Review: International Security in Practice The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy

Abstract

INTERNATIONAL SECURITY IN PRACTICE The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy Vincent Pouliot Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 282 pp. US$29.99 PaPer· ISBN 978-0-521-12203-0In the first part of this ambitious book, Vincent Pouliot, of McGiIl University, outlines an innovative of to enrich our understanding of the world of diplomacy; in the second, he deploys this approach to account for the twists and turns of the NATO-Russia relationship since the end of the Cold War. Theorists absorbed by the intricate dance of realism, institutionalism, and constructivism, and thirsting for another monumental, abstract treatise, might find the first part too brief, whue those seeking a rich, granular narrative of recent history might think that devoting almost half of the book to theory and methods diverts the author from getting on with telling the story. This study may not satisfy purists on either side, but it succeeds brilliantly in what it sets out to do.The first three chapters make a sophisticated argument for exploring the logic of diplomatic in a way that allows for methodological conversations across the spectrum of international relations theories. This spectrum was long dominated by realists and liberal institutionalists of various hues, engaged in debate but united in the belief that the scholar as detached observer was best placed to arrive at a reliable representation of the real world of international politics. The most substantial challenge to these rationalists has come from the constructivists, also diverse and quarrelsome, for whom the world of international relations is socially constructed - the evolving creature of our collective consciousness - and the business of theory engages reflection and interpretation.Pouliot notes the shortcomings of a trait all such theorists share - the representational bias, or the tendency to think about experience rather than from it. In our eagerness to represent the of diplomacy from a scholarly distance, he argues, we miss a great deal by passing over the inarticulate logic of its everyday, commonsense practice. As an alternative, he stresses the virtues of experiential knowledge, only discernible through a kind of ethnographic method, or participant observation. Drawing on the ideas of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu, he argues for an evolved form of constructivism that can produce both subjective and objectified knowledge - the former based on and meaning, the latter on context and history. The validity of that knowledge must then be tested through engagement with the mainstream theories.Pouliot is interested in why NATO -Russian relations, despite their early post-Cold War promise, now seem mired in what is at best a no-war mode, in which diplomacy, self-consciously exercised, prevents crises from careening toward the use of armed force. They do not embody the trust and confidence needed to shift them to that rare class of interstate relations, the security community, in which it is simply taken for granted that force will not be used to resolve differences. In three rich and nuanced chapters, he deploys his hybrid sobjective method to provide a persuasive account of NATO -Russian relations from i99ito20o8.First, chapter 4 provides a close analysis of the NATO-Russia council based on extensive interviews conducted in 2006 with security practitioners in six capitals, and on what Pouliot calls practice analysis, which distils the commonsense knowledge of NATO and Russian council officials from their separate and collective actions. …