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Abstract
By focusing on like-mindedness, community of practice (CoP) scholars are often accused of downgrading issues of power and contestation. This article theorizes practice contestation as an integral part of participation in a community. Building on a relational ontology and the concept of epistemic power, I define practice contestation as tacit (practical) or discursive interventions challenging the shared background knowledge of a CoP. This process is bidirectional (pushing for and against change) and happens at two levels (within a CoP and at the boundaries with other CoPs). This framework leads to four types of practice contestation: internal disruption, internal resistance, external pressure, and external resistance. These concomitant types of contestation participate in the constant fluctuations of international practices and social orders. Methodologically, this article looks at the CoP of World Bank's senior managers and their boundaries with other communities, and it builds on interview material and archival documents collected between 2017 and 2020.

Over the past few decades, International Relations (IR) scholars started to acknowledge the field's racist and colonial legacy. However, only a few studies examined ethnocentricity in the Western IR classroom, and whereas most studied textbooks and graduate training, they seldom looked at undergraduate courses. This article demonstrates that the discipline is taught to IR scholars-to-be by centring Western experience, epistemes, history and agency. After defining the Western gaze of IR, I explore ways to decentre syllabi in the presentation of (1) world history, in (2) reading lists and in (3) the minds of Western IR instructors. This article is based on a qualitative analysis of 50 'Introduction to IR' undergraduate syllabi in the United States and Canada. Décentrer le regard occidental en relations internationales : Les exclusions épistémiques des plans des cours aux États-Unis et au Canada

The most frequent practice in teaching western undergraduate students about international relations (IR) is either to avoid gender studies altogether or at best to compartmentalize them to a single week. This practice marginalizes feminist research by amalgamating highly heterogeneous publications under the pretense that "they look at gender." Rather than treating gender studies as a unified research program, they should be linked to the full range of theories, approaches, or topics they are relevant to, based on their normative and ontological assumptions. In the end, gender-oriented scholars do not form a would-be paradigm, but a community of practice. This community, however, can itself perpetuate colonial exclusions and silencing. This study is based on a content analysis of fifty western undergraduate "Introduction to IR" syllabi from 2015 to 2020, as well as a reflection on my own experience since 2011 as a student, teaching assistant, guest lecturer, and professor in ten IR courses at three western universities.

Abstract
Feminist social theories, especially intersectional and decolonial ones, have been footnotes at best in practice-oriented research in international relations. This disciplinary exclusion of gender studies' concepts from "international practice theories" (IPTs) or the "practice turn" has marginalized inquiries into power and reflexivity in action. As a result, IPTs have failed to theorize how practitioners' reflexivity is shaped by local manifestations of systemic lines of difference like race, gender, coloniality, or class. This Theory Note argues that intersectional and decolonial feminist approaches can address this gap. We demonstrate that positionality and privilege condition practical reflexivity by shaping (1) normative interpretations of the world, (2) the content of social critique, and (3) the reception of such critique. Taking feminists as foundational theorists of international practices is critical to addressing some ontological challenges encountered by current IPT scholarship. In this Theory Note, we develop a productive conversation between the two bodies of literature around concepts of background knowledge and competence, which allows for a better understanding of the interplay of structural power and individual reflexivity in everyday interactions.

Over the past decade, there has been a new "decolonial turn," albeit less related than before to land and political independence. "To decolonize" is now associated with something less tangible and often under-defined. We argue that scholars, especially Western ones, should avoid depoliticizing the expression "decolonizing" by using it as a buzzword. Scholars and policymakers should use the expression only if it is closely related to the political meaning ascribed to it by Global South and Indigenous activists and scholars. Decoloniality is a political project of human emancipation through collective struggles, entailing at least the following: 1) abolishing racial hierarchies within the hetero-patriarchal and capitalist world order, 2) dismantling the geopolitics of knowledge production, and 3) rehumanizing our relationships with Others and nature. We conclude that there is a need for epistemic humility and that Western scholars and institutions must refrain from using the word too freely.

Abstract
This special forum focuses on international communities of practice (CoP) as a concept and an object of inquiry in International Relations (IR). The Introduction discusses the concept's origins and how it has entered the field of IR. It addresses why and how CoPs matter to IR scholars by looking at how structure, agency, processes, institutions, and knowledge manifest themselves in communities. This special forum's main contributions are: (1) capturing the political and economic effects of shared knowledge creation and diffusion through practices; (2) identifying the sources of knowledge production and learning, as well as the normative and political contestation within and between CoPs; (3) studying the social processes that originate at the boundaries between CoPs; (4) examining how people and processes generate, transform, and communicate knowledge; and (5) exploring how CoPs cultivate global governance's norms, values, and practices from the bottom up. The Introduction also helps distinguish CoP from other relational concepts in IR such as networks, fields, regimes, and epistemic or security communities. It ends by way of situating the contributions to the special forum and outlining a research agenda on CoPs in world politics.