Theory and Intuition

All theories are ultimately based on intuitions, insights typically implicit and vaguely formed about how the universe, social life, or politics “works.” Psychologists have demonstrated that even young children have intuitive theories of physics (e.g., relating to the movement of objects) and psychology, especially relating to social interactions.^{Footnote 6} Although exactly how these intuitions are formed is still not fully understood, experience interacting with the environment and other humans is central. Given the latter, it would be extraordinary if politics were not equally encapsulated in intuitive models of group dynamics and decision-making, even at a young age. Intuitions may also arise later from disciplinary training in which members are taught to “see” certain things and not others; indeed, if the disciplining works, the “known” becomes intuitive.^{Footnote 7}

My intuition is that many intuitions, especially in the social sciences, derive from lived experience. By lived experience I mean the sum total of one’s interactions with the environment and, more importantly for my purposes here, with other human beings. How were you raised as a child? How frequently were you exposed to new ideas and places? Who did you interact with frequently or in significant ways? The range of possibly significant interactions is large. With the debate between nature and nurture forever unresolved, all we can say is that experience interacts with our genetic material to shape who we are. Each person and their life experience are, of course, unique; this is what makes us individuals.

Some life experiences, however, are patterned. Although as humans we share much, some subset of these patterns are associated through social practice with ascriptive characteristics, creating the socially constructed categories of race, gender, and inequalities on other dimensions. What matters here are not just one-off interactions (however important some may be to an individual) but repeated interactions that imprint themselves on us. These patterned interactions begin early in life, exemplified by our social norms and practices embodied, for instance, in dressing little boys in blue and giving them trucks as presents while dressing little girls in pink and offering them dolls. Parents and families may attempt to break these patterns of interaction—buying and encouraging their male children to play with toy kitchens, for instance—but they have only a limited ability to control the patterns enculturated in the larger society.

Ascriptive characteristics do not determine lived experience but they are often signals to others—individuals and society as a whole—as to how a specific individual is to be “treated.” As a result, individuals with shared ascriptive qualities will tend to share similar life experiences. In this way, ascriptive characteristics are both a cause of life experience and a correlate. The lived experiences of white males in the United States during the twentieth century, for instance, share similarities that are different from those for women, blacks, Hispanics, and other racial minorities. It is not whiteness or maleness—or their genetic markers—that really matter for the argument here, but rather the lived experience that is associated with these attributes.

Lived experience, in turn, shapes our intuitions, including about social life and politics. Even before encountering the formal study of political science, we almost certainly begin with an intuitive sense of politics shaped from childhood on. Can people on average be trusted? Is the “system” generally “fair” or is it rigged against the “little guy”? When I speak will others listen? The answers to such questions are often unexamined—and thus, “intuitive.” Once introduced to the study of human behavior and politics, we are then drawn to certain theories, typically stated at the broad philosophical level, that seem to capture some salient dimension of this lived experience. In IR, scholars are often attracted to particular approaches such as Realism, Liberalism, Neoliberal Institutionalism, Marxism, Constructivism, Feminism, Postmodernism, and so on. These so-called paradigms are not theories in any systematic way, but are really more intuitions about the nature of humans and their social interactions.^{Footnote 8} Self-identification as a “Realist” likely says less about a scholar’s actual research than about his intuitive sense of how the world works, in this case reflecting an intuition that individuals aggregated into collectivities called states, pursue power, and that politics is inherently competitive, a zero-sum dog-eat-dog world.

Our job as scholars, is turn, is to critically evaluate our own intuitions and those of others around us. For critical theorists, evaluation entails exposing our intuitions—or hidden assumptions—and asking whether they are normatively or morally just. For positivists, critical evaluation means building or refining theories to incorporate our intuitions, deriving testable propositions, and then subjecting hypotheses to potential refutation. Unlike politicians or bureaucrats who exist mostly within the world of intuition, often accepting or shaping evidence to fit the echo chamber of their “preconceived notions,” scholars can be and should be both intuitive and critical at the same time. It is the ambition to check the deductive validity of our intuitions and then test their implications against some moral standard or the empirical record that separates scholars from everyone else.

