Best Article in the European Journal of International Relations 2018

The winner of the EISA´s Best Article in EJIR 2018 award is Ted Hopf  for his article “Change in international practices”.

The abstract of the article:

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.

The committee comment:

Ted Hopf's article 'Change in international practices' offers a particularly clear and thought-provoking intervention in the practice debate in IR theory. Drawing on sociological literature, Hopf makes a case for the integration of 'reflective change' into practices and elaborates its scope conditions. The article is an outstanding example of synthetic and systematic argumentation contributing to the development of practice theory and beyond.