Academia is an easy target for attack for a variety of reasons. Shortened attention spans make communicating complex and nuanced arguments challenging. Everyday people often have little time, patience, and energy to immerse themselves in emerging literature on war, peace, public policy, and economics.
Academics often don’t help themselves, either. Scholarly work is often longer and less digestible, accessible, and clear than it ought to be. The politicking of tenure, too, can breed exclusivity and feed already overfed egos.
But scholars have answers, or at least theories, to explain the world’s most delicate and important challenges. Take armed conflict, for example. International Relations scholarship is replete with literature on how wars (both inter and intra-state) begin, how warfare is conducted, how wars end, the durability of peace, and how wartime economies perpetuate violence. One need not look far to discover the war initiation puzzle, preventative war, diversionary war theory, and bargaining theory of war. Policymakers contending with the stubborn dynamics of war and peace would be wise ground themselves in the this scholarship.
I am not suggesting that ongoing debates about war and peace are settled. They are not, and fierce debate among scholars persists. Nor am I advocating for International Relations professors to be left in charge of the Department of State or Foreign Office (some of America’s preeminent foreign policy practitioners: Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Woodrow Wilson all taught International Relations before entering the West Wing.)
I do, however, see a substantial incongruence between the nuance and rigor that exists in the academy versus that of the public rhetoric and logic policymakers responsible for tending to the world’s most urgent questions: war and peace, stability and chaos, cooperation and fragmentation. Surely the gap between scholars and policymakers is inevitable, policymakers have little time to ponder and research the idiosyncrasies of war and peace, but it should be far more narrow. Why, for example, do we fail to witness rigorous, intellectual, and nuanced foreign policy debates in the corridors of Congress or Parliament?
Scholars often do their best to engage critically with policymakers. Many, in addition to teaching responsibilities, take fellowships at prestigious think tanks in Washington, D.C. and London. They host events, promote ideas, and write policy briefs that make the complex more absorbable. This dynamic, however, can be one-sided — making the most important foreign policy questions far too reductive. It is time for policymakers to start having more nuanced conversations.
What is the point of academia if not to enhance our understanding of the world and ultimately make it less violent? Why aren’t well-reasoned, thorough academic papers cited as evidence in service of a certain policy choice? These are overlooked questions.
This moment in time is an opportunity to engage more profound ideas, we should invite the people who develop, test, refine, and scrutinize ideas for a living into the policy conversation.