International Relations and the Ivory Tower

Lee Jones (May 12th 2009)

Joseph Nye has an interesting piece in the Washington Post asking why no IR scholars were picked to serve in the Obama administration; his answer is that the profession has withdrawn to its ivory towers and must make itself more relevant in the future.

On the one hand, this addresses a specifically US culture, where, as Nye points out, there has been something of a revolving door between the academy and policy circles. Nye himself was Deputy Undersecretary of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology under Carter, chairing the National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and later the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs under Clinton. He has just been appointed US ambassador to Japan.

However, the general complaint is a common enough refrain, not just in the US but in the UK - that academics must be 'policy relevant' in their choice of research topics, their research methodology, and the way they disseminate their findings to various so-called 'stakeholders'. In the UK, this 'imperative' is reinforced by the bureaucratic diktat of the various government-backed funding councils. It fits with the viewpoint enunciated since the 1980s that the primary task of academics is research; and it naturally follows from this that academics should do relevant research (who would defend 'irrelevant' research?) which addresses itself to contemporary policy requirements.

I am not particularly convinced by this line of thinking. Despite acquiring a taken-for-granted quality, it is actually a very recent innovation. For centuries, the job of people staffing universities was primarily to teach their students, not to conduct research. Then, only a few decades into an age where ordinary people could aspire for the first time to become university students, suddenly the mission of universities underwent radical transformation as governments refused to allocate the necessary money to fund this expansion in higher education, forcing universities instead to compete for funding through exercises designed to assess their research output -- the Research Assessment Exercise. The history is somewhat different in the US, where the expansion of higher education to include the working classes has largely involved the grossly underfunded expansion of largely state and community colleges.(1) Elite, Ivy League schools have expanded their undergraduate numbers but much undergraduate teaching is hived off to graduate students whose own studies are correspondingly extended; those who can afford to take a Masters degree may be taught by the academics whose 'big names' attracted them in the first place. I think it is a good thing that research is now carried out in specialised institutions by people enjoying (supposed) academic freedom. Along the way, however, it might well be argued that the academy's initial mission has actually been usurped.

Putting those questions aside for the time being, what of the broader relationship between the state and the academy? Is Nye right to blame academics for retreating into their ivory towers? Let's concede that Nye is partly right, even if he is swinging at the wrong punchbags. The first point, easy to concede, relates to academics' weakness in communicating their ideas: all too often we are content to write for each other, knowing full well that our work will never be consumed beyond a narrow disciplinary clique. We need to do much better.

Nye also complains that the American Political Science Review never publishes policy-relevant articles - or even articles that policymakers can comprehend. That is undeniably true, but the real problem here is actually one of methodology - which he hints at by swiping at scholars obsessed with modelling. What he is actually criticising here is the mania for quantitative methods and formal modelling that has gripped the US academy and which is gradually infecting the British academy.

There is no doubt that the average APSR article is impenetrable to any normal person lacking econometric training, but this is not the only reason such research is not policy relevant: it is also because very few questions of major import actually lend themselves to being studied in this fashion. Hedley Bull once commented that a commitment to quantitative methods is a commitment to the marginalia of the discipline; the real problem is that the marginalia have now become the core. This is clearly linked to the overall conception of social science we hold - whether we believe people are like particles and can be studied using similar methods to those used in Physics. The most influential IR journals, like Foreign Affairs, contain absolutely no articles of a quantitative bent.

Our beliefs about social science are influenced strongly by the overall political economy of research funding - Physics attracts the most funding as a 'hard' science, Economics models itself on Physics to attract the most funding in the social sciences, and the other, envious social sciences model themselves on Economics. Physics undeniably generates a great deal of very useful research (although the constant push for results of immediate usefulness may well now be undermining 'blue skies' research that pushes forward the limits of human understanding). Whether Economics has done likewise is clearly open to debate. Ironically, IR scholars still labour beneath the shadow of the work of Kenneth Waltz, who sought explicitly to import models used in Economics to understand the emergence of a balance of power between states. At root this is a problem of all human knowledge being judged by a set of extremely idealised, monolithic notions of how 'science' works.(2)

The more abstract and bizarre these models become, the more removed they become from reality, the less impact they are likely to have on reality. But the problem here is not 'policy relevance' -- it is rather a two-fold issue: a far deeper philosophical question as to what social science can accomplish and what it is for, combined with a funding structure which assumes the wrong answer to these questions. Policy-relevant material will not be produced by the sort of exhortations Nye issues, but only by addressing these two broader issues.