Humans are, of course, pretty poor at self-criticism—and scholars are no different. To the extent our intuitions are the product of lived experience, they seem natural to us; they reflect life as we know it. When surrounded by others with similar life experiences, our intuitions are further naturalized and, indeed, reified. Rejecting or even modifying one’s intuition is thus hard, even emotionally painful. Precisely because our intuitions are deeply encoded in our (perhaps unconscious) minds, accepting that they are morally flawed or theoretically invalid can be traumatic. For this reason, most social scientists do not reject theories they find intuitively appealing. Rather, scholars tend to assume (albeit implicitly) that their lived experiences are more common than they are, and then simply reach for new lines of defense or make only slight modifications to what is basically the same intuition. Because our intuitions are often at least partly “correct” or capture some salient dimension of social and political life, they tend to survive scrutiny, although perhaps not emerging entirely unscathed. Ideas do change. At the same time, our intuitions are real to us and, thus, remarkably robust even in the face of criticism.

The difficulty of self-criticism and identifying the partiality of our own intuitions, however, is the principal reason why enhancing diversity in academia is important. Because life experiences and intuitions differ, aspects of politics or social life more generally that might seem unimportant and safely ignored by one theorist may be highly salient and essential to another. The theories they write, therefore, will be at least somewhat different. Some theories will prove superior, better able to explain patterns of social life. Others will not. But our responsibility as scholars is not to assume the universality of lived experience but to be conscious about our differences, reveal and articulate them clearly, and then—and only then—test theories that incorporate these experiences against a moral standard or observed reality. This is most easily accomplished within a more diverse community of scholars able to challenge one another’s intuitions with their own.

Intuition and Theory

The primordial assumption of International Relations is that the international system is anarchic, or devoid of authority higher than states. This assumption, in turn, rests on an even deeper conception rooted in formal-legal conceptions of authority that implies states are of equal status or, as we now understand the word, sovereign. Much of this follows from Emmerich Vattel, who extrapolated from liberal theory to states, arguing that since “a dwarf is as much a man as a giant is; a small republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom.”^{Footnote 9} The assumption that international relations are anarchic and composed of formally equal states may be the product of a shared life experience or intuition of what is still a largely white male scholarly community. That actors, including states, may differ in physical strength but be otherwise of equal status likely accords with the intuitive model of politics white males—myself included—carry around in their heads. This is, of course, speculative and possibly impossible to prove, but introspection suggests that, if current scholars are honest with themselves, there may be an element of truth in this suggestion. I would extend this same line of argument to the role of violence in international relations, the emphasis on physical force as the basis for bargaining, and the salience of high politics (security, the aim to protect others) over low politics (economics, human rights, the environment, which tend to nurture others). I develop this point more fully in the next section. What the largely white and male scholars of IR deem important to study and explain may well reflect their common lived experiences and intuitions about politics.

Speaking for white males in my profession is dangerous. These broad speculations are just that, speculations. I can, however, speak for myself. Acknowledging the difficulties of self-criticism just discussed, let me reflect on my own research and the role that intuition has likely played in my choice of theoretical approach. For those unfamiliar with my work, I have focused on questions of international order and leadership for the better part of my career. The main intuition—one that has been fairly consistent over three decades—has been that international order is, in part, produced by the leadership of dominant states in the international system. That is, international cooperation is the product not just of self-interest or self-enforcing institutions but is, at least in part, a consequence of politics as the authoritative allocation of value.^{Footnote 10} Understood in this way, domestic and international politics are not worlds apart, but are both hierarchical realms of authority.^{Footnote 11}

