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This book rethinks the key concepts of International Relations by drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The last few years have seen a genuine wave of publications promoting sociology in international relations. Scholars have suggested that Bourdieu's vocabulary can be applied to study security, diplomacy, migration and global environmental politics. Yet we still lack a systematic and accessible analysis of what Bourdieu-inspired IR might look like. This book provides the answer. It offers an introduction to Bourdieu's thinking to a wider IR audience, challenges key assumptions, which currently structure IR scholarship - and provides an original, theoretical restatement of some of the core concepts in the field. The book brings together a select group of leading IR scholars who draw on both theoretical and empirical insights from Bourdieu. Each chapter covers one central concept in IR: Methodology, Knowledge, Power, Strategy, Security, Culture, Gender, Norms, Sovereignty and Integration. The chapters demonstrate how these concepts can be reinterpreted and used in new ways when exposed to Bourdieusian logic. Challenging key pillars of IR scholarship, Bourdieu in International Relations will be of interest to critical theorists, and scholars of IR theory.

Abstract
Many of the in-built contradictions in the liberal international order were pointed out by critics early on. Why were these voices not heard? How was contestation ignored or made acceptable by the people governing within liberal sub-orders, articulating progress, rationality, and equality? Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge and theories of organizational culture, I address this puzzle through the lens of the "normalization of deviance." Beyond understanding the challenges as a crisis of and within the liberal international order, I argue that they unveil the limitations of hegemonic expertise governing this order. Part of the current predicament of the liberal international order has to do with the entrenched positioning and organizational cultures of political leaders and experts, making them blind to their own blindness. As they justify deviations and defend "their" order, they normalize contestation. The implications extend beyond the immediate challenges to the liberal international order, offering insights into reimagining its future and prompting a reconsideration of the discipline dedicated to understanding it.

AbstractThe EU is divided between member states that have adopted the euro and those that have not. This article looks at the issue of differentiated integration with particular reference to eurozone integration and the euro‐outsiders. I explore the recent public debate in the UK on euro‐outsiderness, comparing this with debates in Denmark. The article highlights some striking differences between the UK and Denmark when it comes to the actual management of euro‐outsiderness in Brussels as well as some of the dilemmas facing euro‐outsiders such as the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Poland as the EU struggles to exit its crises. Finally, I discuss the future of two‐speed European integration and the UK's possible exit from the EU. The UK cannot escape the dilemma of favouring either influence or autonomy; whether the UK remains in or leaves the EU, it will need to allow the eurozone to proceed in order to prevent further eurozone crises.

AbstractThis article explores how practice theory can be recruited for the study of European integration. New generations of EU researchers are fascinated by the prospect of leaving the armchair and studying the people and artefacts that make the EU on an everyday level. This article surveys key practice‐oriented, anthropological and micro‐sociological studies of the EU and European integration and shows how their findings challenge more traditional understandings of the dynamics of European integration. Moving beyond a stock‐taking, the article distinguishes between 'ordering' and 'disordering' practices and explores the potential of a practice turn in EU studies for both theory (overcoming dualism, replacing substantialism with processualism and rethinking power) and methods (including unstructured interviews, fieldwork and participant observation). A practice turn will force us to rethink core assumptions about the EU and allow us to grasp otherwise uncharted performances and social activities that are crucial for European integration.

AbstractThis article develops a theoretical approach to stigma in international relations and resituates conventional approaches to the study of norms and international order. Correcting the general understanding that common values and norms are the building blocks of social order, this article claims that international society is in part constructed through the stigmatization of "transgressive" and norm-violating states and their ways of coping with stigma. Drawing on Erving Goffman, this article shows that states are not passive objects of socialization, but active agents. Stigmatized states cope strategically with their stigma and may, in some cases, challenge and even transform a dominant moral discourse. A typology of stigma management strategies is presented:stigma recognition(illustrated by Germany);stigma rejection(illustrated by Austria); and finallycounter-stigmatization(illustrated by Cuba). Because of the lack of agreement on what constitutes normal state behavior, attempts to impose stigma may even have the opposite effect—the stigmatizers become the transgressive. A focus on stigma opens up new avenues for research on norms, identities, and international order.

National diplomacy is challenged by the rise of non-state actors from transnational companies to non-governmental organisations. In trying to explain these challenges, scholars tend to either focus on a specific new actor or argue that states will remain the dominant diplomatic players. This article develops an alternative Bourdieu-inspired framework addressing symbolic power. It conceptualises diplomacy in terms of a social field with agents (field incumbents and newcomers alike) who co-construct and reproduce the field by struggling for dominant positions. The framework is applied to the EU's new diplomatic service (the European External Action Service, EEAS), which is one of the most important foreign policy inventions in Europe to date. I show that the EEAS does not challenge national diplomacy in a material sense - but at a symbolic level. The EEAS questions the state's meta-capital, that is, its monopoly of symbolic power and this explains the counter-strategies adopted by national foreign services. The struggles to define the 'genuine' diplomat reveal a rupture in the European diplomatic field, pointing towards a transformation of European statehood and the emergence of a hybrid form of diplomacy. A focus on symbolic power opens up new avenues for the study of transformations of authority in world politics. Adapted from the source document.