Beyond the gap: relevance, fields of practice and the securitizing consequences of (democratic peace)research

Beyond the gap: relevance, fields of practice and

the securitizing consequences of (democratic peace)

research

Christian Bugera and Trine Villumsenb

aEuropean University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini 9, I-50014 San Domenico di

Fiesole, Italy.

E-mail: [email protected] of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353

Copenhagen, Denmark.

E-mail: [email protected]

International Relations (IR) has cultivated the idea of a gap between the theory andthe practice/praxis of IR. This division into two different spheres of knowledge isrelated to the predominant objectivist conception of science in IR, where thescientist is said to be observing reality from a distance without affecting it.Poststructuralists have denied that this distinction is meaningful and have evenargued that it is dangerous to be oblivious to the structuring effects science mayhave on the social world. This article sets out to avoid further cultivation of the so-called gap between theory and practice, and instead addresses the question of howthe theories of IR relate empirically to the practices of world politics. We suggest atheoretical and empirical alternative based on practice theoretical thought. Weargue that researchers’ theories and policymakers practice ‘hang together’ andrequire analytical attention. In order to give empirical flesh to the theoreticaldiscussions and to demonstrate the difference a practice theory approach makes, wediscuss the example of the democratic peace thesis. We lay out how US peaceresearchers, the Clinton government and NATO participated in weaving a ‘web ofdemocratic peace practice’ and stabilizing the thesis as a ‘fact’. We argue that ‘ivorytower scientists’, US foreign policymakers, and NATO politicians and bureaucratshang together in this web and use each other as a resource. As a consequence, theacademically certified version of the democratic peace led to a securitization ofdemocracy. We conclude that one way to cope with the complexity of science–politics interactions is to foster reflexive empirical work on researchers’ ownpractices.Journal of International Relations and Development (2007) 10, 417–448.doi:10.1057/palgrave.jird.1800136

Keywords: democratic peace; NATO; policy relevance; practice theory; theory andpractice; US Foreign Policy

Journal of International Relations and Development, 2007, 10, (417–448)r 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1408-6980/07 $30.00

www.palgrave-journals.com/jird

Introduction: Rethinking IR–Policy Relations

The discipline of international relations (IR) has cultivated the idea of theexistence of a gap between the theory and the practice of IR. This division intotwo different spheres of knowledge is related to the predominant objectivistconception of science in IR, where the scientist is said to be detached from theobject of study. IR poststructuralists have denied that this distinction ismeaningful, and have zoomed in on the structuring effects science may have onthe social world. In general, however, the theory/practice nexus of IR has beenan undervalued issue. Yet, recently it has been resurrected: a new wave ofpublications (Jentleson 2002; Lepgold and Nincic 2002; Walt 2005; Ish-Shalom2006) has called for re-thinking the relation. The International StudiesAssociation (ISA) made responsible scholarship and the IR–politics relationthe theme of the 2007 annual meeting and the poststructuralist position wasprominently re-stated in Steve Smith’s (2004: 500) provocative ISA presidentialaddress which argued that IR had ‘sung the world of 9-11 into existence.’

This article sets out to avoid further cultivation of the so-called gap betweentheory and practice and instead addresses the question of how the theories ofIR relate empirically to the practices of world politics. Even though we largelyagree with Smith’s presentation of the poststructuralist argument, that IRtheories co-constitute and theorists contribute to the constitution of the worldthey study, we find that it lacks a specific theoretical underpinning and —perhaps most importantly — empirical case studies to back the philosophicalclaims.

In order to fill the void left in IR, we suggest a theoretical and empiricalalternative based on ‘practice theoretical’ thought, which refines and addsprecision to the poststructuralist position. We suggest that researchers’ theoriesand policymakers’ practice ‘hang together’ and require analytical attention. Toelaborate on this alternative, we discuss the ways in which the science–policyrelation has been addressed in IR and security studies so far. We argue that twoimaginaries have structured current debates: an imaginary of a ‘gap’ and apoststructuralist-inspired imaginary of an ‘all-encompassing text’. We suggestthat both conceptualizations suffer from shortcomings and lead to a set of‘blind spots’: practical patterns of interaction between research and practiceand the specificity of social science contributions have been underestimated,and the normative dilemmas that researchers face have been formulated in toouniversal terms. Hence, we argue for the formulation of a third imaginary.Through the adoption of practice theory — specifically the work of PierreBourdieu and Bruno Latour — we develop the notion of a ‘dense web ofpractices’ in which scientists and politicians partake. This approach calls forempirical analyses of concrete science–practice interactions and allows us tostudy dilemmas as linked to webs of practices.

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To demonstrate the difference a practice approach makes, we turn to a studyof the democratic peace. We focus on the social processes evolving around thisclaim from three perspectives: peace researchers, US foreign policymakers andNATO. Through adopting these different perspectives, we tell the story of howNATO transformed into a democracy promoter, US policy developed newguiding lines for distinguishing friend from foe and how ‘ivory tower’ peaceresearch became a source of strategic advice. The case underlines the need for arevised imaginary of the science–politics relation. The way the field of practicechanges the relation between democracy, peace and security stresses the needfor tracing the relationship between theory and practice, and the dilemmas ofproducing unintended consequences, empirically. We conclude by stressingthat one way to cope with the complex science–politics relation is to fosterreflexive work on researchers’ own practices from a practice theoreticalperspective.

Discursive Structures and Bridging the Gap: Two IR Imaginaries

Two central imaginaries structure current IR thought on the relation betweentheorizing and policy: (1) A ‘mainstream’ imaginary of a gap between theworld of theorizing and the world of practice; and (2) a poststructuralist,linguistic imaginary in which theorizing and political action are seen asexpressions of one larger discursive structure. These imaginaries are importantthought constructs because they structure academic practices.1 They let us seesome things, while downplaying others. They tell us about the nature of ourown relationship with our object of study and what role science plays, shouldplay and can play in relation to practical politics. In sum, imaginaries are partof the ‘repertoire of action’, which underlie and structure research. In thefollowing, we briefly discuss both imaginaries in idealized versions, identifyhow they depict the relation between IR and politics, and point to aspects ofthe relation they highlight and neglect.

Mind the gap?

The imaginary of a gap and the related practice of digging it is the mostprevalent conception of IR–policy relations. For many, the existence of a gaphas come to be seen as a matter of fact — a commonsense understanding ofhow research and politics relate (Villumsen 2007). In a review of the literature,Eriksson and Sundelius (2005: 55) go as far as claiming that ‘the gap exists ishardly a controversial statement’.

In this perspective, theory and the theorist, and politics and the politician areconceptualized as inhabitants of two different spheres divided by a ‘gap’

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(George 1993; Lepgold 1998; Jentleson 2002; Lepgold and Nincic 2002): aquasi-independent, a-social sphere of the scientific subject is divided froma pre-scientific sphere of political objects. This division potentially creates apower base for the scientist: it is only with scientific tools that truth can besought. Theorists who want to contribute to change in the world of theirobjects, however, argue that it has become increasingly difficult for theirknowledge to travel from one sphere to the other. For some, the distancebetween IR and policy is chasm-like widening (Kruzel 1994). Knowledge isincreasingly circulated only among scientists while the objects under study arepractically unaware of the (scientific) knowledge produced about them. Takingthis (mainly experience based) diagnosis as a point of departure, scholars stressrevising scholarship to bridge the gap in future.

