The chapter centres on the notion of repetition and takes it as the key concept of practice theory. It explores the translocal character of practice with regard to transnational diplomatic negotiations in the UNESCO World Heritage Programme. First, the chapter addresses a widespread bias towards stability and reproduction of the social in practice theory, points towards the need to take account of the dynamics of the social, and develops a poststructuralist understanding of repetition. The second part outlines three related dimensions of repetition and spells out their methodological implications for practice theory. By thinking of practices in terms of repetitions that link different sites and instances, the methodology of practice theory is to follow the fragile relations which make up the (in)stability of the social, enabling it to grasp the specific contributions of bodies and material artefacts. Drawing on data from a long-term participant observation, the final part of the chapter puts this methodology to work by analysing continuity and change in international diplomacy, looking at the interwoven diplomatic practices of negotiating, drafting, and decision-making.

This chapter will depart from these interpretations of the Turkish Revolution through the theoretical and historical pointers discussed in previous chapters. It will argue that the original Kemalist experiment with modernity (1923–45) cannot be understood as a form of (state) capitalism, but rather as a historically specific Jacobinism.

The success of legal time in migration law is exemplified by the multitude of possibilities to differentiate, categorize, and calculate human life by means of time. This is based on an intricate play between two complementing and contradicting forms of time: human time and clock time. The success of clock time in law can be related to its objective character, which allows for quantification and calculation. It is this quantification that provides a clarity and logic to processes that are otherwise rather intangible. It is the transformation from an individual process of human time into quantifiable, calculable chunks of clock time that enables the simple, general application in law. An extra value of this generality is its visibility, it is easy to demonstrate that a certain policy has changed based on clock time. However, legal time cannot be equated with clock time, the reference to time in law is always the time of someone, and therefore it is characterized by temporality. The virtues of legal time can be seen at work in several temporal differentiations in migration law: differentiation based on temporality, deadlines, qualification of time, and procedural differentiation.

This chapter heeds recent calls for a theoretical broadening in practice-oriented approaches to world politics by bringing Foucault into a conversation with practice-oriented approaches to power. In particular, it explores Foucault’s contribution to the study of resistance as practice. Foucault has typically been read in IR as a theorist of social order, less often as a theorist of resistance. Yet in his writing on ‘counter-conduct’ it is precisely forms of resistance that Foucault engages. The chapter argues that counter-conduct can be a useful tool for a practice-based account of resistance but that it also needs to be modified when used in the present. This is because Foucault developed the idea of counter-conduct by studying dissidence and refusal among religious movements in Europe in the Middle Ages, a time very different from our own. Largely missing from Foucault’s account is a sense of how counter-conducts are mediated; that is, how they attract (or fail to attract) a public. To address this gap the chapter proposes a notion of the scene. It demonstrates the value of a concern with scenes by means of a case: practices of migrant solidarity in Europe, the criminalization of those practices, and resistance to such criminalization.

The phenomenon of the shifting border, in which the temporal border is one of the key features, reaffirms precisely the double-edged, or Janus-faced, role of time in the control of the presence of migrants within a certain territory that is at the heart of this book. On the one hand, the temporal border is the demonstration of the seemingly endless possibilities of this form of temporal governance of the process of the presence of migrants within a given territory by means of legal time. On the other hand, precisely these frenetic attempts to prevent migrants from reaching the territory and the endless efforts to cut down to the bone the entitlement of those present on the territory by means of temporal differentiation demonstrate in a rather cynical way the normative force of the jus temporis that I have argued for in this book. It is because we acknowledge that generally the presence of migrants within a territory matters that we try to prevent people from reaching our territory and that we develop measures that limit those entitlements for the undesired aliens. The argument of jus temporis is stating the obvious: human time has value.

Having documented the uneven and combined developmental trajectories of Britain and France, in this chapter I will begin to explore the significance of Jacobinism for our understanding of the rise of multiple modernities outside Western Europe. To this end, I seek to identify the precise nature and concrete outcome of the "combined" character of Ottoman modernization. It shows that the late Ottoman Empire can neither be understood as a "patrimonial state" nor can it be conceptualized as a "peripheral capitalism." Instead, the end result of the Ottoman experiment with modernity was a historically specific Jacobinism that combined and bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

The epistemic community research programme, which in the last generation helped frame International Relations understandings of the relationship between knowledge and power, rested on the influence of scientists and experts on policymaking through framing, persuasion, and socialization. In this chapter, we argue that while pioneering, the epistemic-community research programme was incomplete, since it neglected the relationship between knowledge, power, and practice. Because practices are at the core of what epistemic communities are, do, and aim to achieve, we suggest a pragmatist practice-based approach, according to which knowing requires active participation in social communities and knowledge is not a product but is bound with action. We, therefore, explain the political adoption of knowledge-generated practices by the very nature of practicing and joining communities of practice. With this purpose in mind, we propose understanding epistemic communities as epistemic communities of practice. By identifying epistemic communities as a special and heuristically important case of communities of practice, we will open new and exciting avenues of theory-making and empirical research. We illustrate our approach by examining the establishment of nuclear arms control verification practices during the Cold War and the recent spread of a populist ‘post-truth’ epistemic community of practice.

This chapter makes an introduction to the key themes of the book and provides a book plan.

This chapter attempts to build a transdisciplinary methodology to historicize modernity. The need for transdisciplinarity stems from the idea that disciplinary divisions and categories (such as the political, the economic, the social and the international) are the products of modernity, and hence cannot be used to study modernity’s history, which would otherwise impose the structure of modern (capitalist) society onto a differently constituted past. I use a twofold methodological critique to problematize these disciplinary divisions and the attendant tendency to transhistorize the sociospatial parameters of the modern present: the critique of “methodological presentism” and "methodological internalism.