Vincent Pouliot is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. He is the author of International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-editor of Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (Cambridge, 2015) and International Practices (Cambridge, 2011).

• Introduction: all the world's a stage; Part I. Situations: 1. The politics of multilateral diplomacy; 2. A practice theory of social stratification; Part II. Dispositions: 3. The diplomatic sense of place; 4. A working consensus: the negotiation of the 2010 Strategic Concept and the NATO pecking order; Part III. Relations: 5. Permanent representation: relational structure and practical logics; 6. Clan politics: Security Council reform and the UN pecking order; Part IV. Positions: 7. State practices and multilateral fields; 8. The field logics of multilateral pecking orders: NATO and the UN compared; Conclusion: the miracle of multilateral pecking orders; Appendix: research design, methods and data.

'Pouliot's book is a welcome contribution to the international relations (IR) literature on the practice of diplomacy. Few works in the scholarly study of IR attempt to rigorously explain how multilateral diplomacy works and its larger effects. Pouliot's framework for understanding seeks to move beyond structural and agency approaches by integrating social theories to explain diplomacy and outcomes in world politics … In essence, the book seeks to explain 'social theater' by looking closely at the practice of diplomacy … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.' J. Fields, Choice