The gap imaginary invites us to see the task of science as creating adequate,truthful representations (knowledge) about the political world. If anythingpasses the gap, it is knowledge, which is thought of as objective, of havinga life of its own independent from actors and structures (Laffey and Weldes1997). The reasons for the failure of knowledge transfer have mainly beenidentified in the techniques of formalizing knowledge and communication tonon-scholars (Gray 1992; George 1993; Galvin 1994). For scholars arguingfrom this perspective, it is surprising if knowledge passes the gap and if actorsrely on IR knowledge in policy processes. The image of the ivory towerresearcher with no connection to the outside world is a popular variant of thisimaginary.2

Three major criticisms against the gap imaginary exist. First, critics arguethat the empirical diagnosis of a gap is flawed: scholars tend to overlook majorroutes by which IR knowledge reaches the policy processes. By practices suchas teaching future politicians, contributing to mass media coverage of issues orworking with non-state or intergovernmental actors, knowledge is diffused topractical politics (Booth 1997a; Mallin and Latham 2001; Eriksson andSundelius 2005). Others raise doubt about the empirical adequacy of the gapdiagnosis through historical case studies. For instance, Oren (2004) demon-strates how the key concepts of the early (American) discipline of politicalscience (such as culture or democracy) were always heavily influenced by thepolitical establishment’s needs and wishes. For the case of early American IRand its subfields security studies and peace research, a gap-like division ishardly adequate (Hoffmann 1977; Lawrence 1996; Robin 2001; Wæver andBuzan 2007). Second, the understanding of usage in the literature is criticizedas over-simplified. IR knowledge might de facto be used, it is argued, but ishard to recognize, because it is stripped of its scientific form when it enters thepolicy sphere (e.g. Ish-Shalom 2006). Third, the imaginary is criticized forbeing self-contradictory. A position in which independence is presupposed andcontributions to social change are addressed at the same time is a contradiction


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in terms (Oren 2006: 77; Herborth and Franke 2007). Independence is lost ifscholarly representations become part of the world studied.

Scholars raising these criticisms either reject the assumptions of the gapimaginary and contribute to the development of an alternative following thelinguistic or interpretative turn, or have generated empirical-analytical,normative or hermeneutical revisions to the gap assumptions withoutchallenging them fundamentally. In the following, we briefly review the latterresponses. Subsequently, we move to those contributing to a second,alternative imaginary.

Critical theorists have created a normative answer to the gap imaginary andargued that two different types of IR–politics interactions — and hence twogaps — need to be distinguished: interactions between IR and the state, inwhich IR theory serves as a problem-solving tool, and interactions between IRand civil society (or ‘the suppressed’), in which IR theory contributes toemancipation (Booth 1991; Wyn Jones 2005). The major move has been tore-tie scientific knowledge to different actors’ interests, while preserving theidea of scientific knowledge production as taking place in an independentsphere.

The empirical-analytical response has foremost developed from the epistemiccommunity concept as outlined by Adler and Haas (1992). It links knowledge toactors and institutions, while leaving the notion of independent academicknowledge production intact. The concept has primarily (albeit a differentreading is possible; see Antoniades 2003; Adler 2005) attempted to formulateconditions under which academic knowledge exerts influence on policyprocesses: crisis or uncertainty and the existence of a ‘community of believers’advocating for the knowledge in the policy world have been suggested. Whilethis constitutes a more sophisticated version of science–policy interactions, itcontinues to rely on the assumption of locating the source of relevance in theknowledge itself and in the independence of its production (Lidskog andSundqvist 2002).

In sum, the gap imaginary presupposes a ‘logic of diffusion’: a logic, inwhich knowledge is produced independently from its objects in a scientificsphere and then transported or diffused as readymade knowledge in a‘package’ to policy. That policy processes rely on academic knowledge is eitherhighly unlikely or subject to a range of specific conditions. The reasons for‘completed’ knowledge transfers are primarily sought in the inherent (superior,value-free) quality of the knowledge package.

A discursive structure?

A second, less widespread imaginary breaks with the idea of a pre-scientificworld. Poststructuralist IR has argued that science is and always has been part


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of the social world. The conventional division between science and policy is,hence, seen as a socially constructed dichotomy with roots in the objectivistdistinction between theory and reality: there is no neutral place from where thescientist can speak ‘truth to power’. ‘Discursive representation is never aneutral detached one, but is always imbued with the power and authority of thenamers and makers of reality — it is always knowledge as power’ (George1994: 30). Thus, science cannot be a well of knowledge from wherepractitioners can draw objective advice, but is considered part of one largerdiscursive structure or ‘text’.

Already Karl Mannheim pointed to the sociality of scientific choices:assumptions and the selection of objects of study are inherently shaped bysocial structure — or discourse as contemporary theorists put it. WhileMannheim was primarily concerned about the epistemological problems thiscaused (Pels 2005), contemporary IR theorists (Walker 1993; George 1994;Klein 1994) have argued that ‘the theory of international relations should beread as a characteristic discourse of the modern state and as a constitutivepractice whose effects can be traced in the remotest interstices of everyday life’(Walker 1993: 6). Consequently, poststructuralists have focused on the limitingand structuring effects that theory exerts on how to think and speak aboutpolitics, and have pointed to similarities in the discursive constellations ofscience and policy.

This basically epistemologically informed argument about the impossibilityof detached knowledge has been carried further in a related, but for theresearcher more ethically problematic way: social research has been placed inthe concrete construction process of social reality. The objects of the socialsciences are knowing subjects, capable of reflection — unlike the objects ofstudy in the natural sciences. Hence, analyses may create social reactions.Drawing on this argument, scholars highlight the inherent capacity of scientificstatements to create or provoke self-fulfilling prophecies: theoretical argumentsabout the possible state of international affairs may turn into empiricalconclusions about international life, when actors start acting ‘as if’ the analysisis valid. The most commonly used contemporary example of such a process isthe impact of Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations.

Ido Oren (2004: 98–99, 2006) has nuanced this point: a self-fulfillingprophecy is only one plausible reaction, a self-negating process another. Ifsocial agents disagree with the results of an analysis, they are likely to start ‘dis-confirming’ the correlation and thereby contribute to creating new social factsand correlations (Oren 2006: 84–98). Oren’s addendum of the self-negating ordis-confirming practice is valuable, because it forces scholars to think ofsituations in which the two processes are likely to occur, and calls for turningthe epistemological assumption about the impossibility of detached knowledgeinto practical analyses of how knowledge works in society.


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In security studies, the argument about the impossibility of detachedknowledge and self-fulfilling prophecies has taken a different spin: securityresearch occupies a space wherein self-fulfilling prophecies may have direpractical consequences. When linked to security, concepts such as migrationcan attain connotations that legitimize the use of extraordinary measures —perhaps even the military instrument (Huysmans 2002a). Research can triggera process that has been termed the process of ‘securitization’ (Wæver 1995;Buzan et al. 1998). It exacerbates the problem of creating self-fulfillingprophecies.3 Huysmans (2002a: 43) has pointed out that securitization leads toa ‘normative dilemma’ for the researcher, ‘[which] consists of how to write orspeak about security when security knowledge risks the production of what onetries to avoid, what one criticizes: that is, the securitization of migration, drugs,and so forth.’

Although the normative dilemma is widely acknowledged, the discussion ofconcrete strategies for coping with it has been limited (c.a.s.e. collective 2006).The arguments presented range from a simple ‘keep silent’, to ‘divert attentionto another threat’ and ‘contribute to a different reading of the threat’ (Buzanet al. 1998: 34–35, 204–6; also Huysmans 2002a). But the questions of thetemporal and spatial limits of the normative dilemma and when it will be mostconsequential have rarely been asked. We argue that they can and should beasked.