Let's turn now to thinking about where Nye may simply be wrong. His assumption is that the academic should be, needs to be, policy-relevant. As I've already said, this can be a very pernicious assumption. As an invitation to contribute to discussions about the direction of society and policy, no one could reasonably object: those who wished to contribute could do so, while others could be left to investigate topics of perhaps dubious 'relevance' that nonetheless enrich human understanding and thus contribute to the accumulation of knowledge and general social progress (and, quite probably, to those scholar's research communities and their students). As an imperative, however, it creates all sorts of distortions that are injurious to academic freedom. It encourages academics to study certain things, in certain ways, with certain outcomes and certain ways of disseminated one's findings. This 'encouragement' is more or less coercive, backed as it is by the allure of large research grants which advance one's institution and personal career, versus a fate as an entirely marginal scholar who is incapable of attracting research funding (nowadays a standard criteria in academic job advertisements).

It is very telling that the two names Nye drops are Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both of whom served as National Security Advisers (under Nixon and Carter respectively), while Kissinger also went on to become Secretary of State (under Nixon and Ford). Kissinger, as is now widely known, is a war criminal who does not travel very much outside the USA for fear of being arrested a la General Pinochet.(3) Brzezinski has not been subject to the same scrutiny - yet - and even popped up to advise Obama recently, but can hardly be regarded as a particularly nice guy, either. Under his watch, the US sent tens of millions of dollars to the deposed Khmer Rouge forces after their overthrow by Vietnam in 1978, to help them regroup and rearm on Thai soil.

In addition to these two, Nye says only three people in the 'top 25 most influential scholars' list served in policy circles, according to the TRIP survey (pdf) on which his article was based. By this I assume he means himself (ranked 6th), Samuel Huntington (8th), and John Ruggie (14th). Ruggie worked as an Under Secretary-General in the UN. Though I have no idea as to what he achieved, his influence was probably quite benign and his work is genuinely interesting. As to the other two, when set alongside Kissinger and Brzezinski, it makes one wonder exactly what sort of IR scholar one needs to be in order to be appointed to a US government post. I've already dealt with Huntington at length elsewhere. Nye of course is a dyed-in-the-wool 'liberal' but his constant commitment to US hegemony is what has kept him in the national spotlight, whether in the wake of the oil crises, the collapse of Bretton Woods and the rising economic competition from Japan and Europe in the 1980s (with his co-authored book, After Hegemony, which is explicit about its desire to maintain US power using institutions), cheer-leading post-Cold War US hegemony in his book, Bound to Lead (1990), or exhorting the US to regain its battered international reputation through the exercise of 'soft' or 'smart' power in his Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics (2004).

Nye’s most significant contribution to the field was probably his work on complex interdependence with Bob Keohane, but for the past 20 years he has essentially been recycling his work on ‘soft power’. 'Soft power' is basically the idea that you can get others to do what you want by getting them to share your preferences through the force of cultural 'attraction'; in America's case, this involves things like the values of an open society, cultural output like Hollywood, etc. I'm simplifying only very slightly here. It is such a weak, amorphous concept that China specialist Sean Breslin recently presented a paper where he felt the need to disaggregate no fewer than eight types of Chinese 'soft power', the most significant of which was its 'imagined soft power' -- the imagination of which must surely owe something to the hocking of Nye's concept around policy circles for two decades. His concept of power is essentially Gramscian with everything critical ripped out of it. Sure, it improves on the crude measures of power touted by neo-realists, but these were debunked by Robert Dahl’s ‘lump-of-power’ fallacy back in the 1970s.

This brings us to the nub of the problem. Is it possible to be a critical scholar and be regarded as 'policy relevant' in a US context? It depends what one means by 'critical' of course. Huntington showed that one could be influential despite a veneer of iconoclasm, but he never really questioned the foundational assumptions of US hegemony, i.e., the undisputed merit of US values and of US power and its exercise. Nor did any of the others directly involved in policymaking. More broadly, I have no doubt that the State Department and various other agencies regularly draw upon academic expertise when formulating policies (and so the survey and Nye's article will understate the actual degree of involvement). But the sorts of people likely to be invited to contribute are not likely to be too critical, even if they have criticisms of existing approaches and wish to offer alternative solutions.

