This article builds on the practice turn’s welcome move to redirect our attention to the unconscious habitual practices that constitute most of daily social life, including in world politics. Since International Relations practice theorists continue to resort to arguments that include deliberate reflection, I try to clarify the relationship between going on in the world automatically and proceeding with conscious reflection. Beyond providing scope conditions for reflection during ongoing practice, which increase the probability of a change in practices, I also elaborate mechanisms by which ongoing practices may yield an endogenous source of change. I illustrate some of these conditions for change from recent International Relations scholarship on practices in world politics.

Introduction The most important contribution of the practice turn in International Relations (PTIR) theory has perhaps been to shift our focus from reflective deliberation and conscious instrumental and normative decision-making to the daily practices of habitual sayings and doings. The dominance of habit in everyday life has been recognized for centuries, and is a central assumption of practice turn theorists. However, PTIR, in its understandable desire to point our theoretical gaze to practical consciousness and away from reflective deliberation, has found itself unable to provide a creditable account for change in world politics. Yes, there is, of course, change in practices themselves through the operation of practices, but these are conceded by International Relations (IR) scholars to be able to explain only change at the margins. I am not the first sympathetic critic to point out the problem that PTIR has with explaining change.1 A primary reason for this problem, I argue, is the PTIR’s abandonment of reflection, despite the fact that, as I will show, deliberate reflection plays a large role in the theorization of practice in the works of the social theorists of practice on which PTIR relies. By ignoring reflection, IR scholars of the practice turn have robbed themselves of a more comprehensive and promising account of change. In their conclusion to one of the original foundational texts in PTIR, Adler and Pouliot’s (2011)International Practices, Duvall and Chowdhury (2011: 337) claim that “the analysis of practices falls short of offering satisfying ways of theorizing change in international politics.” Bueger and Gadinger (2014: 60–65) also single out the unresolved “tension between understanding practice as a social regularity and as a fluid entity” — we are faced with the “continuously changing character of practice on the one side, and the identification of stable, regulated patterns, routines, and reproduction on the other” — they suggest that “understanding when and how practices transform under which conditions … will be one of the main challenges for future studies in international practice theory” (see also Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 456; Kustermans, 2015: 19).2 I make several claims: first, practical consciousness and unreflective habits are the predominant ways of going on in the social world, as argued by social theories of practice and PTIR. Second, deliberate conscious reflection still plays a central role in the social theory of practice, and should play such a role in PTIR as well. Third, PTIR has a problem in explaining change. In particular, endogenous change in practice through the operation of practices, despite being ubiquitous, does not account for the kind of meaningful and significant change that we mostly care about in the study of world politics. Fourth, conscious reflection increases the probability of such meaningful change but, as practice theory argues, is not as common as practical consciousness. I, therefore suggest scope conditions that are most likely to accompany such conscious reflection.

Habit in social theories of practice PTIR has justifiably insisted that we treat unconscious practices as the most important starting point for understanding the social world. After all, habit has held scholarly attention for centuries.3 John Dewey, one of the most inspirational figures for PTIR, wrote almost a century ago that “man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor instinct” (Dewey, 1921: 125). PTIR scholars argue that we should redirect our theoretical and empirical attention away from the two reflective logics of social action: the instrumental rationality of the logic of consequences and the normative rationality of the logic of appropriateness. We should instead privilege the non-reflective and non-representational logics of habit and practice. Pierre Bourdieu, the contemporary social theorist whose sociological works on practice are most frequently used to ground PTIR, understood broad norm adherence as a product of unconscious doxa. Instead of constantly referring to our identities to find out what we should do in a particular situation: it is this immediate and tacit agreement, in every respect opposed to an explicit contract, that founds the relation of doxic submission, which attaches us to the established order with all the ties of the unconscious. The recognition of legitimacy is not, as Weber believed, a free act of clear conscience. It is rooted in the immediate, prereflexive agreement between objective structures and embodied structures, now turned unconscious. (Bourdieu, 1998: 55–56) What PTIR fails to fully grasp is that while automatic going on in the world is, of course, central, conscious reflection still matters. In fact, habit frees up the reflective mind to consciously deliberate about the world. Instead of acknowledging that habits permit reflection, PTIR treats habits themselves as inherently creative (Kratochwil, 2016). However, habits are