Analysts in the poststructuralist tradition have not done so, because theylargely overlook the specificity of researchers’ representations (what kind of textis research?) and the authority scientific text exerts through scientific practicesof truth-telling and objectification. In addition, poststructuralist contributionsgenerally rely on a concept of linguistic practices and undervalue sources otherthan textual ones. Funding practices, the structuring of education systems, theuse of statistics and other technologies are all examples of practices that canplay a role in the construction of the symbolic structure of IR and that aredownplayed or even neglected in poststructuralist studies. These pointschallenge the imaginary of ‘one text’ and call for the formulation of analternative.

Challenges for a new imaginary

Broadly speaking, recent IR and security studies have conceptualized therelation between science and policy primarily in two ways: as divergent anddivided processes of theory and practice in separate spheres, or as a discursivestructure, which stresses the impossibility of detached knowledge. Thisimpossibility has translated into arguments about self-fulfilling or self-negatingprophecies and — in security studies — into the related normative dilemma ofwriting security.


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The first imaginary does not provide a clear take on how science and policyactually interact and on what role these interactions play in the construction ofthe social. The second imaginary argues that both science and policy contributeto the construction of social reality. In security studies, a normative dilemma isseen as inherent to conducting security research. Poststructuralists, however,overlook the specificity of researchers’ representations and the normativedilemma argument ends up as a free-floating, abstract epistemological pointwith no specifications as to when and how it plays itself out. Further,poststructuralist contributions generally rely on a concept of linguistic practicesand undervalue other forms of constructing social reality. On the basis of thiscritique, we find that a different imaginary needs to be developed.

We agree with poststructuralists’ basic epistemological points about the lackof a detached, Archimedean point, and the risks of self-fulfilling prophecies.But research does not necessarily or easily translate into policy practice on theground, and only in some cases will the normative dilemma of writing securitybe relevant. Scientific representations are indeed a part of the texts constitutingthe social, and the normative dilemma of writing security is indeed a dilemma.But science is only one player among many in the construction of theinternational. In addition, scientific representations are manufactured andlegitimized through a different set of practices from that of practical politics:science should be considered a different kind of ‘text’. Science is indeed politics,but, to use Bruno Latour’s (1983: 167) formulation, science is ‘a form ofpolitics pursued by other means’, and the ‘otherness’ and diversity of meansneed consideration.

In order to build an argument around the specificity of scientificrepresentations, the diversity of means or resources, and attention towardsmore than linguistic practices, we suggest a sociological focus on socialpractices and how these practices play themselves out in a ‘web of practice’(Schatzki 2001: 2) or ‘regions of practice’ (Ashley 1989: 264). Such a focus goesbeyond a mere substitution of current imaginaries in IR and security studiesand points to ways of conducting concrete analyses of how the normativedilemma of security plays itself out.

Entangling for Untangling: The Social Practices of IR and SecurityPolicy

In the following we discuss how an alternative imaginary can be developedfrom the perspective of ‘practice theories’. Like poststructuralism, practicetheories should not be understood as a consistent, unified theory, but ratheras a ‘family of theories’ (Reckwitz 2002a) that share an emphasis on practiceand how practice is important.4 Practice theories have been formulated


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in recent years on the background of a set of shared assumptions drawn fromcultural or interpretive (linguistic turn) theorizing (Reckwitz 2002a). Inopposition to classical understandings of the social, cultural theorizing locatessocial order in shared systems of meaning and centres on how actors gain thecapacity to act through these systems. While this general assumption is sharedby almost any recent cultural theory, the formulation of practice theorieshas been motivated by a perceived disappointment with poststructuralism, itsover-emphasis on textual, semiotic structures, its relative neglect of con-tingency and agency and the status it gives to the material as primarilysymbolic (Schatzki 2001; Reckwitz 2002a,b; Spiegel 2005). Instead of locatingshared knowledge in inter-subjective symbolic orders (or discourses), practiceapproaches locate it in practice, in practical activities and its representations.Practice approaches are most notably ‘joined in the belief that such phenomenaas knowledge, meaning, human activity, science, power, language, socialinstitutions, and historical transformation occur within and are aspects of thefield of practices’ (Schatzki 2001: 2, italics in original). From a practice theoryperspective, then, the theory and politics of IR hang together in a ‘field ofpractice’. They form a loose social order by, in, and through practice. Practicecan generally be defined as ‘a routinized way in which bodies are moved,objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world isunderstood’ (Reckwitz 2002a: 250). Although some constructivist IR scholar-ship has been inspired by practice theory (for instance Giddens’ structurationtheory or Swidler’s understanding of culture as praxis), it is hard to speak of a‘practice turn’ in IR comparable to other disciplines (Schatzki et al. 2001;Spiegel 2005). Iver Neumann (2002) has most clearly advocated for such a turnin IR — ‘returning practice to the linguistic turn’. The use of practice theory,however, is still marginal. Yet, practice theoretical insights provide a powerfulfoundation on which an alternative imaginary of the relationship betweentheory and practice can be built. We suggest that inspiration from the workof the practice theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno Latour can strengthenour understanding of the relation. We shall start by a discussion of theirkey concepts: types of practice, ‘fields’ or ’webs of practice’, ‘capital’ and‘resources’.

The practice theoretical vocabulary

One of the most prominent and consistent approaches in the field of practicetheories is that of Pierre Bourdieu. Besides other more or less complete andconsistent approaches,5 Bourdieu’s analysis contains a well-developed con-ceptual vocabulary and, moreover, might be the practice approach that hasinfluenced IR the most, starting from the pioneering arguments presented byAshley (1987, 1988, 1989).


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Bourdieu’s work is a useful starting point for constructing an alternativeimaginary of how IR and world politics ‘hang together’. Bourdieusiantheorizing, however, is only one expression of contemporary practice theories.Rather than following it dogmatically it is useful to supplement and adjust it.Still, there are good reasons for starting a discussion here: Bourdieu placespractice at the centre of analysis,6 stresses the need for studying social scienceas a practice, and conceptualizes the relation between social science and sociallife in a reflexive way that foregrounds the practices of science and theirimplications for construction of the social.

Bourdieu argues that both theory and practice are social practices, standingin a constitutive relationship with each other. Science is ‘theory-as-practice’and practical politics is ‘practice–practice’. For Bourdieu, practice–practicecannot be represented or studied by science–practice without being categorizedand subjected to different homogenizing moves inherent in scientific practice(Bourdieu 1977: 2, 9–11). Through these homogenizing moves, practice–practice is put under pressure and can consequently change (Bourdieu 1998:130–31). This puts the scientist in a constitutive relationship with the practiceunder study — and thus suggests that science and policy are part of the samesocial space — but also points towards the specificities of the scientificendeavour. Bourdieu’s argument stresses the need for actively engaging withthe structuring and homogenizing moves and practices of science towardspractical politics, and how science constructs its authority as a truth-teller.

Fields and webs of practice

Bourdieu conceptualized social space, webs of practice as a field. According toCalhoun et al. (2002: 262), Bourdieu’s notion of a field can be understood asmeaning ‘simply the terrain upon which the game is played. Broadly speaking,a field is a domain of social life that has its own rules of organization, generatesa set of positions and supports the practices associated with them.’