I started by trying to elaborate, refine, and test the theory of hegemonic stability, but eventually concluded that was something of a blind alley.^{Footnote 12} Tacking in a difference direction, I began exploring more explicitly how authority between and over states might affect prospects for international order. Drawing on theories of the firm, I first sought to explain the form and extent of international hierarchy.^{Footnote 13} Stepping back, I both extended the approach to emphasize the socially constructed nature of international hierarchy and developed more fully its empirical implications for world politics.^{Footnote 14} Both of these later books fed into what is now being called “new hierarchy studies” in IR.^{Footnote 15}

Unifying my work on hierarchy—and this is important—is essentially a voluntarist, negotiated, or social contract view of authority. This has been the most frequent criticism of both my 1999 and 2009 books, and the critique is not without merit. While opening a space for hierarchy between states, ruled out by most others under the anarchy assumption, there is a residual assumption that today’s modern world and the principle of sovereignty imply that hierarchy and, especially, subordination is a choice—a choice constrained by often extreme power differentials, I want to stress, but a choice nonetheless. On reflection, I recognize that a choice between subordination and, at an extreme, annihilation is in reality not much of a choice. Especially in its formative years, hierarchy can take brutal forms. I have emphasized repeatedly, especially in the 2009 book, that authority must be legitimate, but it is never “fair,” equitable, or even reasonable from the view of the subordinate. Authority is everywhere and always exercised by someone for some purpose, often for selfish motivations. I am not blind to the effects of the “Hobson’s choice” that is often at the core of any hierarchy. But as an analytic abstraction, I must confess that I find a social contract approach an intuitive way of thinking about the formation and operation of hierarchy within and especially between states.

Despite the recognition expressed in the theory that international politics is comprised of unequal actors of differing authority or hierarchy, the voluntarism of my social contract approach almost certainly stems from my life experience as a white male in which making “contracts” in politics, however unequal, still “makes sense.”^{Footnote 16} One makes the best deal possible, but thinking of giving up some measure of autonomy for social order can through my experience be reasonably conceived as a choice someone might have. In recognizing this intuition, however, it immediately follows that for someone with a different life experience or intuition about politics, conceiving of this tradeoff as a choice might not be reasonable at all. This is likely to be the case for women and racial minorities who have, for various and deeply regrettable reasons, endured structurally unequal positions in society and far more limited ranges of choice—that is, very different life experiences. Women or racial minorities might well approach the problem of authority and hierarchy in international relations from a very different starting point, leading to a different theory on the foundations and processes of hierarchy. In the end, within the commitments to our intuitions just described, we might contest which theory of hierarchy captures better the reality around us—which theory has more explanatory power—but in the end our understanding would be greatly enriched regardless of the outcome through the very act of constructing different theories based on different intuitions.

I have frequently wished, for instance, that some scholar would rewrite my work on hierarchy from the bottom up.^{Footnote 17} In retrospect, I am now aware that I wrote a theory of hierarchy from the top-down, from the point of view of a privileged person in an especially privileged country in which a social contract conception of authority makes intuitive sense. I suspect that a scholar with a different life experience and intuition would likely see hierarchy from a different perspective in which the voluntarism natural to me looks rather optimistic, perhaps even silly. Frankly, I have thought about attempting such a project myself, inverting the lens through which I have previously looked at world politics. Though perhaps somewhat self-aware, I am also not convinced I could shed the blinders I inevitably wear. Such a bottom-up theory would not only be easier, I am sure, but done better by someone with a different intuition shaped by a less privileged life. Were that theory available to engage, I am sure my understanding of international relations and, in particular, international hierarchy would be greatly improved. Assessing the two theories against one another, I am confident, would tell us something meaningful about the origins and nature of international authority. I remain hopeful that someone will take up this challenge.

My point here is not that we are strictly governed by our life experiences or that white males cannot grasp the existence of structural inequalities in world politics.^{Footnote 18} My own intellectual evolution belies any such argument. Rather, my argument is that some theories are more intuitive than others to different groups of scholars; like a pair of shoes—not only of the old and worn variety—some simply feel right or fit. Our life experiences shape our intuitions, which in turn guide our theoretical suppositions. Some theories are just easier for some people to accept than others.