not creative; they are permissive, not productive. Claire Carlisle (2013: 48), surveying theological and philosophical views on habit from Thomas Aquinas to Hegel, concludes that: because so much of our activity is taken care of by habit … our energies and attention are free for other things, including creative thought. Without this effect of habit, it is difficult to imagine the development of a culture beyond the basic elements of survival.4 Summarizing the views of Martin Heidegger, another central figure in the theorization of practice, Dreyfus (1991: 93–94) describes habit as that “nondeliberate action” or “unthinking comportment” providing “the nonsalient background that makes it possible deliberately to focus on what is unusual or important or difficult.” Social theorists of practice, if not IR users of practice theory, while privileging taken-for-granted everyday practices, still recognize conscious reflection as a necessary component of successfully going on in the world. First, one certainly learns habits and practices in the first place via deliberate attention. To be sure, while mimesis, or simple repetition of what is done around us and not doing what is not done around us, plays a primary role in the acquisition of habitual practices for practice turn theorists, they also acknowledge the role of learning rules or being deliberately instructed. Bourdieu (1976: 17), for example, argued that while “the inculcation of the habitus transpires for the most part simply through children encountering and interacting with people going about their business,” this “process is hastened, and its misfirings corrected, by the citation of rules.”5 In other words, both mimesis and reflection are part of learning practices in the first place.6 Practice theory confuses matters by often concentrating on the “mindlessness” of virtuoso performances by chess grandmasters, concert violinists, and professional tennis players, paying no attention to how they learned their skills in the first place. In fact, the play of chess masters is “based … on previous attention to thousands of actual and book games, [and so] incorporates a tradition that determines the appropriate response to each situation” (Dreyfus, 1991: 93–94). Scholarship in psychology confirms the three hunches of practice theory: habits dominate everyday life; habits free up humans to reflect; and habits are acquired through a combination of imitation and instruction. From the perspective of cognitive psychology, humans are naturally habitual; otherwise, they could not go on in the world. Humans operate on the principle of “least effort,” not “maximum thought” (Van den Berg, 1998).7

Reflection in social theories of practice Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger differentiate among five different approaches to practice theory. The first and most prominent approach to the practice turn is Bourdieu. However, there is clearly conscious reflection in Bourdieu’s writings as he calls habitus a “cognitive scheme” that agents implement in order to go on in the world. The very stakes of political struggle are a “cognitive struggle for the power to impose the legitimate vision of the social world … its present meaning and the direction in which it is going and should go” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 168; see also Bourdieu, 2000: 152, 185). The second stream that Bueger and Gadinger identify is the “community of practice” approach of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who argue that “within these communities, meanings are negotiated [and] knowledge is created, and community members’ deliberate what their joint enterprise is constituted by” (Bueger and Gadinger, 2014: 29–31). Learning, knowing, negotiation, and deliberation all require reflection: [about] what matters and what not … what to do and what not, what to pay attention to and what not … what to justify and what to take for granted … when actions are good enough … and when they need improvement or refinement. (Wenger, 1998: 81) At a minimum, conscious reflection is a necessary part of practice when community members are learning what it means to be a member of any particular community. Vincent Pouliot (2016) observed that it takes at least a year or more for diplomats at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United Nations (UN) to learn the “feel for the game” in those institutions. The third approach, based on the work of De Certeau, is narrative, wherein actors use narratives “in their deliberative practices to make sense of a problem” (Bueger and Gadinger, 2014: 36–41). Through subjective storytelling, different worlds are created. It is impossible to tell a story, or deliberate, without consciousness. Another approach identified is Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology. They describe actors who “consciously decide when it is either appropriate to engage in justification” or not and credit Boltanski with the foundational premise of “frankly critical and reflexive actors” (Bueger and Gadinger, 2014: 53, 73). Only Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory escapes crediting conscious reflection in its account of practice. I make use of this exception below. Later, Bueger and Gadinger (2015: 455) add pragmatism, which argues that practices can “only be grasped if one takes their [participants’] perspective as fundamental.” Indeed, situations are “always in need of interpretation by involved agents,” which requires reflection. Similarly, Andreas Reckwitz (2002: 249) defines practice as including “forms of mental activities, background knowledge, and motivational knowledge.” The latter, at least, entails conscious reflection. In a foundational text for practice theory, Schatzki (2001b: 50) writes that “it is