It has been rightly argued that it is hard to assume and think of the existenceof clearly identifiable fields in IR — even if Bourdieu himself suggested thattransnational fields are in the making (Bourdieu 2000: 98). In fact, it isbecoming the prevalent view in security studies that Bourdieu’s toolbox is noteasily fitted to the international level (see Leander 2006 for an overview) —despite distinct cases, such as the European Union. World political phenomenahave, however, been understood with reference to the field concept. Classically,Ashley argued that IR can be studied as a field in which statesmen and ‘thescholars who proclaim themselves realists’ (Ashley 1987: 421) act according toa foundational practice of sovereignty. Bigo has analysed a field of Europeaninsecurity professionals with a high degree of hegemony over knowledge onmigration (Bigo 2007). Leander (2005) has elaborated on a transnational field


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of private security, Guilhot (2005) on a field of human rights and democracy,Huysmans (2002b) on a field of transatlantic security and Pouliot (2004) on afield of Russian–Atlantic security. These studies demonstrate that using theconcept of a field provides an insight into how certain practices uphold doxicunderstandings in large-scale inter- or transnational fields and highlight thatfields are not necessarily bound by national boundaries, or enduring andstable.

A related practice theoretical concept is the concept of assemblages (Schatzki2002; Latour 2005). While sharing many features with Bourdieu’s field,assemblages stress a more fluid and loosely knitted web of practice thatresonates well with our purposes.7 It allows to gain enough structure to createan imaginary of the relationship between theory and practice that includesBourdieu’s concepts of science–practice and practice–practice in a looselystructured social space, while leaving the more rigid and substantial discussionsof the nature of the social structure to others. This perspective emphasizesprocess, how webs are made. It foregrounds the production and not the statusof a field. IR and policy practice can then be understood as hanging together ina loosely structured social space in the international realm, wherein both takepart in structuring common sense through different types of practices.

To be able to include science and the processes of the construction ofscientific knowledge in such a web of practice requires an insight into howtruth is manufactured. The study of scientific practices such as truthmanufacturing has been a longstanding area of research within social studiesof science — a body of knowledge largely neglected in contemporary IR.8 Overthe past 20 years, science studies scholars have shown how scientific facts arestabilized in webs of practice. In the vocabulary of Bruno Latour, through theprocess of weaving a web around a statement, facts become ‘black boxes’ inwhich everything contested and contingent is hidden (Latour 1987; for anoverview see Knorr-Cetina 2005).9 Latour and others show that this process isnot a uni-linear relation between the scientist and their object of study (Bugerand Gadinger 2007). They demonstrate how networks of relations, techniquesand institutions ‘translate’ or ‘change’ knowledge to a degree that makesthe differentiation between a scientific and a non- or pre-scientificcontent impossible. In order to study the homogenizing moves of Bourdieu’stheory–practice, the processes of black-boxing, of fact-manufacturing, becomecentral.

By integrating the insights of Latour, we gain a sustained and enhancedfocus on the processes of web-making and its stabilization, a process that canlead to a stabilization similar to Bourdieu’s notion of fields. Latour, however,points to the contingency of webs of practices. In general, philosophical terms,science and non-science (or politics) may always hang together — as argued inthe poststructuralist, textual imaginary — but if we are interested in specific


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webs, situations and knowledge, we should not start from this generalassumption or any other pre-fixed assumption of how science and politicsrelate to each other. Rather, a focus on how actors set up these relations and inwhich situations becomes pivotal.

Power, capital, resources

But with what resources — with what power — do actors engage in andstabilize webs of practice? Bourdieu focused on different, competing actors in afield and specified the main battles along two axes structuring the powerrelations between them (e.g. Bourdieu 1993). Power was conceptualized as thepossession of a certain type of capital, specific to and valued in the field inquestion — be it economic, symbolic or social capital. Through mapping thepossession of forms of capital — understood as ‘a resource or weapon that canbe used in the fight for recognition and power in the field’ (Bourdieu andWacquant 1992: 98) — Bourdieu focused on the battles for recognition indifferent spheres in society.

From a slightly different perspective from the one Bourdieu took, we findthe concept of capital useful. Instead of focusing on the accumulation ofcapital, the concept can be used to study how different actors contribute to thespread and stabilization of knowledge through diverse strategies and actions,and how resources and capital are mobilized. Latour argues that if we follow anactor, the relation to other actors or things can be seen as ‘resources’. Withthese, the actor weaves and stabilizes the network in order to establish a factand himself as its legitimate spokesperson. From this point of view, tohomogenize and to objectify are practices/strategies specific to research,whereas institutionalization and formalization are practices specific to politicalactors. A range of different types of capital will be linked to these practices.

Introducing a relational concept of power as resources underlines that websof practices are woven and stabilized through the mobilization of capital orresources. Resources are put into use in practice. Capital, hence, provides aconceptualization of with what means science and politics interact and arerelated. It zooms in on how different practices are supported by themobilization of things such as military capabilities, techniques such as statisticalmethods, or social capital such as networks with think tanks and other actors.Thinking in such terms provides an opportunity to strengthen the inclusion ofsources other than textual or linguistic ones.

Towards a practice imaginary

To sum up, the practice approach we put forward centres on the assumptionthat the science–practice and practice–practice of IR ‘hang together’ in a


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loosely knitted web of practice. Such webs are held together and stabilized bythe practices of agents and through the mobilization of a wide range ofresources. Hence, webs of practice are not exclusively symbolic structures:agents can be more than discursively structured and order can be constitutedalso by things.

Following from this, scientific knowledge production cannot be separatedfrom other spheres of practice as implied by the gap imaginary. Scienceand politics are linked in webs of practice. But science and politics are notthe same. They work according to different principles and with differentresources at their disposal. This difference has not been captured by theinterpretative imaginary of ‘one big text’, but requires a place in a practiceframework. A practice perspective stresses the importance of acknowledgingthe diversity of science–politics constellations. Relations between IR andpolitics will differ over webs of practice and different normative dilemmaswill arise in the local and historical situations created by them. For thesereasons, a practice imaginary is a valuable addendum to the IR debateson the science/policy nexus. It enables us to gather knowledge about how the‘hanging together’ plays itself out, how it is (re-)produced in concretesituations, which practices and resources are used, and how this conditionsconcrete normative dilemmas. Thus, by opening up the science–politicsrelation, empirical analysis of actual webs becomes a prerequisite for furtherthinking.

In order to highlight what difference the practice imaginary makes, how itcan be put into use, and how concrete situations of science–politics relationscan be studied through its lens, we will use the case of democratic peaceresearch as an explorative example. While we cannot provide a full-fledged casestudy here, we shall use the example to indicate which practices and resourcesare at play, what empirical elements practice research foregrounds and in whatway normative dilemmas can be addressed.

The Practice Perspective in Practice: The Field of Democratic PeacePractice

The assumption of the peaceful character of inter-democratic relations is apiece of knowledge that has visibly and significantly shaped the character ofglobal politics. Since the early 1990s, the vision has spread like a bushfirethrough various governments, organizations and institutions. The USgovernments of Clinton and Bush, the European Union member states,international organizations such as the UN or NATO, and various non-governmental human rights organizations explicitly give reference to it and acton the basis of it.


