Description
How and why have Pierre Bourdieu’s interventions into social theory been incorporated into international relations? This paper argues that that “Bourdieu” has come to be incorporated into IR in a partial and somewhat peculiar way. For much of the contemporary literature, “Bourdieu” is equated with practice theory, and vice versa. Although there are multiple theoretical approaches to the study of “practice”, rooted in disciplines ranging from anthropology to science studies, the approach has, within IR, come to be equated primarily with one theorist. Conversely, this also suggests that Bourdieu’s work has been incorporated into IR in a limited way, with relative neglect towards other of his conceptual innovations that might prove fruitful for the discipline. This paper develops an intellectual history of the incorporation of “Bourdieu” and “practice theory” into IR, suggesting that these resulted from the successes of a few intellectual entrepreneurs who introduced their particular interpretation of Bourdieu’s practice theory into IR, which was then adopted and reproduced by others in the discipline. Expanding the theoretical repertoire of practice theories within the discipline will open up both the critical potential of the approach, and its utility for explaining relations of power in practice.