the role the socially constituted mind plays in structuring practices that certifies practices as the place of social order.” Practices, in part at least, are “organized by a pool of understandings [and] a set of rules” (Schatzki, 2001b: 58). Despite the practice turn privileging the practical consciousness of “knowing how” versus the discursive consciousness of “knowing that or what,” in practice, practice theorists themselves cannot do without reflection. For example, Schatzki writes that “knowing what another person is doing helps determine how to respond to him” (2001b: 58 emphasis added). He distinguishes this from “practical intelligibility,” which is primarily determined not by understanding, “but by rules, teleology, and affectivity.” The latter two aside, by rules, he means “the explicit formulations that enjoin or school in particular actions.” These include, “statute law, rules of thumb, and explicit normative enjoining.” None of this is unconscious, but rather demands reflection for practices to proceed in any organized fashion. Indeed, he continues: “What people often do often reflects formulations of which they are aware.” What makes sense to them to do often “reflects their understanding of specific rules” (all quotes taken from Schatzki, 2001b: 58–62). In another important text, Lave and Wenger (1991) wished to demonstrate the primacy of knowing how over knowing that or what. The contributors and editors argue that learning occurs through doing, not through reading a text or a manual. In other words, we learn “how,” we do not learn “that.” However, in the 12 case studies used, not a single one of them is able to do without dozens of pages on learning “that” this is how we can be a midwife, “that” these are the things a navy quartermaster does, and does not, do in order to do the job appropriately, and so on. Even a classic practice turn text cannot get away from reflection despite asserting that we can theorize the social world without it. Barry Barnes (2001: 29) warns that reacting against the excesses of those who privilege reflection or representational knowledge: by giving attention exclusively to the role of practice is merely to indulge in another form of excess. It amounts to an ungrounded prejudice in favor of know-how at the expense of know-that, in favor of skill and competence at the expense of information and representation. As Schatzki (2001a: 17) insists, “claims about practical understanding deny neither the existence nor the efficacy of explicit formulations in ongoing activity. Skills and explicit propositions work in tandem. What is more, different mixes reign in different practice arenas”; there is obviously room for reflection in practice. By ignoring reflection in practice, the PTIR omits an important part of the social theory of practice, and also robs the theory of significant sources of change in practices.

Change in practice Emanuel Adler in writing his entry for the Handbook of International Relations, quotes my argument that “constructivism is agnostic about change.” (Adler, 2002: 102; Hopf, 1998: 180) On the contrary, Adler counters, “constructivism is nothing if not about change.” (Adler, 2002: 102). More recently, in their introduction to International Practices, Adler and Pouliot write that “change not stability is the ordinary condition of social life.” (Adler and Pouliot, 2011: 16. See also Doty, 1997; Pouliot and Cornut, 2015). In what follows, I try to make sense of these differences. First, I address what change is. Second, I offer a non-reflective account of change, elaborating ways in which unconscious performances of practices can result in a change in practices independent of anyone’s intention to effect such change. I think it is the latter to which Adler and Pouliot refer, but a fuller account of change occurring in practices requires attention to reflective conscious choices as well. Third, I offer a reflective account of change, which is mostly rejected by PTIR. What is change? It can be acknowledged that practices are never the same, across time performed by the same person, or across the same practice performed by different people. As Barnes (2001: 34) reminds us: “rules can never be sufficiently informative … to keep instances of rule-following behavior relevantly identical in all the diverse situations wherein rules are followed.” However, Schatzki reminds us that: an event is not the same thing as a change.… To be sure, every activity is unique and thereby effects a change in, that is, an expansion of, the total stock of events. Not every activity, however, constitutes changes beyond this. We must realize that “many events perpetuate existing practices … and effect only negligible changes, if any” (Schatzki, 2011: 4). This runs counter to the “prominent contemporary intuition that becoming — or process … are understood as continuous change” (Schatzki, 2011: 8). Jorg Kustermans (2015: 7–8) criticizes PTIR for not acknowledging that “change and process are not the same thing” and for assuming “change to be ubiquitous” when, in fact, “this remains a metaphysical wager.” Change in practices This article treats change as a change in practices — what we are saying and doing. This does not mean that there is any observable or significant change in social structures. It only means that how one goes on in the world is different at t + 1 than at t. I explore two routes to such change. The first is the unconscious unarticulable one, or changes in practice through practice (or practical consciousness or agency), and is privileged by PTIR. The second is the conscious reflective route, or changes in practice through reflection (or reflective or discursive practice or agency). I end with a discussion of the conditions under which we should expect reflection.