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It is hardly controversial to claim that the academic formulation of ademocratic peace is part of this large-scale spread: advocates of the gapimaginary hail it as the prime example of the still existing possibility ofknowledge transfers between IR and policy (Kruzel 1994; Siverson 2001;Lepgold and Nincic 2002). They argue that the spread of the democratic peacehas its anchorage in the successful formulation of a fact — in peace researchers’formulation of the democratic peace as a clean and simple theory. In arelated way, Ish-Shalom (2006: 569) argues from a hermeneutical perspectivethat the success of the democratic peace in policy is caused by its abilityto present ‘an entire world view of political phenomena’ and to act as thefirst step in what he calls a hermeneutical mechanism. He argues that ‘socialscience theories [y] may well serve as originators of public conventions’(Ish-Shalom 2006: 571, original emphasis) but ‘they need to migrate outsideacademe’ (ibid.: 569). For Ish-Shalom, the migration of the democraticpeace was facilitated by the fact that it fitted the identity of the ‘sole remainingsuperpower’ (ibid.: 581). Surely, scientific work contributed to the spread ofthe democratic peace, but that does not account for the fact that visionsof a liberal peace have permeated global policy since President WoodrowWilson.10 A successful knowledge transfer or ‘migration’ is thus only partof the explanation. Advocates of a textual/linguistic imaginary account forthis historical lineage and see the democratic peace as an expression ofWestern identity (e.g. Grayson 2003; Rasmussen 2003). None of the accounts,however, ask how we arrived at that state, and even less what role theacademic formulation of this knowledge played. From the practice perspective,these aspects come to the fore. The establishment and institutionalizationof democratic peace can be explored as a ‘web of democratic peacepractice’, centred on the knowledge of the peaceful character of inter-state relations and driven by a distinct set of practices of democratizing,securitizing, pacifying and theorizing. Empirical analyses need to focus on thepractices by which such a web is woven and stabilized, and on the resourcesthat are used.

In the following, we investigate practices of weaving and stabilizing the webof democratic peace. Our aim is to show how different academic and non-academic strategies and resources take part in the construction of the web.11

Different groups contributed to the spread of a distinct version of thedemocratic peace thesis through diverse, but specific, strategies and actions.We limit our perspective to (1) peace researchers (primarily from the US), (2)the Clinton Administration, and (3) the Western security organization NATO.While this cannot cover the full picture, such a selection considers at least someof the major agencies in the web.12 In following each of these three groups, weunpack how NATO transformed into a democracy promoter, US foreignpolicy found new guiding lines for distinguishing friend from foe, and how


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‘ivory tower’ peace research became a source of strategic advice. Putting thepractice approach into practice also stresses how a normative dilemma playsout. The web produced a situation in which democracy became an issue ofsecurity and military politics, and thus constitutes a variant of Huysmans’normative dilemma of writing security. It represents a situation in which peaceresearch was linked to security politics and created unintended effects. As aconsequence, Huysmans’ normative dilemma must be extended to includepeace research: the analysis reveals how peace research faces the problem ofproducing unintended securitization without ever explicitly mentioning theterm security or conducting security analyses per se.

Manufacturing the democratic peace

Double Democracy is a near perfect sufficient condition for peace — the onlysuch condition known to us (Gleditsch 1995: 318, original emphasis).

Kant’s Perpetual Peace is most often seen as the prime source of thedemocratic peace thesis; however, it is not the only (or even most important)source of what is currently understood as the democratic peace. As Cavallar(2001: 248) notes ‘the election of Kant as founding father seems to be somehowstrategically motivated or arbitrary as several other political theorists [y] havepointed to the relationship.’ Multiple practices of representation and themobilization of other resources have shifted a philosophical thought into anobjective statement — coming close to a ‘scientific law’ (Levy 1988: 622) andwhat might ‘well be a law of nature’ (Bueno de Mesquita 2002: 5).13 In thiscontemporary formulation, the liberal peace is restricted to one distinct version(MacMillan 2004), stripped of its normative content (Cavallar 2001). By whichresources and practices did this version become manufactured as certain,nearly factual knowledge?

If we take a look at any of the state-of-the-art papers on the democraticpeace literature,14 we will find a good indication of the resources the fact restson and the practices building it: the obvious first resource is Kant’s PerpetualPeace. Kant entered the process as a resource through a translation by MichaelDoyle (1986) — a translation on which the initial research programme was setup (Owen 1994), and that still dominates the thinking about democratic peace(MacMillan 1998). The second type of important resource are data sets. Thethesis relies on the maintenance of databases in which information about warand democracy are stored (such as the Correlates of War Project and the Politydata set). These data sets are central devices for calculating and securing theevidence of the fact. Thirdly, the authority of having won a controversy against(realist) critics constitutes an important resource. Although some critical casesremain, the controversy over the fact seems settled. The fourth type of resource


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concerns support from a community of politicians, bureaucrats andintellectuals who guarantee funding for research and provide the possibilityto justify the research as ‘relevant’. We may finally add a fifth resourceconstituted by the peaceful behaviour of democratic politicians, who do notwage war against each other: without the absence of war among democraticcountries, the claim of the existence of a democratic peace would be worthless.These are the major resources on which the fact is set up.

Major non-linguistic practices related to the resources establishing thethesis as true are: the practices of representing and collecting data andthe practices and technologies of calculating (statistics) and mobilizinghistorical data (such as case study research).15 These practices are inherentto science–practice in Bourdieu’s understanding as they constitute system-atization and generalization. The linguistic practices pursued include practicesof writing, convincing colleagues and interesting public and policy agencies inthe research. The invocation of these different types of resources and practicesconstituted the ‘scientific link’ between democracy and peace, and made thedemocratic peace a powerful scientific fact.

As Latour (1987) and others argue, facts are established in a process ofresource mobilization in which modifying principles are continuously reduced.A statement of ‘there might be a relation,’ is reduced to ‘a relation underconditions X and Y’ to ‘there is a relation’ (a fact). Through this process ofdiminishing ambiguity a scientific fact gains solidity. The democratic peacestarted as a cosmopolitan thought; was transformed into a claim about therelations between states; modifying principles, such as time, context and spacewere gradually removed; and alternative views, such as that about the inherentpeacefulness of democracies (the monadic version) or facts that pointed tosimilar relations between autocracies or socialist states (e.g. Oren and Hays1997) were marginalized. In the end, a specific version of the democratic peace(MacMillan 2004) was held as being a fact. Schwartz and Skinner (1999) go asfar as to argue that ‘a ‘‘no’’ answer [yto the question of whether a democracywould wage war against another democracy] is now unassailable dogma in thehalls of academe.’

By establishing a relation between a form of regime and peace (or initiallythe absence of war), researchers created certainty about the relations between acertain type of countries: democracies. This new certainty was created at a timewhen old certainties were shattered and the possibilities of exercisingstructuring effects on policy were extensive. As a consequence, democraticpeace researchers could establish themselves as spokespersons (or authority)for the ‘nature’ of relations between democratic states. And by casting therelation in technical terms, the knowledge about this relation could only bechallenged by using sophisticated statistical techniques and academicvocabulary. This status as spokesperson for the truth about democracies was


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even used to produce more positive correlations by practices of teaching andpreaching:

Understanding the sources of democratic peace can have the effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy [y]. Repeating the proposition that democracies shouldnot fight each other helps reinforce the probability that democracies will notfight each other. A norm that democracies should not fight each other thusis prudentially reinforced, and in turn strengthens the empirical fact aboutinfrequent violent conflict (Russett 1993: 136).

The establishment of democratic peace nonetheless had exclusionary effects. Ifdemocracy was what secures democratic states, non-democratic states wereexcluded — and indirectly blamed for war. Mark Rupert (2001: 154) and JohnMacMillan (1998: 23–26) argue that democratic peace leads to a normalizationof violence between democratic and non-democratic states. The non-democratic nature of the opposing state can be held responsible for causingany violence that occurs. For MacMillan (1998: 23), democratic peace gives‘‘‘absolution’’ for that violence which does occur between liberal andnonliberal states.’ Creating the certainty of democratic peace, consequentially,increased the uncertainty about the relations between democratic and non-democratic states. In order words, thinking in terms of a zone of democraticpeace also created a vision of a ‘zone of turmoil’ (Singer and Wildavsky 1993),a zone of non-democratic relations. A new inside/outside was established andresulted in border cases — such as democratizing or not-yet democratizingstates. Creating this uncertainty or new insecurity presented a key totranslating non-democracy into a threat and to securitizing democracy.

