The International as an Everyday Practice

The concept of the everyday is an emerging concept in the field of international studies that has made faint but repeated appearances in the literature for the past ten years (essentially through the medium of ethnographic or autobiographic accounts) and has become a key component of critical International Political Economy. The idea of this forum is to offer a space for authors to engage with the concept of the everyday in order to provide different venues by which the international can be approached from the perspective of the everyday. The everyday is a concept that has seen a variety of theoretical engagements from very different authors or groups, including Michel De Certeau, Michel Foucault, the surrealists, Pierre Bourdieu, James Scott, the situationists, Henri Lefebvre, Erving Goffman, Michel Maffesoli, American pragmatists or Mikhail Bakhtin (for useful overviews and engagements with the literature see, for instance, Gardiner 2000; Highmore 2002; Hviid Jacobsen 2009; Moran 2005; Sheringham 2006). These authors have provided us with a variety of concepts or approaches to think about everyday life and practices as a central feature of relations among social, political or economic subjectivities as well as the relations between these subjectivities and general, even global, structures.