Change in practice through practice A central insight of the practice turn is that change may occur without conscious reflection, through the operation of practices themselves. As Adler and Pouliot (2011: 7) put it: “there is always wiggle room for agency even in repetition.” Janice Bially-Mattern (2011: 72, n. 40), in the same volume, criticized Adler and Pouliot for making this observation without offering “a theoretical account of how this is possible.” In what follows, I offer mechanisms by which we may see “wiggle room” in action. Arguing that practice changes through practice is a very significant claim as it implies that all of us are change agents all the time, even if unconsciously. It also implies that practical changes occur without any necessary or predictable directions, hence making any efforts at predicting change futile. All we can best do is historically reconstruct the collection of practices that produced the changes in practices that we ultimately observe. Nor is there any reason to specify scope conditions as we are constantly re/producing practices merely by their use, whereas, as we will see later, reflection is more, or less, likely depending on a number of circumstances. Bourdieu’s concept of “practical sense,” which he distinguishes from conscious thought, and Giddens’s “practical knowledge,” which he distinguishes from discursive knowledge, both speak of the unarticulated everyday practices of agents operating within constraining social structures. Through these unconscious engagements with the world, a world that itself is always just a little different than it was a moment ago, adjustments in practices occur that we might call change. An important contribution of Bourdieu (1976: 11) is the idea of “regulated improvisation”: how change occurs despite the fact that individuals are constrained by their habitus within a social field to automatically respond to the cues of their environments in a predictable fashion. Thus, there is improvisation, but within limits. Otherwise, there is nothing but stasis if people only respond reflexively to structured predispositions. Nonetheless, Bourdieu repeatedly reminds us of the limits of such improvisation, while simultaneously insisting that it demonstrates the capacity for agency within the habitus, if only an anchored kind of agency (see also Bueger and Gadinger, 2015: 453; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 979; Ortner, 2011: 80). Similarly, Wittgenstein (1953: 128e, #431) writes that “there is a gulf between an order and its execution. It has to be filled up by the act of understanding.”8 There is no precise correspondence between the rules that govern everyday social life and the unique features of social life encountered every day.9 Necessarily, all of us must act in situations under-specified by the necessarily non-existent rulebook. How we respond to these situations is almost always “appropriate” in that we go on in the world without a hitch. However, even minor improvisations in how we follow the rule can bring about minor adjustments by others. In other words, as a rule does not apply itself and has to be applied, we must necessarily “improvise” when applying any rule, and in so doing, we change what the rule means in practice. Before we know it, how a rule is generally understood can be undermined, and transformed. This is the kind of unintentional change that the concept of practical agency captures. Wittgenstein recognizes this unintentional potential for slippage: “We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike” (Wittgenstein, 1953: 224e). However, this passage also reflects the intrinsic barriers to change: a very high probability of not recognizing differences in performances and uses even when we see them. Practices are also never precisely the same because no two phenomena are ever identical. The social world, and the audience for one’s words, gestures, practices, and actions, is constantly changing, like the Heraclitian River. Moreover, each of us is irreducibly unique. Our life experiences make it impossible for us to be identical to each other in understanding the social world and our places in it. Hence, in executing a practice, it is unlikely that we will be performing that practice in a way identical to others performing the “same” practice. It is these potentially meaningful differences in understanding the “same” word, idea, or practice that makes practical agency possible in terms of unintentionally effecting change while believing that one is doing nothing, or nothing of the kind, or doing precisely the opposite.10 Unconscious practices may foster change because none of us can possibly know all the consequences of what one says or does. As Bourdieu (1976: 79, emphasis added) put it: Each agent is a producer and reproducer of objective meaning. Because his actions and works are the product of a modus operandi of which he is not the producer and has no conscious mastery, they contain an objective intention which outruns his conscious intentions…. It is because subjects do not know what they are doing that what they are doing has more meaning than they know.11 Operating at a more meso-level is Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis, or the conflict created when an agent who is inhabiting a habitus suited to one social field finds herself in another field where the social, cultural, and material capital valued in the first field turns out to be mismatched to the new social field that she has entered.12 Such mismatches result in both/either an agent realizing her devaluation and hence need to adjust to the new field and/or the field adjusting to her new, and challenging, sources of capital. One can imagine, for