US foreign policy and the democratic peace: a new guiding principle

While democracy will not soon take hold everywhere, it is in our interest todo all we can to enlarge the community of free and open societies, especiallyin areas of greatest strategic interest (White House 1996, emphasis added).

In the scientific fact-manufacturing process, politicians were mobilized asresources in two ways: firstly, as supporters of the production process, andsecondly, as object of study in their role as state representatives. Researchersmanaged to interest politicians in obtaining certainty about the democraticpeace, and politicians therefore shared the interest of stabilizing democraticpeace as a fact. Politicians, however, also mobilized the researchers and theirfact as a resource.

In the US foreign policy discourse, the academically formulated democraticpeace left its first marks in the late 1980s. By 1991, mentioning it was alreadyconceived of as a ‘currently fashionable notion’ among ‘policymakers and


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commentators’ (Rothstein 1991: 45, 43). During the election campaign in 1992,would-be president Clinton was advised to declare democracy promotion a toppriority due to the scientifically certified relation between democracy and peace(Hamilton 1992; Scholarz 1992), and when he became president he made it akey principle of his administration’s foreign policy. The fact found its way intoall major national security policy documents of the 1990s and turned into ‘theessence of the national security rationale’ (Talbott 1996: 49). It became sodeeply rooted in the American political landscape that by 1997 even some ofthe former supporters criticized the strong reliance on the thesis (e.g. Carothers1997). The mentioning of democratic peace has since remained a stable patternof US foreign policy — also, and even stronger in the George W. Bushadministration. As John M. Owen (2005: 1) observed ‘the Bush administrationhas gone much further in its faith in the idea, betting the farm that the theoryholds and will help Washington to achieve a peaceful, stable, and prosperousMuslim world.’

Why was the democratic peace thesis interesting for the politician? Asalready argued, both researchers and politicians shared the prime concern offinding certainty about the relations between states in a time where the guidingrepresentations of the Cold War lost credibility. The well-documented thesishad the capacity to replace the Cold War representations. Through thecoupling of military and scientific resources under the headline of democraticpeace, the US could redraw its map of global security. Direct expressions of itpermeate the official statements of the Clinton administration. For example,Anthony Lake explained his strategy of ‘Engagement and Enlargement’:

During the Cold War, even children understood America’s security mission;as they looked at those maps on their schoolroom walls, they knew we weretrying to contain the creeping expansion of that big, red blob. Today [y] wemight visualize our security mission as promoting the enlargement of the‘blue areas’ of market democracies (Lake 1993).

While the overarching (Cold War) image of a world of two separate spheresremained, the emphasis shifted from the (defensive) notion of containment tothe (active) one of enlargement. As Joseph Kruzel (1994: 180) coined it,democratic peace laid the ground for a proactive policy formulation, as thishad ‘a clear policy implication for the Defense Department: You can prepareto defend against a threat, or you can make the threat go away by turning acountry into a democracy.’ The national security strategies published in theClinton era confirmed that view. In the 1995 national security report, it wasargued that:

Promoting democracy does more than foster our ideals. It advances ourinterests because we know that the larger the pool of democracies, the better


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off we, and the entire community of nations, will be. Democracies create freemarkets that offer economic opportunity, make for more reliable tradingpartners and are far less likely to wage war on one another (White House1995, our emphasis).

The scientific fact of democratic peace presented the opportunity ‘to unifyAmerican foreign policy around a single sweeping idea’ (Carothers 1997: 99).The wide acceptance of democratic peace as a secured fact (‘we know’) and thedepolitization supported by the researchers opened the possibility to argue fora convergence of interests and ideals based on certain knowledge. As Haas(2003) puts this, ‘democracy promotion efforts are based on the most hard-headed of calculations: the realization that democracies rarely go to war againstone another, but rather settle their differences peaceably.’ By presenting thenew strategy as a rational one, the strategy was no longer a question of politicalchoice, but of necessity. Instead of being a normative choice, democracypromotion was depoliticized. The US Department of State (1999) reasoned forits democratization practices, by arguing: ‘We do so not just because it is right,but because it is necessary. Our own security as a nation depends upon theexpansion of democracy worldwide.’ Scientific resources were central in thisprocess. And the administration even directly quoted scholarship. For instance,Strobe Talbott (1996: 49, footnote 2) refers in his defence of the Haiti missionto ‘a substantial body of empirical evidence and political science scholarship.’

In sum, when the democratic peace thesis entered the political landscape inthe US, it was translated into concrete policy strategies. It allowed for clearlydistinguishing friend from foe. It served as a basis to argue that foreign policyis based on rationality, on ‘hard-headed calculations’, and is thus adepoliticized practice. It was translated into military on-the-ground practicesof peace-keeping and peace enforcement and was further rationalized andsecuritized. The objectified link between democracy and peace had beenchanged towards a link between democracy and security. Practices ofdemocracy promotion moved from an ideal task to an issue of supremepriority, were dramatized and finally legitimized the use of military forces.16

NATO’s new strategy: the transnational institutionalization of the democratic

peace

The democratic peace thesis had thus gone from a scientific proposition linkingdemocracy and peace, through a national adaptation in the United States,which turned the focus towards the concept of security. In NATO, thisdevelopment was paralleled and came to institutionalize the shift from peace tosecurity in three ways. First, new linguistic strategies for the alliance focused onthe link between democracy and security and gave NATO a new direction.


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Second, democratic states of the former Eastern block were invited to take partin everyday life at the alliance HQ in Brussels as ‘Partners for Peace’ and inpeacekeeping exercises in the region. Through this, NATO created a practicalunderpinning to the link between democracy and security. Third, concretemilitary operations in the Balkan area were carried out with reference to thelink and tied the military and institutional resources of the alliance closely tothe discursive and practical institutionalization. Democracy promotion becamea transatlantic security strategy underpinned by practices using institutional,military, social and political resources.

Democracy as the most viable way to create security and stability forNATO was gradually introduced in the 1990s (Adler and Barnett 1998;Williams and Neumann 2000). During the Cold War, NATO had embodiedthe concept of strategic balancing and was in need of a new direction after thedemise of the Soviet Union and hence the disappearance of the balancing‘other’. For a short while in 1995, then NATO secretary-general Willy Claespointed to Islamic fundamentalism as a possible new threat to replace thecommunist enemy as the new balancing other (Bilski 1995); however, this wasrejected by the NATO community. Little by little and in the face of theatrocities taking place in the Balkan area, NATO came to see itself as thedefender of not only democracy, but of a standard of civilization (Huysmans2002b; Rasmussen 2003).

