Recent developments in international theory, such as Adler’s and Pouliot’s (2011) work on International Practices, aim to unfold the mechanisms through which advancements take place in international society. While those contributions provides a better understanding of change and legitimation in international society, the replication of similar research questions across different cases remains limited as units of analysis are not well defined. Furthermore, following a trend in sociological approaches in IR (including English School and Constructivism), the notion of practices tends to ignore developments in the economic realm.
Considering these limitations, I propose that the international level should be theoretically conceived as composed by three fields that underpin the existence of practices, such as regimes. Following Pierre Bourdieu (1991), I define a field as a system of definitions where nothing, either in the institutions or in the agents, the acts or the discourses they produce, has meaning but in relation to each other. The three major fields are: 1) the field of society, where identities are reproduced; 2) the field of market, where accumulation and changes in material capabilities take palce; and 3) the political arena, where disputes among states take place to redistribute of material and symbolic resources.
Those three fields frame practice in the international level. Therefore, routines cannot be reframed as the actors who perform them want. They face constraints from the constitutions of the fields. An example is an international regime. In this paper, the focus of analysis is the multilateral system of trade, co-ordinated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Such a regime faces a deadlock as emerging powers, such as Brazil, India, and China, want to bring new notions of legitimacy to the system of trade. Those notions, however, are in clash with practices mainly defined by estabilished powers, particularly the US and the EU.