example, taking one’s working-class habitus off to Oxbridge or the Ivy League and finding one’s tales of summer jobs and poor public education an awkward fit with the prevailing elitist habitus of summer camps and preparatory schools. Finally, practices intentionally aimed at resisting prevailing social structures can unintentionally pave the way for the large changes in those structures that we more readily observe. James Scott’s (2012: 12) “weapons of the weak” are acts of resistance that are intended, but that are not intended to bring about the transformative effects that they ultimately bring about. What is unintended is the overthrow of the existing order; what is intended is the expression of discontent with that order, or at least one’s small local part of that daily life. James Scott calls acts of “foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight” constitutive of “infrapolitics” because “it is practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity.” He employs the metaphor of a growing coral reef, where just like anthozoan polyps, “thousands upon thousands of acts of insubordination” create an “economic and political barrier reef of their own” (Scott, 2012: xvii–xx, 7) that can effectively counter the existing order (see also Watson, 2012).

Change in practice through reflection Despite its primary focus on unintentional practices, practice turn theory reserves a large space for conscious reflection and consequent change in practices. While it would be incorrect to say that practice theorists believe that reflection is necessary for change, since most argue that unconscious practices themselves produce change, as seen earlier, they do argue that reflection is very often an occasion for change. Moreover, while it can be said that changes in practice are ubiquitous, it is also widely assumed that these changes in practice through practice are largely incremental and marginal, not fundamental.13 The latter is more likely to come through conscious reflection. Ruminating about the 1897 Pullman strike in Chicago, John Dewey concluded that “the few thousand freight cars burned up was a pretty cheap price to pay — it was the stimulus necessary to direct attention, and it might easily have taken more to get the social organism thinking” (quoted in Menand, 2001: 297; see also Kratochwil, 2011: 47; Miettinen, 2006: 403). Dewey (1921: 100) distinguished between those who unthinkingly accept the world as it is and those who see it as an opportunity for reflection. There is a “remarkable difference between the attitude which accepts the objects of perception … as final, as culminations of natural processes and that which takes them as starting points for reflection and investigation.” Dewey calls this “the scientific attitude”: an attitude that has an “interest in change instead of an interest in … fixities” that is “necessarily alert for problems,” and efforts to solve problems are nothing if not opportunities “for effecting more directed change” (Dewey, 1921: 100). However, unfortunately, Dewey (1921: 101, 228) acknowledges, while we are all potential geniuses and scientists, most of us most of the time “live in dread of change and of problems,” and so perpetuate the status quo. Dewey (1921: 178) observed that “it is a commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconsciously it operates” (see also Pollard, 2006: 67). Dewey introduces a common claim in practice theory: habits prevail until they do not work; we reflect upon why not; we decide to change our practices, or not.14 In Dreyfus’s (1991: 68–69) interpretation of Heidegger, he writes that “if something goes wrong, people are startled.… If the going gets difficult, we must pay attention and so switch to deliberate subject/object intentionality. [Only] then does one have the sense of effort described by [William] James and [John] Searle” (see Merleau-Ponty’s work in Dreyfus, 2002: 381). Fundamentally: mental content arises whenever the situation requires deliberate attention.… The switch to deliberation is evoked by any situation in which absorbed coping is no longer possible — any situation that … requires “a more precise kind of circumspection, such as inspecting, checking up on what has been attained, etc.” (Dreyfus, 1991: 70) Disturbances produce intentional states and only on reflection “can we ask if our beliefs are true” (Dreyfus, 1991: 249). Heidegger categorizes these moments of disruption as “temporary breakdowns” or “obstinacy.” At these junctures, the previously transparent becomes explicitly manifest: we “act deliberately, paying attention to what we are doing” (Dreyfus, 1991: 72, 74–76; see also Mulhall, 2014: 119). Knorr-Cetina (2001: 184) calls out the practice turn for its overemphasis on “the habitual and rule-governed features of practice.” In fact, one might expect practitioners “to have to keep learning … and to continually reinvent their own practices of acquiring knowledge.” There are “moments of interruption and reflection” in the performance of research. What we often encounter is “creative and constructive practice — the kind of practice that obtains when we confront nonroutine problems.” This kind of practice goes beyond our “current conceptions of practice as [only] skill or habitual task performance” (all quotes taken from Knorr-Cetina, 2001: 184). While social theories of practice have frequently invoked reflection to explain change, they have only vaguely or unsystematically discussed the conditions under which such reflection is most likely to occur. In order to specify such scope conditions, I necessarily must go beyond social theories of practice and marshal arguments from cognitive and neurocognitive psychology as well.

