Making Use of the ‘View from Somewhere’: Creativity of Practice and Problems of Recognition in the European Security Order

The ‘practice turn’ in International Relations (IR) has generated innovative perspectives on world politics—but despite its relational ontology, the vital claim to bring the ‘everyday’ to the forefront and wealth of empirical works, substantive debates within the ‘turn’ remain surprisingly theoretical. Researching international practice still tends to be premised on definitional prefiguration regarding how practices, whether patterned or volatile, ought to look to qualify as such. We argue that pragmatist-inspired methodologies turn this conceptual diversity into a resource for empirical research attuned to the contingent character of practices and their recognition as such. Drawing on research on European defence cooperation and ordering processes, we show how the very perception of social behaviour is shaped by implicit visualisations of practices as taking a determinate form. These Gestalt switches are contingent upon the situatedness of practice within relatively homogeneous communities with shared assumptions, such as the European Union (EU), or, conversely, across geopolitical divides, where practices are more readily rendered as irregular exceptions instead of expected regularities. By zooming in and out, we demonstrate a strategy of methodological reflexivity through the deliberate adoption of a ‘view from somewhere’, expanding possibilities of observation and enabling the recognition of elements—such as creativity and mutual recognition—foregrounded by one perspective yet overlooked by another.