The link between peace and democracy was stated as a fundamental value inNATO from the beginning of the 1990s: ‘y peace through democracy [is a]shared value [y] fundamental to the Partnership’ (Partnership for Peace:Framework Document 1994: 1). But as early as the Turnberry Communique(1990: para 1), the link between democracy, peace and security was present. Aprocess of ‘becoming democratic’ was seen as ‘. an important element in thefuture security and stability in Europe’ (NAC, Turnberry 1990: para 9) and inthe London declaration the same year, the Alliance vowed to ‘support[y]security and stability with the strength of our shared faith in democracy.’(NAC London 1990: para 2). Security was seen as linked to NATO’sneighbours (NAC London 1990: para 4) and the possibility for enhancingsecurity thus lay in relations with and the nature of these. Promotingdemocracy in NATO’s neighbouring states thus came to be discursively tied tosecurity, stability and peace. In 1998, the link was no longer formulated as avalue, but took on a more solid character as a fact of the nature of democracy:‘Military forces which are accountable to a democratic civilian government aremuch less likely to be used for purposes that run counter to peace and stability’(Partnership for Peace: A Political View 1998: 2, emphasis added).

The fundamental value — and later fact — of linking peace, security anddemocracy was further translated into practical cooperation in the militaryalliance. First, through the creation of the North Atlantic Cooperation Council


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(NACC) in 1991 and later through ‘the quantum leap’ (NATO 2002: 3),which the creation of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) constituted for theAlliance. This cooperation was outlined in practice: The North AtlanticCouncil (NAC) planned ‘y to offer permanent facilities at NATO Head-quarters for personnel from NACC countries and other Partnership for Peaceparticipants in order to improve our working relationships and facilitate closercooperation’ and to ‘y propose, within the Partnership framework, peace-keeping field exercises beginning in 1994’ (Partnership for Peace: Invitation1994: 2). In 1997, the PfP Programme was extended to include Russia in a EuroAtlantic Partnership Council (EAPC), and NATO declared: ‘No Europeandemocratic country whose admission would fulfil the objectives of the Treatywill be excluded from consideration’ (Madrid Declaration 1997: para. 8). TheAlliance wanted to build a cooperative security landscape (NAC, Brussels1996), inhabited by a certain type of actor — as the title of the Partnership forPeace-programme had already foretold.

The discursively formulated link between peace, democracy and securitywas, thereby, brought into the transnational realm and was institutionalizedthrough a variety of practical measures, including new consultation mechan-isms, military diplomacy and joint peacekeeping exercises under the PfP. Acomplex web of relations and practices all directed at carrying out the promiseof the link between security and democracy were set up: the military andinstitutional resources of the complex organization were used to lift democracyup as a new security strategy for NATO and the social resources (networks)were used to spread and consolidate the message of a democratic peace. In theprocess, NATO also used the political resource of ‘having won the cold war’ totie the Eastern European countries close to it. Partners in Peace were a type ofactor — a border case — possibly considered eligible to join the democraciesthat had ‘won’ the Cold War. But NATO held the political resources thatallowed it to define who was in and who was out.

The overall discursive and the practical, everyday activities of consultationbetween former enemies, sharing offices, meeting each other in the hallways ofthe NATO HQ and in the newly established meeting configurations to buildsecurity through democracy were not the only practices to bind security anddemocracy together in NATO. When NATO went into military action in theBalkan area, the link between security and democracy became tied to the wholemilitary apparatus of NATO and further accentuated the securitization ofdemocracy. NATO capabilities and command structures became operational inthe service of democracy promotion. Military resources were primarilymobilized symbolically in the first half of the 1990s (‘we won the cold war’),but the new missions from the mid-1990s onwards put them into practical use.The decisions to intervene in the Bosnian war in 1994/1995 and later theKosovo Crisis in early 1999 made this clear. NATO was ready to apply what


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the Copenhagen School of Security Studies would call emergency actions in thequest for civilized behaviour in the periphery of the cooperative securitylandscape of democracies.

The Strategic Concept of 1999 was approved by the North Atlantic Council(NAC) while NATO fighter planes were still bombing Serbia to reachwithdrawal from the Kosovo region. This must have made the words of theStrategic Concept ring apocalyptically in some democratic peace theorists’ears. The Alliance vowed ‘to preserve peace, support and promote democracy’(Strategic Concept 1999: para 33) and to ‘provide one of the indispensablefoundations for a stable y security environment, based on the growth ofdemocratic institutions’ (ibid.: para 10). The ‘promotion’ of democracy withinNATO in the 1990s can, thus, be understood along a continuum of practicesranging from general political statements about the security value ofdemocracy, to concrete practices in the NATO HQ and securitized practicesof military missions. The entire range of resources: military, institutional andpolitical were used in support of these practices. The changes in NATO’snarrative were profound. Not only had NATO securitized democracy, but thealliance also reshaped its understanding of space on the basis of this: NATOwas not fighting Serbia per se but the lack of democracy in the country.Williams and Neumann (2000) argue that: ‘[y] it is the absence of specific,democratic cultural and political institutions that comes to define theperception of security’ (Williams and Neumann 2000: 369–70; also Rasmussen2003). NATO was practicing Democratic Peace.

Democratic peace, theory, practice and securitization

The creation of a ‘fact’ by peace researchers played an important role inestablishing a web of democratic peace practice. Our explorative analysisshowed that all three agencies analysed above contributed to stabilizing thisfact through multiple, specific practices and resources. All three groups formedpart of the web and depended on each other; none were detached from theproduction in the practice field: peace researchers added authority andcertainty to the Kantian utopia by depoliticizing and transforming it into asimple statement by using techniques such as statistics. US foreign policy-makers relied on the fact to unify US foreign policy under one certain principlein a world where old certainties were lost: non-democracy was securitized,became a threat. The securitization of democracy opened a path for applyingmilitary emergency measures — a trend that became institutionalized in NATOstrategy. The agencies, thus, ‘hang together’ in the web of practice: withoutscientific authorization, the fact could not work as an integrated, depoliticizedsecurity technique. Without strong political and bureaucratic reliance on thefact, research on democratic peace risked marginalization — and perhaps loss


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of funding. Attention towards the specificities of scientific practice and towardsnon-linguistic practices brought this to the fore.

Therefore, a story of the democratic peace thesis as a success story ofknowledge transfer is clearly challenged by our discussion. No simple one-waydiffusion of knowledge was taking place. Instead, the effect of the web ofdemocratic peace practice was the establishment of non-democracy as asecurity threat and the transformation of democracy promotion into a securitytechnology, governed by necessities.

If such a diagnosis is adequate, the issue of researchers’ responsibility andthe dilemma created in this web need to be raised. Certainly individualdemocratic peace researchers did not intend to securitize democracy, createnew threats — rather the opposite.17 Through practice, they contributed to thisprocess. Consequently, from the researchers’ perspective, the case ofdemocratic peace must be seen as one example of how the normative dilemmaof writing security plays itself out in practice. The fact underwent suchimportant translations through social practices that the vision of a peacefuluniverse of democracies was not only translated into political and strategicdocuments, but into real, military war-fighting and on-the-ground practices.Yes, peace research had proven relevant — but in a way that foregrounds theunintended consequences of weaving a web of practice. In the web, researchlent scientific and social authority to the link between peace and democracy,and ended up being taken as authority over the link between peace and securityby practitioners.

The normative dilemma of writing security takes a spin when tied to anetwork of practices instead of to the subject of security or the utterance of theword security. It is equally tied to peace, and may be located in very differentcases. Therefore, the dilemma should be studied concretely and not be leftas an epistemological deadweight for researchers. The dilemma can besituated in time and space, and can be connected to concrete actors in a fieldof practice.

