How does power work in practice? Much of the 'stuff' that state agents and other international actors do, on an everyday basis, remains impenetrable to existing International Relations theory. This is unfortunate, as the everyday performance of international practices actually helps shape world policy outcomes. In this article, we develop a framework to grasp the concrete workings of power in international politics. The notion of 'emergent power' bridges two different understandings of power: as capability or relation. Emergent power refers to the generation and deployment of endogenous resources -social skills and competences -generated in particular practices. The framework is illustrated with an in-depth analysis of the multilateral diplomatic process that led to the 2011 international intervention in Libya. Through a detailed account of the negotiations at the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union, the article demonstrates how, in practice, state representatives translate their skills into actual influence and generate a power politics that eschews structural analysis. We argue that seemingly trivial struggles over diplomatic competence within these three multilateral organizations played a crucial role in the intervention in Libya. A focus on practice resituates existing approaches to power and influence in International Relations, demonstrating that, in practice, power also emerges locally from social contexts. 891Taking international practices seriously, we argue, helps address these shortcomings. The everyday performance of international politics is not a mere epiphenomenon of deeper structural forces; it is also a generative force in and of itself. Central to our framework is the notion of 'emergent power,' which refers to the endogenous resourcessocial skills or competences -generated within practices. Through a detailed account of the multilateral negotiations on Libya at the UNSC, NATO, and EU, we demonstrate how state representatives use various tactics to wield influence by establishing themselves as skillful diplomats, while undermining similar claims by their opponents.Importantly, we do not claim to account for the Libyan war, in the sense of identifying all its multifaceted causes. Instead, our more limited purpose is to provide an account of the intervention, centered on multilateral diplomacy. In IR, most theories tend to explain military interventions by inferring the belligerents' interests, derived from the international structure (e.g. balancing), domestic politics (e.g. diversion), or norms (e.g. humanitarianism). There is no doubt that interests, norms, and structural forces played a role in the Libya case, but our argument operates on a different analytical plane. In tune with practice theory, we refrain from using motives, which are often empirically intractable, as explanatory variables. Instead, we zoom in on the actual moves performed by national diplomats at the UNSC, NATO, and EU in order to reconstruct the dynamics of influence that gave the i...

This 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 finally counter-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.

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This article examines the formal and informal practices of two champions of opting out, the United Kingdom and Denmark, in the area of Justice and Home Affairs. On the surface, both countries have chosen to avoid further integration within this policy area to safeguard national autonomy. Foreign policy experts have argued that national reservations lead to the loss of influence and possibly second-class membership, and legal scholars describe substantial opt-outs as a 'hijacking' of the acquis communautaire. This article demonstrates that opting out does not necessarily imply that member states are out in the cold. Both the UK and Denmark, it is argued, have influence and adapt to new EU legislation, even in politically sensitive areas covered by their protocols. National opt-outs are pragmatically circumvented in the consensus-oriented Council of Ministers.

This 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.

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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.

How are controversial national opt-outs managed and perceived in the EU? This article argues that the United Kingdom and Denmark compensate diplomatically for the exclusionary effects of their exemptions. A Bourdieudian approach to national diplomacy in the EU is developed to explore how British and Danish officials handle their opt-outs. By drawing on extensive interview data, it is demonstrated that the two opt-out champions employ various sophisticated strategies to overcome the dilemma between autonomy and influence. Some diplomatic strategies reduce marginalization while others enhance it. National opt-outs are ambiguous attempts at avoiding further European integration. Copyright (c) 2008 The Author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.