The linguistic turn in the social sciences has been fruitful in directing attention towards the preconditions for action, as well as those actions understood as speech acts. However, to the extent that the linguistic turn comprises only textual approaches, it brackets out the study of other kinds of action, and so cannot account for social life understood as a whole. We should return to seminal theorists such as Wittgenstein and Foucault, who complemented a linguistic turn with a turn towards practices. Drawing on the work of ethnographers such as Michel de Certeau and sociologists such as Ann Swidler, in part one of this article I suggest that this may be done by using a simple model of culture as a mutually conditioned play between discourse and practices. In part two, I use this model to study changing Norwegian diplomatic practices in the High North in the aftermath of the Cold War. The claim is that capital-based diplomatic practices are being complemented by emerging local practices which may only be governed from the capital by indirect means. Diplomacy thus changes from being a centralised to being a multibased practice.

Studies of global governance typically claim that the state has lost power to nonstate actors and that political authority is increasingly institutionalized in spheres not controlled by states. In this article, we challenge the core claims in the literature on global governance. Rather than focusing on the relative power of states and nonstate actors, we focus on the sociopolitical functions and processes of governance in their own right and seek to identify their rationality as practices of political rule. For this task, we use elements of the conception of power developed by Michel Foucault in his studies of “governmentality.” In this perspective, the role of nonstate actors in shaping and carrying out global governance‐functions is not an instance of transfer of power from the state to nonstate actors but rather an expression of a changing logic or rationality of government (defined as a type of power) by which civil society is redefined from a passive object of government to be acted upon into an entity that is both an object and a subject of government. The argument is illustrated by two case studies: the international campaign to ban landmines, and international population policy. The cases show that the self‐association and political will‐formation characteristic of civil society and nonstate actors do not stand in opposition to the political power of the state, but is a most central feature of how power, understood as government, operates in late modern society.

The study of identity offers a possibility to theorize on the human collectives of world politics, to give them an ontological status, and to discuss how they are constituted and maintain themselves. The first part discusses social theorizing of collective identity along the ethnographic, the psychological, the Continental philosophical, and particularly, the `Eastern excursion' of theorizing; Bakhtin, Levinas and Kristeva are lauded for jettisoning a dialectical mode of analysis in favour of a dialogical one which respects difference. The second part discusses how Der Derian, Shapiro, Campbell, the `Copenhagen coterie' and Wendt have brought this theorizing into IR, and assesses their work in terms of that discussed in the first part. The study of identity formation should do away with psychologizing conjecture and focus on the drawing on social boundaries and the role played by groups who are ambiguously poised between the self and the others. Collective identities are overlapping and multifaceted phenomena which must not be reified and studied in isolation from one another.

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We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.

This article argues the case for a new approach to the analysis of regions. It highlights how a region is constantly being denned and redefined by its members in a permanent discourse with each member attempting to identify itself at the core of the region. The core is defined in both territorial and functional terms and this definition necessarily involves a manipulation of knowledge and power. This region building approach utilizes the literature on nation-building and the genealogical writings of anti-foundationalists. It does not, however, attempt to place the study of regions in international relations on a new footing or replace what are arguably the two dominant approaches in the existing literature: an ‘inside-out’ approach focusing on cultural integration and an ‘outside-in’ approach focusing on geopolitics. Rather, it aims to extend the ongoing debate by asking questions about how and why the existence of a given region was postulated in the first place, who perpetuates its existence and with what intentions, and how students of regions, by including or excluding certain areas and peoples, help to perpetuate or transform a given region. After sketching the divergent approaches used to analyze regions, the second part of the article identifies how the two dominant approaches have comprehended Northern Europe, and it then uses the region-building approach to criticize and supplement their findings.

Drawing on ethnographic material on speech writing in the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I argue that this practice and others like it integrate the Ministry by setting up the work so that every subsection of the Ministry is allowed a say, and by short‐circuiting outside attempts to access the practice for other purposes, such as tailormaking speeches to audience needs and expectations. Speeches are treated first and foremost as instantiations of the ministry. Inasmuch as a Ministry of Foreign Affairs consists of units that mediate relationships to widely different worlds, there is a pressing need for it sometimes to speak in one voice. Speech writing turns out to be such a practice, and the work of the ministry is set up in such a way that this is guaranteed to continue, barring outside intervention from politicians. This finding supports the hypotheses of Michael Herzfeld and Mary Douglas about the integration of organizations, while also demonstrating in detail how diplomatic working routines secure invariance by actively relegating innovative moves in order to repeat an already existing form. Change will therefore reach the interior of the organization from its margins, where the costs of non‐adaptability is most keenly felt. Change in diplomacy may therefore be expected to be initiated by politicians, not by diplomats themselves.

No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man. Each time, it has to do with the discourse of responsibility: I have, the unique I has, the responsibility of testifying for universality. Each time, the exemplarity of the example is unique. This is why it can be put into series and formalized into a law.1