The community of IR scholars in the United States and Europe is still overwhelmingly white and, though women are increasing in numbers, largely male. These are not the only ascriptive traits that might matter, nor do they determine life experiences. Nonetheless, as has been increasingly vocalized by members of various disadvantaged groups in recent years, being white and male still confer individually and jointly privilege in U.S. society—and I would add in academia. Diversifying the academy by including more scholars who are women, of color, from impoverished backgrounds, of differing sexual orientations, and other dimensions of difference will broaden the life experiences brought to bear in the discipline and to the study of world politics. The different intuitions carried by now-under-represented scholars will expose previously hidden assumptions, provoke new insights, provide inspiration for new theories, and likely produce new hypotheses that help identify new empirical regularities. We will all know more about international politics if we create a more diverse community of scholars. This is, however, harder than it should be because of the disciplinary hierarchy in which we are embedded and the practices, seemingly neutral on their face, that sustain it.

Disciplinary Hierarchy

IR as a discipline (like international relations itself) is hierarchically ordered.^{Footnote 19} As select scholars are recognized by their peers for their research and other professional accomplishments, they are eventually invited to serve as reviewers for journals, section organizers of association meetings, editorial board members, external referees for promotion and tenure decisions, journal editors, and perhaps even as officers of various professional associations. In these roles, these scholars consciously or not become “gatekeepers”—though few identify with that role. Which papers or panels get onto the program of which association conference? Which submissions get published in which journals? Who gets tenure? How do we organize our professional associations, including which voices get heard within their deliberations? Although “contributions” can arise in many forms—some rewarded for their research, others for providing public goods to the field—most recognition in the discipline simultaneously requires an intellectual advance of some kind and acceptance of that advance by the existing community of scholars. One must innovate in some way, but within the limits of what others already find “interesting,” salient, important and—dare I say at this point—intuitive. The need to be accepted within the existing hierarchy means that innovation occurs at the margin, within the standards of the current gatekeepers.

In a largely white male community, gatekeeping privileges research that conforms to the life experiences and intuitions common to that ascriptive group. The topics that are appropriate for study and the approaches that seem sensible and reasonable are guided by the intuitions of the existing gatekeepers, creating a self-reinforcing community standard. The limited life experiences of white males, coupled with their dominance at the top of the disciplinary hierarchy at this point, likely shapes much of the discipline, perhaps most notably reflected in the gender citation bias in IR.^{Footnote 20} There is, I want to emphasize, nothing nefarious about this gatekeeping process or its effects. Gatekeepers are rarely self-conscious in their biases and even less, I believe, intentional in their exclusionary practices. It is just that standards about what constitutes “good work” are shaped by our intuitions and, in turn, life experiences that are themselves shaped by and reflect various ascriptive characteristics. White man’s IR begets white man’s IR.

The hierarchy is perhaps most obvious in defining what is “important” versus “peripheral” in the field. “Real” security studies involve the use or at least the potential use of organized physical violence for political ends, whereas human security is still seen as outside the mainstream of the field.^{Footnote 21} Although the human security literature includes a good many male authors, at present it remains the case that women are disproportionately drawn to the study of how inequalities—even violence—affect the everyday lives of individuals, including how deprivation of food and human rights can be thought of in terms of security or how sexual violence is used to reward soldiers and traumatize victims.^{Footnote 22} While the ratio of men-to-women who self-identify as studying global/international security is 1.45, the same ratio of those identifying themselves as specializing in human security is 0.32.^{Footnote 23} Where there are almost one-and-a-half men for every woman studying international security issues, in other words, there is only one-third of a man for every woman working in the area of human security. It is even less of a coincidence, I would argue, that women, writing from a feminist perspective, have highlighted the deep structures that produce and sustain violence as an instrument of control.^{Footnote 24} I am not suggesting that women are innately more nurturing and drawn to the “personal.” Rather, shared lived experience is sufficient, in my view, to make women on average slightly more sensitive to the kinds of inequalities that motivate research on human security issues. Perhaps because of its gendered origins and priorities, it is also not a coincidence that human security studies are still regarded as peripheral by “traditional” security scholars.^{Footnote 25} In similar ways, the subfield of international political economy focuses almost entirely on the instruments of and impediments to business—trade barriers, foreign investment, exchange rates—and rarely emphasizes how globalization affects the actual lives of everyday people and families—the equivalent of the focus on individuals in human security studies.^{Footnote 26} In both areas, what constitutes “interesting” or appropriate questions worthy of research, publication in top journals, and prominence in the field are constrained, limited, and indeed severely truncated.

