In a recent article Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argued that attention to practices could help IR scholars overcome ontological gaps and provide a new basis,on which the discipline could be established. Four such dichotomies are... more
In a recent article Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot argued that attention to practices could help IR scholars overcome ontological gaps and provide a new basis,on which the discipline could be established. Four such dichotomies are particularlysalient: between the material and the meaningful, the rational and the practical,between agencies and structures, and between the forces of stability and of change.By failing to provide a theoretical basis for a synthesis, however, this project will fail. What a practice is, and how ontological gaps should be understood, cannot bedetermined outside of the context of a theory. The article reviews theoretical attemptsto deal with the dichotomies Adler and Pouliot identified and investigates the role of practices in the study of international relations.
