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This article builds on the practice turn's welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scope conditions for reflection during ongoing practice, which increase the probability of a change in practices, I also elaborate mechanisms by which ongoing practices may yield an endogenous source of change. I illustrate some of these conditions for change from recent International Relations scholarship on practices in world politics.

This article builds on the practice turn's welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scope conditions for reflection during ongoing practice, which increase the probability of a change in practices, I also elaborate mechanisms by which ongoing practices may yield an endogenous source of change. I illustrate some of these conditions for change from recent International Relations scholarship on practices in world politics.

Russia could have annexed Crimea anytime in the last 25 years. The fact that it did so only in March 2014 is a puzzle. I argue that the predominant discourse of Russian national identity by 2014 made the annexation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine both thinkable and natural to Moscow. A history of the discursive terrain of Russia from 1992 to 2014 shows how Russia's national identity has evolved over the years, both in response to Western inactions or actions and domestic developments. But Russian identity is not a sufficient explanation for Russian behavior in Ukraine. For that, we must pay attention to the event itself: Western support for the Maidan protestors, Western failure to adhere to the February 2014 agreements reached with Moscow on a transitional government in Ukraine with Yanukovych at its head and new elections in November, the presence of disgruntled Russians in Ukraine, and perhaps most important, over a decade of US unilateralism in foreign affairs.

AbstractThe IR literature on hegemony rarely combines attention to material power and ideas. Cox's neo-Gramscian work is a rare exception, but it too narrowly construes Gramsci's conceptualization of common sense, reducing it to elite views on political economy. But Gramsci argued that hegemony had to reckon with mass quotidian common sense. If political elites do not take into account the taken-for-granted world of the masses, elite ideological projects would likely founder against daily practices of resistance. In this article, I show how mass common sense can be an obstacle to an elite hegemonic project aimed at moving a great power into the core of the world capitalist economy. In contemporary Russia, a ruling elite with a neoliberal project is being thwarted daily by a mass common sense that has little affinity with democratic market capitalism. Scholarly work on future Chinese, Brazilian, or Indian participation in constructing a new hegemonic order would do well to pay attention to the mass common senses prevailing in those societies