The disciplinary hierarchy need not be total or even that rigid in its exclusionary practices to have pervasive effects on the research programs of scholars. As Thomas Schelling demonstrated long ago, even very small biases can lead to dramatic segregation.^{Footnote 27} Given professional incentives to publish, get tenure, gain professional recognition, and so on, small differences in the probabilities of success through different choices can have big effects. Graduate students warned that focusing on, say, food security issues will likely make it a bit harder to publish in a prominent security or IPE journal or get a job—even if only at the margin—will rationally choose the safer route and focus on a more traditional or mainstream question for their dissertation. In choosing where to submit an article for publication, especially when the tenure clock is ticking loudly, why submit and then waste months waiting to hear from a journal that has never published an article on feminism or race in IR? Some scholars may be sufficiently committed to an idea, an approach, or a set of questions to buck the mainstream. And some scholars may by personality delight in provoking the field—a critical attitude toward the discipline that deserves more than a measure of applause. But many scholars conform to the discipline of the discipline, even when their ascriptive characteristics, lived experiences, and intuitions as above might have otherwise taken them in a different direction. It is noteworthy, here, that women and minorities who have “made it” within the mainstream of the profession are sometimes the harshest critics of other women and minorities.^{Footnote 28} White man’s IR begets white man’s IR—even for scholars who are women and of color.

Again, I want to emphasize that gatekeepers are usually not conscious of their biases and are rarely malicious in their gatekeeping. I believe most scholars—even the most successful—are sincere in their expressions of support for diversity in society and the academy. But if lived experiences shape what is considered intuitive and appropriate, if these filters in turn structure what are interesting questions and what constitutes “good” work in the field, and if these considerations matter even at the margin for the professional success of scholars, the discipline can severely restrict the range of work produced despite the best and most sincere aspirations of its members.

What Is to Be Done?

Broadening participation of under-represented groups within the power structure of the discipline is essential to breaking this self-reinforcing hierarchy. Promoting diversity in any form is often resented by currently privileged groups—including white males—as a form of “political correctness,” a now-dismissive term it seems, or as a “watering down” of standards in the discipline. How often have we all heard some version of the trope that emphasizing diversity in faculty hiring necessarily means a decline in the average “quality” of the candidates? Ascriptive representation, in turn, is all too often perceived as a challenge to the existing hegemony of ideas. And indeed it is! In fact, if I am at all correct about the role of lived experience, intuition, and theory, this is precisely its value. By broadening participation, we open the discipline to new experiences, new intuitions, new theories, and ultimately a better understanding of world politics. Ascriptive representation is not just a worthy goal in itself, but it is a necessary step towards improved theory in the field.

So, what can we, as a field, do? First, the disciplinary hierarchy must be eroded both from without and within. I write “erode” rather than “overthrow” here on purpose. An incremental strategy that will, in turn, have incremental results is the only viable course of action. A revolutionary approach that seeks to “take over” a journal, professional association, etc., will simply displace the existing hierarchy onto another journal or conference that will then become the primary outlet for “good” work in the field. Rather, the hierarchy needs to be steadily broadened, inevitably by increments and small measures, to become more inclusive. To do this, underrepresented groups must form coalitions with other marginalized groups. Precisely because they are excluded from the mainstream and gatekeeping roles, they must aggregate their voices to be heard. In turn, existing gatekeepers who care not only about diversity per se but also about furthering our intellectual progress must ally with under-represented groups within the field to ensure greater ascriptive representation at all levels of the disciplinary hierarchy.

