Introduction

What do we mean by theory and how is it related to practice? The question has been one of the recurrent themes for negotiating the identity of the discipline of International Relations (IR). Debates concern what kind of knowledge scholars should produce and value, what should count as ‘theory’ and ‘empirics’, but also what status is granted to those that ‘make’ theory and those that focus on ‘practice’. While these debates run through the history of the discipline, three recent developments have given them impetus.

A landmark debate in the European Journal of International Relations in 2013 explored whether the age of theory in IR had ended. Scholars asked whether they had witnessed a ‘retreat from theory’ (Dunne et al, 2013: 406), mourned the end of unifying grand theory that would order the discipline (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2013), and were worried about the proliferation of theories and naive hypothesis testing (Guzzini, 2013; Jackson and Nexon, 2013). The discovery of non-Western IR and theory from the Global South brought another source of discomfort to the discipline. The potential of postcolonial forms of knowledge cast new doubt on the extent and limitations of Western epistemology and its concepts of theory (see Acharya and Buzan, 2010; Shilliam, 2010; Seth, 2011). Yet the emergence of a movement of scholars associated with ‘international practice theory’ also called for new thinking on theory and for grounding it in practice (Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Bueger and Gadinger, 2018). In declaring ‘practice’ as the foundational unit of theoretical thought, they re-raised the tension between theory and practice in new ways.

The triple uncertainty over theory opens a new moment to rethink the making of theory in IR. Taking insights from these three debates into account, this chapter asks whether and how practice theories lead to new, innovative thoughts on ‘theory’ and the relation to practice. The mere label of ‘practice theory’ is interesting: it brings together two terms which are often seen as dichotomous or at least are keenly kept apart. How does practice theory open the space for rethinking the relation?