Change in practice in IR I have specified a number of scope conditions for reflection and possible change. Minimally, these are conditions for scholars to look for when trying to assess the probability of change in any community of practice. More ambitiously, they are a set of hypotheses that can be empirically tested against the historical record. The dozen or so illustrations of these scope conditions operating in IR are merely that, illustrations. They simply show that reflection does, and does not, occur under several of the hypothesized conditions. Socialization and institutionalization Séverine Autesserre (2014: 32–33) reveals the collection of habits of the international community of interveners that prevents them from reflecting upon the many pernicious consequences of their practices. Such shared habits included: not prioritizing understanding local histories, cultures, or languages; not basing recruitment or promotion, even partially, on knowledge of local contexts; and not developing personal or social relationships with the host populations. Shared practices shaped interveners’ views on what counted as a problem. In Congo, for example, dominant narratives constructed the illegal exploitation of natural resources and sexual violence as problems that international actors should address, while framing community conflict and non-sexual torture as domestic issues unworthy of international attention (Autesserre, 2014: 38). Autesserre (2014: 39) describes the process of inducting and socializing new arrivals into the already-existing practices of older interveners: newcomers “learn to mimic prevailing habits.” The institutional processes are so strong in this “transnational community of practice” that despite all the differences across Autesserre’s cases, the practical habits are shared (on the induction and socialization process, see also Pouliot, 2016). Similarly institutionalized (as in Autesserre’s case) were the foreign diplomatic corps in Egypt during the Tahrir Square rebellion. These diplomats were completely unprepared for the revolution, or its analysis as it unfolded, because they preferred to talk to other officials, not “real” people; they preferred those in suits who spoke English, so even those locals with whom they spoke were already far removed from the street that mattered. Moreover, the common practice of a new diplomat arriving in country is to meet with other diplomats, hence reproducing the same circulating narrative among the isolated embassies. Furthermore, the institution of the embassy reproduces itself by providing briefing notes to the incoming envoys, thus perpetuating the same isolated analysis of events that has endured in the embassy’s institutional memory (Cornut, 2015: 391–393). Margins and liminars Autesserre and Cornut report similar sources of reflection in these institutionalized environments: the margins.29 During his fieldwork, Cornut (2015: 398) met several “expeditionary diplomats” who “break free from the isolation of working behind embassy walls and contacting just a narrow array of host-country officials.” These oddities speak and read Arabic, hang out with common people, meet with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), activists and opposition party members, and went to Tahrir Square and monitored social media. Similarly, Autesserre (2014: 6–78) reports that the only person in Timor-Leste among international interveners who predicted the 2006 riots was the one who did not hang out with the international community of intervention practitioners. Both Cornut and Autesserre do not report, however, that these margins had any success in inducing the institutionalized bulk of the diplomatic corps to reflect. However, at least in Autesserre’s cases, she can conclude that the margins can “lead the process of contestation in Peaceland.” The first of these are those excluded from power in the country, including ordinary citizens in conflict zones. Contesting, resisting, distorting, or rejecting a given international program forces international interveners to reflect; reflecting Scott’s “weapons of the weak” in this case. The other group is “expatriates at the margins of the interveners’ club.” These include “those not yet socialized into Peaceland, such as newcomers, interveners from the same region as the host country” (and so have local knowledge), and those with particularly strong ties to the host countries because of personal or family histories. These “foreign peacebuilders at the margins of the interveners’ club are most likely to promote competing practices, habits, and narratives, and they routinely do so” (all quotes taken from Autesserre, 2014: 41). One can see liminars at work in world politics, especially in its study. For many years, Germany and Japan were singled out, by policymakers in the US, and especially by realist scholars of IR in the US, as abnormal great powers. They had all the material indicators of great powerhood, but they refused to act like great powers. Instead of making war on others, intervening around the world militarily, and otherwise converting their economic wealth into military instruments, they chose to concentrate on economic growth and