In practice, this means that women and scholars of color must claim and be appointed to positions of influence within the discipline. We ultimately want varied life experiences, but since these are largely unobservable but do, I believe, correlate with ascriptive categories, we must work to ensure that women, blacks, Hispanics, and others with correlated sets of experiences are included in the informal (e.g., journal reviewers) and formal decision-making structures of the profession. Attention is now paid in many organizational settings to gender balance on committees, editorial boards, and so forth. This is movement in the right direction. We need to expand diversity to include race, sexual orientation, and other under-represented groups. White male scholars should see diversity not as some concession to organized groups within the profession but as an intentional and necessary step to enrich the intellectual breadth of the field.

At the same time, promoting women and minority scholars into positions of influence raises a host of problems, for which there are no easy answers. Ascriptive minorities should and often do see these additional responsibilities as just (yet more) “service.” Representation, however, is also a contribution to broadening scholarship in the discipline and improving theory and will, hopefully, have larger intellectual and professional payoffs. But at the same time, we are asking scholars already outside the mainstream and who may face greater difficulty in getting their worked recognized to spend even more time away from their research and to carry a disproportionate burden of professional service. These same scholars may, for similar reasons, already be carrying a heavy service burden within their home institutions. With research and publication the ultimate coin of the realm in academia, we risk stretching already stretched colleagues to the breaking point—or at least creating conditions in which it is nearly impossible for them to succeed.

We also risk tokenizing women and minorities on various professional committees. On the one hand, they are there precisely as ascriptive minorities with the hope and expectation that their lived experiences will bring a different perspective to bear on the field. On the other hand, these individuals may justifiably feel that they are there because of who they are rather than what they have done. This often leaves scholars feeling demeaned and even more marginalized.^{Footnote 29} It’s all well and good to urge women and minorities to sacrifice some portion of their valuable time and energy to broaden the hierarchy, as I do here, but we must also recognize that this carries a professional and emotional toll that is not easily offset on any other dimension.

In breaking the disciplinary hierarchy, specific attention ought to be paid to gender and racial balance in department hiring, in choosing editorial teams for professional journals, in professional leadership positions, and beyond. Implicit bias remains a real problem that can nonetheless be reduced (if not mitigated) through more structured and self-conscious practices of recruitment and assessment.^{Footnote 30} With women comprising 40 percent of recent Ph.Ds., it is inexcusable to still find departments with only male assistant professors; though the senior professoriate may reflect the hiring practices of decades ago, the ranks of assistant professors should be judged by the standards of inclusion used today. The same is true for panels at professional conferences, including smaller conferences that aim to produce collaborative research. As noted, there has been tremendous progress on this score in the last decade—“manels” (all male panels) at professional meetings are now called out—but further progress is possible and necessary. Over time, inclusion at the junior level will, I hope, percolate to the upper levels of the disciplinary hierarchy.

Second, IR must also broaden the “pipeline” of students with varied life experiences into the discipline, and ensure that it does not unduly “leak” along the way. This is not entirely separate from breaking the disciplinary hierarchy just discussed. To draw young scholars into the profession requires pathways for them to succeed. But there is a chicken-and-egg problem here: to broaden ascriptive diversity at all levels of the discipline requires diversity in the pipeline into the field. Before underrepresented scholars can be promoted in the discipline, members of underrepresented groups must first be encouraged to enter the discipline in larger numbers. This requires the expansion of pipeline programs like the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute of the American Political Science Association, or the summer research program in political science recently begun by my own university in association with Morehouse and Spelman Colleges.^{Footnote 31} Again, there is movement in the right direction. Yet such programs appear to be growing more rapidly than the available pool of students. We need more women and underrepresented minorities to consider IR as an interesting and welcoming field and profession.

