When Can We Know Practices? Rules, Logics, and Epistemologies of Practice in IR

This article examines who can know practices and under what conditions. While scholarship on the practice turn in International Relations (PTIR) emphasizes the tacit, embodied and pre-reflective qualities of practice, it often relies on interviews and textual accounts that presuppose practitioner reflexivity. This tension has been obscured by conflating two dimensions of practice: the rules that constitute and regulate a practice, and the logic of practice, understood as the historically sedimented dispositions that make certain actions appear sensible. The article develops a typology of five epistemological positions in PTIR to show how these dimensions have been treated as differently accessible to researchers and practitioners. Its central claim is that epistemic access to the logic of practice is context-dependent: usually tacit, the logic may become articulable when routines are disrupted or actors occupy liminal positions. This matters for international political sociology because explanations based on fields, dispositions and background knowledge depend on whether the conditions that render the logic of practice articulable are present. Practitioner accounts should therefore be treated as situated, partial evidence whose value depends on when, where and from whom they are elicited. Consequently, researchers should match their methods to the dimension of practice under study.