Conclusions: Towards Reflexive Scholarship in the Field of Security

This article set out to strengthen our understanding of the relationship betweentheory and practice in world politics. We argued that two ways of approachingthis relationship are prevalent in IR: an account that cultivates an imaginary ofa gap between theory and practice, and a poststructuralist-informed account,which we called ‘one big text’. We sketched idealized versions of the twoimaginaries, discussed their merits and shortcomings and concluded that theydo not provide us with the tools to understand the practical interactionbetween IR theory and world politics. The poststructuralist imaginary


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highlighted the possibility of self-fulfilling prophecies and a normative dilemmaof writing security, but told us little about how these processes work inpractice.

In order to explore how theories and practices are connected, we argued forstarting from an alternative imaginary of the relation. To help facilitate this, weadopted a practice theory approach. Using notions from practice theory, wesuggested understanding science (IR) and politics as social practices in looselystructured webs of practice. Seen from this perspective, the discourses,representations and practical activities of social scientists form part of thesocial world and as such take part in the struggle to define reality. Socialscience practices, however, are not just one text alongside others, as suggestedby the poststructuralist imaginary: attention towards the specific objectifyingand homogenizing practices of research is necessary.

To give empirical flesh to the theoretical discussions and to demonstrate thedifference a practice theory approach makes, we discussed the example of thedemocratic peace thesis. We sought to raise the possibility that ‘ivory towerscientists’, US foreign policymakers and NATO politicians and bureaucratshang together in a web and use each other as a resource. Our claim was that thecertainty that researchers gave to a philosophical thought of democratic peacehelped weave the web tighter. Scientific authority became an essential resourcein establishing the democratic peace as a strong principle of contemporarysecurity politics. Peace researchers’ translation and depolitization of Kant’sutopia opened the floor for securitizing democracy, but they did not govern it.Their creation of the binaries of democracy/peace and non-democracy/warcontributed to constructing non-democracy as a threat, but did not dictate it.In the end, democratization became a security issue, increasing the likelihoodof the application of emergency measures.

The case of democratic peace stresses a process similar to the normativedilemma of writing security. In the described situation, however, the logicseems to be more subtle or hidden. Peace researchers did not establish a directlink between security and non-democracy, nor did they explicitly utter thesignifier ‘security’. Rather, the democracy–peace link, established andproduced with the intention of offering a road to peace, held the potential ofbeing turned upside down. With hindsight and after the widespreadlegitimation of military action on the grounds of the ‘democratic peace fact’this hidden dilemma is becoming increasingly clear: the US-led Iraq war andother contemporary military peace operations testify to a dilemma of vastproportions.

The practice theoretical imaginary developed in this article points us to away for understanding and studying dilemmas of this kind. The poststructur-alist imaginary provides a valuable starting point for this, but by hidingacademic dilemmas in the clouds of discourse and epistemology, we gain little.


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Practical reflexivity is at stake: how researchers’ practices, sayings and doingsplay out in concrete situations and contribute to the securitization of issues.Dilemmas can — and should — be studied in concrete practices, be situated intime and space, and be connected to concrete actors. This does not ‘solve’them, but makes them concrete and perhaps more manageable. Reflectionhence needs to be based on concrete research that includes IR scholarship andthe specific authority of research, instead of relying on notions of detachedknowledge production — safely shielded by a deep gap. Knowledgeproduction, transfer and usage go hand in hand in a play of social practices.This is the kind of reflexivity a practice approach calls for.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and critiques, we thank Jens Bartelson, Anna Geis, Friedrich Kratochwil,

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, Pascal Vennesson, Laura Zanotti, and the editors and anonymous

reviewers at JIRD.

Notes

1 Our conception of ‘imaginaries’ takes inspiration from the understanding of the term as

developed by Peter Wagner (1994). In this sense ‘imaginaries directly translate into practice —

they are practice.’

2 See Wallace (1996) and the responses by Booth (1997b) and Smith (1997) in Review of

International Studies. See also Guzzini (2001) and Smith (2003), who argue that the divisions

academia/politics and theory/practice are conflated in Wallace (1996).

3 See also Eriksson (1999) and the related debate with contributions by Wæver (1999), Goldmann

(1999) and Williams (1999). See also Gusterson (1994), Gray (1992) and Booth (1997a) for

similar statements.

4 There is quite some variation and some major disagreements among practice theories (see Rouse

2001; Schatzki 2001; Reckwitz 2002a,b).

5 Such as Schatzki’s site ontology, Boltanski and Thevenot’s French pragmatism, Giddens’

structuration theory, Butler’s gender studies, Swidler’s cultural theory or science studies’ several

contributions — e.g. Latour, Rouse, Haraway or Pickering.

6 Note that Bourdieu is often perceived as primarily concerned with fields, yet, especially his early

work is centred on practice (King 2000).

7 We are well aware of the debate between Latour and Bourdieu. We find, however, that the use

of Bourdieu and Latour is instructive and can guide an empirical analysis regardless of these

differences.

8 See the discussion of how IR has made use of science studies in Buger (2007).

9 By claiming that facts are ‘manufactured’ neither we nor Latour claim that facts are only social

constructions. Our interest here is in the social processes by which facts are discovered and

established.

10 The balance sheet on whether the democratic peace has been a dominant thought in US foreign

policy appears inconclusive. Some argue that democratic peace has been a dominant at least

since President Wilson (Kissinger 1994: 33, 44; Rasmussen 2003). Others stress that ‘the pacific

nature of democracy has become largely forgotten or ignored in the last half century. That

democracy is inherently peaceful is now probably believed by no more than a few prominent


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peace researchers’ (Rummel 1989). Leaving the question of domination aside, there is a

historical lineage.

11 Our focus is hence on the meso level of practice and resources and not on the micro level of

concrete individuals. While there are certainly important individuals in these groups, our aim is

not to judge about individual contributions (or even beliefs), but to investigate the practices

and resources in these groups. We thank an anonymous reviewer of JIRD for helping us clear

this up.

12 Although Europeans participated in the production of the thesis — some even claim that the

true father of the thesis is the German Ernst Otto Czempiel (Muller 2004) — the resources

mobilized and the discursive fora where it was presented were largely US based (see Oren 1996

for a discussion).

13 This is not to argue that there are no remaining opponents to democratic peace theories

(prominently Walt 1999); yet these no longer criticize the evidence of peace among democracies,

but take a different stance on what follows from the fact or how to explain it. Most IR realists

tend to accept the fact (e.g. the discussion in Geis 2001: 291–92)

14 The body of literature on the democratic peace is vast. For classic state-of-the-art articles see

Ray (1998) and Chan (1997).

15 See Kratochwil (2006) for a critique of mobilizing history practices. Discussions of statistical

practices form the heart of the controversies on the democratic peace (e.g. Ray 1998).

16 Military interventions conducted since the introduction of the academic democratic peace were

legitimized by the fact, starting from Haiti (Talbott 1996).

17 For instance, Russett (2005) describes his situation as similar to the nuclear scientists in 1945 —

as having contributed to an intellectual weapon, although his concern was interest-free, basic

research.

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About the Authors

Christian Buger is a Researcher at the European University Institute, workingon a Ph.D. project on the Politics of Expertise in UN Peacebuilding.Previously, he was a Research Associate at the Institute of Social Research,University of Frankfurt, and lecturing at the University of Frankfurt. Hismajor areas of research are the United Nations, Peacebuilding, Afghanistanand Sociology of Science.

Trine Villumsen is a Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science,University of Copenhagen, and is working on a Ph.D. Project about the role ofthink tanks and research in NATO transformation. She is currently a visitingfellow at the Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies inGeneva. Her areas of research include European security, think tanks, NATO,IR theories and the role of science in society.


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Beyond the gap: relevance, fields of practice and the securitizing consequences of (democratic peace)research

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