Studying social action in interaction
Some parts of the discursive literature in IR overlap with the scholarship that focuses on foreign policy practices. This is not surprising given the specific intentions by the scholars behind the practice turn to create an interparadigmatic research programme and promote methodological pluralism (Adler and Pouliot 2011:3). Nevertheless, there seems to be a division developing in the practice turn between those who focus on the language practitioners use by building on scholarship inspired by Michel Foucault, and those who focus on practitioners’ political actions, that is ‘what practitioners do’, in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s work. This book argues that it is instrumental to combine both. However, focusing on the linguistic resources used by practitioners and on the way they construct their social actions allows us to understand and explain specific foreign policy decisions or their practice. In order to do so, a new framework called Discursive International Relations (DIR) is put forward. DIR shares the same philosophical roots as some constructivist and most poststructuralist discursive approaches applied in IR, but it also combines features of discursive psychology (Edwards and Potter 1992), conversation analysis (Davies and Harré 1990; Sacks 1992) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967, Lynch et al 1983) in order to combine discourse and practice.