authority and prestige. The practices of the community are patterned, as they present regularities over time; they are competent, as they rest on collective background knowledge; and they weave together the discursive and the material world. Thus, community practices are the vehicle of both continuity and change, constraint and freedom in international adjudication.

This introduction lays out the book’s aims and its approach to studying reparations. The book uses the notion of ‘practices’ as an analytical lens to make visible forms of social actions that together and simultaneously enable and constrain reparations. The book examines these practices through four phases of the ‘social life’ of reparations: norm-making, engagement with conflict-affected populations, as well as adjudication and implementation of reparations. Accompanying the introduction is a brief background to the case studies that are at the core of this book, namely the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The book focuses on the first two cases at each court that have reached the reparations stage: at the ICC, the cases against Thomas Lubanga and Germain Katanga relating to the situation in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo; and at the ECCC, Cases 001 and 002 involving senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those most responsible for crimes committed in Cambodia during the 1970s.

The chapter centres on the notion of repetition and takes it as the key concept of practice theory. It explores the translocal character of practice with regard to transnational diplomatic negotiations in the UNESCO World Heritage Programme. First, the chapter addresses a widespread bias towards stability and reproduction of the social in practice theory, points towards the need to take account of the dynamics of the social, and develops a poststructuralist understanding of repetition. The second part outlines three related dimensions of repetition and spells out their methodological implications for practice theory. By thinking of practices in terms of repetitions that link different sites and instances, the methodology of practice theory is to follow the fragile relations which make up the (in)stability of the social, enabling it to grasp the specific contributions of bodies and material artefacts. Drawing on data from a long-term participant observation, the final part of the chapter puts this methodology to work by analysing continuity and change in international diplomacy, looking at the interwoven diplomatic practices of negotiating, drafting, and decision-making.

Chapter 3 unpacks why national judges broadly eschewed turning to European law and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) when doing so could bolster their own power. It reveals historically rooted practices and knowledge deficits embodied in the trudge of daily work within civil service judiciaries that fostered what I call an “institutional consciousness” of path dependence: An accrued social identity tied to institutional place that magnifies the reputational risks and labor costs of mobilizing European law. This consciousness reifies judges’ sense of distance to Europe, legitimating a renouncement of agency and resistance to change. The core of this chapter revolves around interviews and oral histories with 134 judges across French, Italian, and German courts, contextualized via ethnographic fieldnotes, descriptive statistics, and secondary sources. The chapter will speak to readers interested in a historical and sociological understanding of what path dependence looks, sounds, and feels like in the courthouse, why judges in civil service judiciaries can be likened to street-level bureaucrats, and how immersive fieldwork can illuminate the habitual practices calcifying the behaviors and identities of judges.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework for understanding the evolution of postcolonial liberation wars. The book uses theory as a lens through which to examine postcolonial liberation struggles. It employs ideas from theories of practices and roles in international politics to shed new light about the evolution of postcolonial separatist violence, and about our understanding of colonialism and decolonisation.

The formation of postcolonial states in Asia, Africa and the Middle East gave birth to prolonged separatist wars between separatist groups in the periphery and the new, still insecure central governments. This book explores these liberation wars, aiming to provide new insights into their roots and evolution. Rather than focusing on the causes of conflict, the book focuses on the governments’ and insurgents’ strategies and policies. The book’s central argument is that we could best understand these strategies as having been shaped by the struggle against European colonialism. The practices and roles that emerged during that period survived into the postcolonial era, moulding the identities, aims and strategies of both governments and rebels. Therefore, the book suggests that theories of practice and roles in international politics serve as a sound theoretical framework for the empirical analysis of the case studies. The book examines two cases of postcolonial separatist wars: the conflict in Northern Iraq between the government and Kurdish separatists and in Southern Sudan between black separatists and the government in Khartoum. The analysis of these two cases relies on extensive field and archival research. Thus, the book sheds new light on the history and nature of these separatist conflicts.

This chapter introduces the study and its approach to examining African peacekeeping. The book is framed around two central arguments. The first is the importance of emphasising and understanding historical legacies and the European colonial enterprise when exploring and analysing African peacekeeping. The second is that African peacekeeping is best understood through the lens of practice theory, an approach which allows the authors to demonstrate just how deeply embedded in both domestic and foreign policy-making peacekeeping has become across the continent over time. The introduction then goes on to outline the data and source material which the book draws on – which includes over ten years’ worth of fieldwork data collected by the authors – and provides a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book’s structure and argument.