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 language | English |
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Article number | ksad070 |
Journal | Global Studies Quarterly |
Volume | 4 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Mar 2024 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.