Morten Skumsrud Andersen

The everyday meaning of ‘practice’ is something like concrete ‘doings’ or ‘what is being done’ in a social setting. Its everyday counter-concept is theory. Intuitively, this may lead us to think of practices as what is really going on in the world, as opposed to theories or models. This commonsensical meaning of practices reinforces the separation between theory and empirical reality. We argue that such an understanding has informed much of the ongoing ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. We also argue that this is not necessarily an efficient way of conceptualising ‘practices’, because practices might end up being too general a concept to be analytically useful. To counter this, we argue, one must be explicit about practices at the level of models, that is, in fictional representations of the world. This can help in studying them as endogenous phenomena, and not only as the practical counterpart of some other phenomena, or emanating from unspoken theoretical assumptions of, for example, conscious rule-following behaviour, interests, identities, structures and so on. As an illustration of what a model of practice might look like, we include a case study of Iroquois diplomacy as practice. Using a model, without relying on unstated assumptions exogenous to it, we represent this particular case through assuming that both the agents and their social environments emerge through practices.

This is a review essay discussing Barry Buzan and George Lawson "The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations" and Jennifer Mitzen "Power in Concert: The Nineteenth Century Origins of Global Governance."

Norge og verden utenfor I 1814 er Napoleonskrigene i Europa inne i sin siste fase, og i november samles stormaktene i den kjente Wienerkongressen for å få orden på maktforholdene i Europa. Noen måneder før har et nytt Norge fått sin grunnlov og sin egen konge. Stormaktsspillet var avgjørende for Norges selvstendighet. Forholdet mellom Norge, Danmark og Sverige ble flittig diskutert i parlamenter og i diplomatiske kretser rundt om i Europa. Skandinavia stod midt i den europeiske stormen frem mot 1814, en periode preget av internasjonal uorden. 200 år senere har vi, uten sammenligning forøvrig, også opplevd en sommer preget av sterk internasjonal uro. På norske avisforsider har den ene krisen avløst den andre som toppsak: i Ukraina, på Gazastripen, i Syria og i Irak. Som i 1814 har vi med all tydelighet fått bekreftet at Norge ikke er en isolert øy i verden – kriser og konflikter internasjonalt påvirker i høyeste grad oss «her hjemme». Norge forventes å svare og ta stilling til det som skjer i andre deler av verden. Og vi påvirkes av det som skjer, enten det er direkte gjennom det nye sanksjonsregimet mot Russland, syriske flyktninger som kommer til Norge eller anmodninger fra våre allierte om å yte humanitaer bistand i Irak.

by the Great Powers in 1814 was that of a semi-core in an empire. The premise on which this article is based is that Denmark and Norway were both polities, with a polity being a social unit that has 'a distinct identity; a capacity to mobilize persons, that is for value satisfaction; and a degree of institutionalization and hierarchy (leaders and constituents)' (Ferguson and Mansbach 1996: 34). The first step in this analysis is to demonstrate that, although the term itself was not in use, the unfolding meanings of empire in early modern Europe applied to Denmark: It participated fully in the European global expansion in the first colonial period, and retained (and retains) an empire around its core area. Hence, Denmark was an empire in a conceptual sense. The second step is to apply the analytical literature on empire to Denmark and to demonstrate that, in an analytical sense as well, Denmark was indeed an empire. Having established what kind of polity Denmark was, the third step is to determine the status of the Norwegian polity within it. We draw once again on the analytical literature on empire, whose starting point is that empires consist of a core, as well as of a number of peripheries whose closeness to the core varies. Analytically, the question of Norway's place within the empire presents itself as a question of closeness to the core. It is immediately clear that Norway was much closer to the core than a formal colony like the Danish West Indies or an informal one like Greenland. It is also clear that Norway was drawn closer and closer to the imperial centre throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, it is harder to imagine a part of an empire being closer to an imperial core than Norway was to Copenhagen. Drawing on previous work by Andersen, we therefore conclude by suggesting the term semi-core to account for Norway's place within the Danish empire. Conceptual Empire 1 1 1 This article hails from the project 'Manning the State', financed by the Norwegian Research Council. We should like to thank the other participants, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Halvard Leira and Ann Towns, for their input. We also thank Elettra Carboni, Ruth Hemstad and our reviewers for comments. All translations from Scandinavian languages are our own.

With long-dominant structures in flux, European states – and perhaps smaller ones in particular – are now forced to rethink their foreign policy approaches and practices.

This policy briefs outlines how one small Northern European state, Norway, and one Central European state, Czechia, assess and respond to a changing international political context. While located in different geopolitical settings, and with different histories, political systems and resources at their disposal, Norway and Czechia operate under many of the same international framework conditions.

How are Norwegian and Czech officials and policy makers evaluating contemporary developments? What do they identify as the key fears to which they must respond? Which partners and institutional structures have they traditionally relied on – and what indications of change (if any) can we now observe?

We find that Norway and Czechia face many common fears – from concerns about the international order and their global sense of place, to challenges to key institutions such as NATO and the EU, and concerning specific issues such as climate change, energy security, territorial security, and how to best respond to migration. We argue that these common fears could provide a springboard to greater cooperation that can diversify Czechia and Norway’s support networks and entrench a greater sense of international belonging for both countries.

despite the historically widespread use relative to ‘our’ terms – the  concept has received scant attention from IR scholars. Second, however, we also indicate how this use is not a coincidence, but is linked to prevalent liberal ideas about empire, civilizational differences and hierarchies. The central contribution of this chapter is that we explicitly link kinship to the exclusionary mechanisms of ‘standards of civilization’. Observing that Europe for a long time sought to limit membership in the family of nations based on civilization is not new. However, few studies have sought to link this to kinship. ‘Civilized’ has trumped ‘family’ in accounting for the role of the ‘family of civilized nations’.