At stake here is the fundamental distinction in scholarship between 'problem-solving' and 'critical' theories of IR, which Robert Cox introduced in a famous article many years ago.(4) Cox argued that theory, despite being presented as a neutral analytical tool, was always for someone and for some purpose. Problem-solving theories ultimately endorsed the prevailing system by seeking to provide ways to make that system run more smoothly. Critical theories, by contrast, seeks to explain why the system exists in the first place and what could be done to transform it. What Nye, Huntington, Brzezinski and Kissinger all share in common (along with the vast majority of IR scholars) is their problem-solving approach. Naturally, policy-makers want academics to be problem-solvers, since policies seek precisely to - well, solve problems. But this does not necessarily mean that this should be the function of the academy.

Indeed, the tyranny of 'policy relevance' achieves its most destructive form when it becomes so dominant that it threatens to squeeze out the space provided to think about the foundations of prevailing orders in a critical, even hostile, fashion. Taking clear inspiration from Marx, Cox produced path-breaking work showing how different social orders, corresponding to different modes of production, generated different world orders, and looked for contradictions within the existing orders to see how the world might be changing. Marxist theories of world order are unlikely to be seen as very 'policy relevant' by capitalist elites (despite the fact that, where Marxist theory is good, it is not only 'critical' but also potentially 'problem-solving', a sinister possibility that Cox overlooked). Does this mean that such inquiry should be replaced by government-funded policy wonkery?

Absolutely not - especially when we consider the horrors that entails. At one conference a couple of years ago I was appalled to hear a presentation from a Kings College London team who had won a gargantuan sum of money from the government to study civil contingency plans in the event of terrorist attacks; they suggested a raft of measures to securitise every day life, including developing clearly sign-posted escape routes from London to familiarise them to people who would be expected to flee the capital in blind panic. There are always plenty of academics who are willing to turn their hand to official agendas, many of which are repressive. There are some who produce fine problem-solving work who ought to disseminate their ideas much more widely, beyond the narrow confines of academia. There are far fewer who are genuinely critical. If one were to assess how much money these groups received to support their research activities, you would, I hazard, find that pet academics receive most, what you might call 'critical friends' second most, and more critical problem-solvers, third, while truly critical minds get the least. I would also expect to see a correlation between positivism and research funding allocation, although some trendy so-called 'post-positivists' may attract certain pots of money depending on the political mood (e.g., some feminist scholars may benefit from the contemporary obsession with the role of women in conflict resolution, development, etc).

'Policy relevance', then, is a double-edged sword. No one would wish to describe their work as 'irrelevant', so the key question, as always, is 'relevant to whom?' I believe that relevance to one's research community, students, and so on, is more than enough justification for academic freedom - provided that scholars shoulder their responsibilities to teach and thus repay something to the society that supports them. But beyond that, we also need to fully respect work that will never be policy-relevant, because it refuses to swallow fashionable concerns or toe the line on government agendas. This, it seems to me, is worth ten thousand Deputy Undersecretaries of State for Security Assistance, Science, and Technology.

Lee Jones is a Rose Research Fellow in International Relations, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. lee.jones@politics.ox.ac.uk

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(1) What this means for teachers and students is admirably chronicled by the inspirational critical pedagogist Ira Shor in his many dispatches from the coalface, including When Students Have Power (1996) and Critical Teaching and Everyday Life (1987), esp. ch. 1, 'The Working Classes Go To College'.

(2) it should now be commonplace knowledge that science does not advance in the way imagined by positivists like Karl Popper, by attempting to falsify hypotheses and endless rigorous testing, but, as various sociologists of science, starting with Thomas Kuhn, have demonstrated, by far more human methods, including retroduction, hunches, guess-work, 'massaging' the data, interpreting the data through paradigmatic prisms, etc. Yet the leading proponents of social scientific methodology in IR, for example, suggest rigidly positivist modes of operation that are not really used in the laboratories of hard scientists (e.g., Gary King, Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba's Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research).

(3) see Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001).

(4) Robert Cox, 'Social Forces, States, and World Order: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium 10:2 (1981).