Practicing Academic Intervention: An Agonistic Reading of Praxis

Abstract

Against the background of Friedrich Kratochwil’s work on Rules, Norms and Decisions (CUP, 1989) and his interest in presenting human action from ‘the midst’ in The Status of Law in World Society: Meditations on the Role and Rule of Law (CUP, 2014), this chapter reflects upon Kratochwil’s work on international studies, leading up to this most recent book Praxis: On Acting and Knowing (CUP, 2018). Taking an agonistic approach, it appreciates this work as a series of academic interventions with two lasting effects. The first consists in the project of studying human action and its effect on the transformation of norms, rules and orders through redrawing disciplinary boundaries of international studies. The second effect consists in opening and expanding access to thinking space that enabled subsequent generations to engage in critical questions about international studies and advance knowledge building on these interdisciplinary strands of theoretical engagement. How do academics make use of their knowledge and to what end? Kratochwil’s work is used as a foil to discuss effects of academic intervention, taking account positions of privilege and responsibility. While not an argument for a better theory, to be sure, I argue that Praxis represents a most compellingly expressed urge to act through theory. This is done by engaging interdisciplinary knowledge, when contesting the work of others and holding their claims to account. As Praxis documents throughout – and often deep into the footnotes – the writings of others actually represent sparring partners of sorts for Kratochwil’s academic interventions. In sum, the Fritzian approach to ‘acting and knowing’ represents an important contribution to projects of academic intervention. Here, the sites of intervention consist in written work, and the purpose of intervention consists in bringing knowledge to bear in order to identify transformations against within the fundamentally contested Western narrative of world order.