development at home, and foreign aid abroad. When Japan seemed to defy realism, it began to be ascribed several other identities than the “normal” one prompted by realism — to name just a few, those of a “trading state,” an “economic” and a “civilian” power, a “reactive” and “defensive” state, and an “economic giant, but military pygmy” (Hagström, 2015: 127). As Berger and Luckmann would predict, mainstream IR scholars have treated Japan and Germany as “freaks” and outliers, the exception that proves the rule. They are both “traumatized” by their Second World War experiences, have “odd” pacifist publics, and enjoy US security guarantees. Nevertheless, to the extent that Germany and Japan remain rich and under-militarized, they provoke reflection in the US. Problems that matter Janice Gross Stein has described a crisis of confidence in the global human rights community beginning in the 1990s. This community of practice received sustained academic criticism for disrupting local societies and economies, concentrating on highly visible emergencies that would “sell in the humanitarian marketplace,” (Stein, 2011: 89) while ignoring the less visible, long-lasting, and hard to reach. This array of problems moved the community to reflect and try to change. As Stein (2011: 97) put it, these changes in practices occurred “when new problems [arose] that challenge[d] existing knowledge,” when their “existing repertoires [did] not have programs to process the stimulus that [they were] receiving.” Exogenous shocks Iver Neumann’s (2002) work on how the Norwegian Foreign Ministry constructed a new region in the northern borderlands between Norway and Russia shows the importance of an exogenous shock in producing reflection, and change in diplomatic practices, as well as the institutional resistance that had to be overcome to get Norwegian diplomatic professionals to change their daily practices. The creation of a new northern regional council in the Barents region, with local representatives conducting foreign relations with their Russian counterparts, could not have occurred without the exogenous shock of the Gorbachev revolution in foreign affairs and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The foreign minister himself initiated the new policy against the resistance of the professional Foreign Ministry bureaucracy and continually fought institutional resistance to this new diplomatic practice. Autesserre (2014: 43), in part, explains some of the pathologies of peacemaking as the product of an exogenous shock. The increased number of attacks on interveners in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in particular, the 2003 bombing of the UN and Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad, prompted a change in everyday security practices, encouraging “bunkerization,” rather than relying on acceptance to ensure safety. This spurred the growth in institutionalized isolation of the intervener community from the communities it serves. Pouliot and Cornut (2015: 306) have written that “diplomacy and practice more generally tend to reproduce themselves.” While they may transform over time, it is only at the margins. One exogenous shock they identify that was associated with reflection and the problematization of established ways of doing things was the failure to prevent the First World War and subsequent calls for open diplomacy. Richard Little (2011) found that it required the exogenous shock of “deviant” behavior by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War to induce British decision-makers to reflect on their practice of non-intervention in the sovereign affairs of other states. Discursive fit Pouliot and Cornut (2015: 307) observed that when change does occur, “new and innovative practices need to be synchronous with the past in order to resonate in the present.” In other words, they need to fit. Pouliot (2016: 206) further concludes from his work on the UN and NATO that “mainstream positions are likely to reinforce a diplomat’s hand on average, while more marginal viewpoints, except perhaps in rare virtuosic exceptions, tend to undermine claims of competence.” This demonstrates the importance of finding the discursive “sweet spot” to promote reflection and possible change.30 Difference Schindler and Wille’s (2015) analysis of the breakdown in Russian–NATO relations in the 1990s is a good example of the power of difference and “incomplete objects,” to use Knorr-Cetina’s conceptualization, to spur reflection. Schindler and Wille argue that it was uncertainty about the meaning of the past, in this case, what the end of the Cold War meant, that destabilized practices between NATO and Russia, and thus made the sudden and drastic change in relations between NATO and Russia possible. The history of the end of the Cold War was contested, or, as Knorr-Cetina (2001: 190) put it, instead of history being a closed box, it was “more like open drawers filled with folders extending indefinitely into the depth of a dark closet.” This disagreement between actors spurred reflection, and Russian resistance to NATO’s interpretation of the end of the Cold War as Russian capitulation to a NATO-led security order in Europe.

