Communities of Practice in World Politics: Advancing a Research Agenda

Emanuel Adler, Niklas Bremberg, Maïka Sondarjee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

This special forum focuses on international communities of practice (CoP) as a concept and an object of inquiry in International Relations (IR). The Introduction discusses the concept's origins and how it has entered the field of IR. It addresses why and how CoPs matter to IR scholars by looking at how structure, agency, processes, institutions, and knowledge manifest themselves in communities. This special forum's main contributions are: (1) capturing the political and economic effects of shared knowledge creation and diffusion through practices; (2) identifying the sources of knowledge production and learning, as well as the normative and political contestation within and between CoPs; (3) studying the social processes that originate at the boundaries between CoPs; (4) examining how people and processes generate, transform, and communicate knowledge; and (5) exploring how CoPs cultivate global governance's norms, values, and practices from the bottom up. The Introduction also helps distinguish CoP from other relational concepts in IR such as networks, fields, regimes, and epistemic or security communities. It ends by way of situating the contributions to the special forum and outlining a research agenda on CoPs in world politics.

Original languageEnglish
Article numberksad070
JournalGlobal Studies Quarterly
Volume4
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2024
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.

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