Symposium: Seizing Constructivist Ground? Practice and Relational Theories

[This is a post-publication review symposium.] International Studies Quarterly (ISQ) has a tradition of being home to big debates about, and major contributions to, international-relations theory. There’s simply no way to do justice to the list of important articles important (Tickner 1997) articles (Williams 2003), forums (ISQ 2014), and even special issues (ISQ 1990). In recent years, ISQ published a call for global international relations (Acharya 2014), a major piece on practice theory (Bueger and Gadinger 2015)—the subject of a symposium (ISQ 2015), and an influential call to move beyond paradigms in international-relations theory and scholarship (Lake 2011). I mention these last three pieces because they bear directly on the subject of this symposium, David McCourt’s “Practice Theory and Relationalism as the New Constructivism” (2016). McCourt’s piece enjoys the distinction of being ISQ’s first “theory note.” We introduced theory notes to help forward ISQ’s tradition as a place for important debates about international-relations theory. But, beyond the vague notion that there should exist the equivalent—or, more accurately, the inverse—of a “research note,” we really had very little idea what the category entailed. Indeed, none of the available (Butcher and Griffiths 2017)—or forthcoming—theory notes share much more than their status as spare, disciplined, and salient interventions on ongoing theoretical controversies. [...]