Expanding the pipeline is, I think, the biggest challenge we face, and once again there is no easy solution. Most suggestions appropriately focus on making college and, to a lesser extent, graduate education accessible to all. One small step that the discipline itself can take, however, is to think more carefully about what and especially who we teach in our undergraduate and graduate courses. Many departments and institutions, for instance, teach Introduction to International Relations as the study of war, sending a message to students that this is really what the field is about.^{Footnote 32} Others teach that course—and its graduate equivalent, the field seminar—as a debate between the alternative paradigms of Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism (with an occasional nod to more critical approaches), suggesting to students that there are pre-defined and a limited number of approaches to the subject matter; I think a more “problem-oriented” approach on a greater variety of topics is more intellectually engaging and welcoming to a more diverse student population.^{Footnote 33}

We should also be sensitive to the balance of authors from various ascriptive groups on our syllabi. A long list of obviously “male” and less obviously “white” names signals students about the existing disciplinary hierarchy.^{Footnote 34} I was struck by a recent conversation between some colleagues on gender-balance in our course readings. One position was that there is no female-IR, no male-IR, just “good” IR. This seemingly reasonable position, however, ignores how the corpus of “good” work is defined. In any field, but especially in IR, white males decide what work is “essential” reading for novices, whether this be18-year-olds taking an introductory course or graduate students taking a field seminar. Even scholars who are women or of color who want their students to be “well educated” will be expected to assign many of the same readings, though women on average assign more works by women and are less likely to assign their own research to students.^{Footnote 35} But if I am right and different lived experiences influence what gets incorporated into our theories, and these theories then resonate (more or less well) with the lived experiences of other scholars who are like “us,” then “important” theories that must be taken seriously by students are endogenous to those lived experiences. To break this cycle, we must be more self-conscious about what “matters” to the field and what readings and approaches we emphasize. Ensuring that we assign works by diverse scholars is a check against the further inbreeding of ideas. Yet, broadening the range of readings assigned in courses is not a panacea. Available publications are themselves subject to the disciplinary hierarchy, with works reflecting different life experiences and intuition likely not appearing or appearing only in less prestigious journals. Thus, diversity on syllabi is hard to achieve, itself a product of all that I have been discussing to this point. But if we are more self-conscious about what we assign to our students, we can begin to open the discussion and, perhaps, create a more welcoming environment for different experiences and perspectives. This will, hopefully, eventually build a more diverse pipeline that will broaden our intellectual horizons.

In addition to encouraging diversity in the pipeline, we must also make greater efforts to promote a climate of inclusion within the profession. At the level of universities, we should demand family-friendly policies and more flexible tenure and promotion timetables, recognize gender-bias in student evaluations of teaching performance,^{Footnote 36} and reward the service discussed here appropriately. At the level of profession, we must also make sure there are adequate opportunities for women and scholars of color to participate in professional conferences and, importantly, that the climate at such meetings is inclusive and welcoming for all. Although there is no documentary record, rumors abound of inappropriate behavior at professional meetings. We must make clear that there is zero tolerance for sexual harassment or bias at any professional gathering; the same rules governing behavior within universities should be strictly enforced within our professional associations whenever they meet.

Diversity is an end in and of itself. I understand that there are a variety of opinions about this statement; though few would argue today that diversity is inherently bad or unjust, different people weight it differently as a goal for society. Personally, I attach great importance to diversity in all of the power structures of American society, not just for the academy. At the same time, however, greater diversity is an essential intermediate goal in our discipline. If the arguments I have made above are at all plausible, greater diversity of scholars in the field will ultimately improve the quality of the scholarship we produce. Even if you do not value diversity in itself, if you care about understanding world politics you should care about expanding diversity in the discipline. In our age of environmental degradation, human suffering from widespread political violence, inequality, ineffective political institutions, and abuses of individual and community rights and freedoms, we need all the help we can get.