Siting Practices in Praxiology: On Visibilizing Power in Multilateral Governance Spaces

The “practice turn” in International Relations (IR) has grounded world politics in the everyday, prompting IR scholars to focus on the mundane practices of transnational actors. Yet, it has largely overlooked how the spatial arrangement of these practices has distinct ordering effects within multilateral governance. Drawing on site ontology, we introduce the concept of “siting practices”, the active processes through which actors (re)configure the constitutive elements of sites (entities, places, boundaries) to structure social relations in space. Through an event ethnographic analysis of the Gender Alliance meetings at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome, we analyze how practices are sited within a hybrid multilateral governance forum that brings together states, international organizations, civil society organizations, and business actors in the absence of a formal institutional hierarchy. We demonstrate how siting practices operate as mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, revealing how seemingly neutral spatial arrangements become sites through which authority, visibility, and access to participation in multilateral governance are produced and distributed. In fact, siting practices operate as power moves that shape who can act, speak, and be recognized within international governance settings. The article contributes to international practice theory and International Organization (IO) scholarship by showing how sites are not merely a backdrop for practices but a constitutive element that shapes the structures of possibilities for political action.