This chapter heeds recent calls for a theoretical broadening in practice-oriented approaches to world politics by bringing Foucault into a conversation with practice-oriented approaches to power. In particular, it explores Foucault’s contribution to the study of resistance as practice. Foucault has typically been read in IR as a theorist of social order, less often as a theorist of resistance. Yet in his writing on ‘counter-conduct’ it is precisely forms of resistance that Foucault engages. The chapter argues that counter-conduct can be a useful tool for a practice-based account of resistance but that it also needs to be modified when used in the present. This is because Foucault developed the idea of counter-conduct by studying dissidence and refusal among religious movements in Europe in the Middle Ages, a time very different from our own. Largely missing from Foucault’s account is a sense of how counter-conducts are mediated; that is, how they attract (or fail to attract) a public. To address this gap the chapter proposes a notion of the scene. It demonstrates the value of a concern with scenes by means of a case: practices of migrant solidarity in Europe, the criminalization of those practices, and resistance to such criminalization.

This chapter considers key aspects of the context that affect participants’ judgements of other people’s behaviour as well as their own. It starts by drawing an important distinction between context and the focal event and points out that while participants evaluate the focal event, that focal event is embedded in a context that frames interpretation and hence needs to be understood conceptually. The chapter explores it from two main angles: the scene and the participants, unpacking each of these angles in turn and considering how cultural factors may influence participants’ conceptualisation and interpretation of the various components of the context. The discussion not only emphasises that context is particularly important in intercultural encounters, but also that it cannot be limited to linguistic context, or even to aspects of contexts that can be studied with the conventional inventory of politeness research. Individuals bring a complex cluster of pre-existing extralinguistic and extra-contextual knowledge to interactions, and this cluster may underlie a striking variety of miscommunications in contexts where common ground is minimal. This, in turn, implies that any theory of context in intercultural politeness needs to be multidisciplinary in character. There are three main sections to the chapter: scene; participants; focal event.