FPA meets Bourdieu: Towards a Field Theory of Foreign Policy Making

In recent years, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu has been fruitfully applied in critical security studies and International Relations (IR). By contrast, it has not been utilized in FPA. In this paper, I argue that FPA can profit from Bourdieu’s relational approach in two ways: First, his field metaphor can serve as an anchor to re-integrate an increasingly dispersed theoretical landscape. To define foreign policy as a partially autonomous, structured social space allows to relate it consistently to IR as a meta-field, while staying true to the multilevel and multifactorial character of FPA scholarship. Second, Bourdieu’s conceptual triad of field, habitus and practices enables us to resolve the agency-structure dualism. Fields exist whenever groups of actors frame their action vis-à-vis one another. Their striving in the field is coordinated by the habitus – a matrix of dispositions that tends to be consistent with the field conditions under which it was produced (structural homology). Finally, the concept of practices which emerges from the encounter of habitus and field, imagines human beings as pragmatic problem solvers who respond creatively to opportunities and constraints. A turn to Bourdieu’s sociology, I argue, will thus foster the combination of different analytical levels without an alternate bracketing of agency and structure.