Making Grand Strategy in Practice

Theories of practice are widely seen as the most innovative recent research programme in international relations. They also provide important avenues to understand how grand strategy is made and why and how it has effects. Strategy is understood as the outcome of practical activities and struggles between actors. This chapter presents an overview of how practice theories have productively revisited concepts such as ‘strategic culture’ or ‘security communities’. It also demonstrates how frameworks derived from field theories, actor-network theory and narrative theories illuminate grand strategies and the processes that produce them. Theories of practice provide a major innovative point of departure for understanding strategy differently.