Conclusion: A practical model of change in practices I have argued that PTIR has usefully redirected our attention to the effects of unconscious non-representational practices in world politics, away from representational conscious references to norms or identities, and their logics of consequentialism and appropriateness. However, in making this important contribution, PTIR has also ignored the fact that social theories of practice include reflection in their theorization of going on in the world. Moreover, given the many critiques of PTIR for having no adequate account of change, and the fact that many social theorists of practice include reflection in their accounts of change, PTIR needs to recover conscious reflection if it is to offer a credible and more comprehensive account of change in practices in IR. A two-part model emerges from the discussion. First, practices slowly change constantly but in ways that are mostly unintentional, non-directional, and unpredictable in their consequences: they might as well inhibit as promote change. If they do produce change, it is largely at the margins and incremental. However, this does not mean that we should ignore it. As James Scott points out, ignoring these “infrapolitics” leads to significant methodological and theoretical errors in both historical and social-scientific accounts of change. Knowing the scope conditions under which reflection upon one’s practices is most and least likely to occur suggests that IR scholars of the practice turn should be paying attention to these circumstances in their work. That is, they should expect reflective awareness to accompany significant changes under particular circumstances. This is a straightforward theoretical and methodological implication. However, paying attention to change in practice through practice, or practical agency, is not so straightforward. Scott’s work on everyday resistance foregrounds the epistemological challenge that practical agency poses to mainstream social science. If we are to take change in practice through practice seriously, we are going to need to abandon any hopes of predicting social change. At best, we can carefully reconstruct the decades of daily practices that made possible the moment of change that we do observe, the one we usually code as the “cause” of that change, almost always a moment of reflective agency. As Scott (2012: 133–135) reminds us, “the job of most history and social science is to summarize, codify, and otherwise ‘package’ … major historical events”; therefore, we “typically give short shrift to the confusion, flux, and tumultuous contingency experienced” by the actors themselves. As Roxanne Lynn Doty (1997: 376) observed: “practice must entail an acceptance of its indeterminacy.”31Scott (2012: 12) appropriately criticizes social scientists and historians for missing the “accumulation of thousands or even millions of such petty acts” that can have massive effects on the stability of social order. This “quiet, unassuming quotidian insubordination, because it usually flies below the archival radar” (Scott, 2012: 12), escapes the notice of scholars interested in explaining change. To summarize, we could say that change in practices through practice, or what I call practical agency, is both ubiquitous and invisible. It is ubiquitous in the sense that every actor going on in the social world has to apply rules and perform her identities in ways that necessarily have an effect on the prevailing social structures. However, these practices are largely invisible because most social scientists and historians, as Scott has noted, do not pay attention to these daily “microdisruptions,” focusing instead on the big bang of reflective agency. Indeed, as Scott makes clear, even in retrospect, scholars are likely to reconstruct events as if there were a key reflective moment, robbing the masses of their due credit for years or decades of practical agency, the daily practice of change. A coherent practice turn in IR needs to combine both an appreciation for the taken-for-granted daily practices of normal quotidian life, and the incremental changes at the margins that they are likely to continuously produce, as well as the moments of reflection that arise that yield opportunities to more fundamentally think about and alter those daily practices.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank: Ron Krebs and Robert Duvall for inviting me to present a much earlier version of this article at the University of Minnesota; Iain Johnston for the same opportunity at Harvard; Rodney Bruce Hall for hosting me at the University of Macau; and Matthew Evangelista for inviting me to Cornell. I am very grateful to Christian Bueger, Vincent Pouliot, Will Bain, Patrick Smith, Matthew Lepori, Onur Ulas Ince, Sinja Graf, Anna Leander, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, and Srdjan Vucetic for their insightful comments along the way. I thank Benjamin Seet and Samuel Kiat for invaluable research assistance.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.