Michael Desch believes that external threats largely determine the degree of policy-relevance in political science, and especially the status of security studies. When threats are high—as in World War II or the early Cold War—social scientists focus on providing usable knowledge and policy-makers pay more attention to their work. When dangers wane, however, disciplinary imperatives re-emerge, political science looks inward, and policy-relevant subfields like security studies come under attack.
As someone who has worried about the adverse effects of professionalization in academia, observed the hostility to security studies in several departments, and called for giving more weight to policy-relevant work, Footnote 1 I have considerable sympathy for Desch’s central argument. Nonetheless, I shall resist the temptation to simply agree with him and focus instead on several issues that merit further investigation.
For starters, does Desch’s broad explanation fit the facts? Desch’s account highlights the collapse of Yale’s Institute of International Studies in the mid-1950s, but the fate of one center at one university is hardly definitive evidence of a recurring tendency. Harvard’s Center for International Affairs was established at about the same time, for example, and it served as an intellectual home for scholars such as Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Waltz, Thomas Schelling, and Robert Jervis. Yale’s current International Security Studies program was founded in 1988, and it has thrived in a period where the United States was the dominant world power and faced few serious foreign dangers. Thus, looming external threats do not seem necessary to maintain a degree of policy-relevance and an interest in security topics.
Similarly, Desch’s theory does not fully explain why security studies came under such strong attack during the Indochina War. Many experts believed defeat in Vietnam would have serious adverse consequences, and this period also witnessed a Soviet arms buildup, an eroding military balance in Europe, and recurring conflicts in the Middle East. The international environment was far from benign from 1965 to 1974, yet security studies languished until the early 1980s. Footnote 2 The main reason was anti-military sentiment within the academy, but that is a different problem than Desch’s emphasis on the level of external threat.
Second, although I believe Desch’s account of trends in political science is generally accurate, academia as a whole presents a more complex picture. In particular, he does not discuss the parallel emergence of schools of public policy, whose ranks include a number of prominent security scholars. Technique may be trumping relevance in traditional “arts and science” departments, but Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, John Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, the Harvard Kennedy School, and other similar institutions have expanded steadily over the past four decades, even as the level of external threat has waxed and waned.
Third, are the disciplinary pathologies Desch identifies offset over the course of individual life academic careers? Younger scholars typically focus on establishing their disciplinary credentials, but many become more engaged by real-world issues after receiving tenure. The careers of Joseph Nye, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stephen Krasner, or Condoleezza Rice illustrate this familiar tendency, and younger scholars such as Jeremy Weinstein (chief of staff to UN Ambassador Samantha Power) and Colin Kahl (national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden) seem to be following a similar path. If so, then academia may still be providing useful guidance to the policy world.
Lastly, what is the proper balance between “pure” or “applied” research, either in the field as a whole, within a given department, or in an individual scholar’s career? There is no “right” answer to this question, of course, and the optimal balance is bound to vary over time. Here Desch’s recommendation that academic departments employ a wider set of criteria when evaluating scholars and not rely solely on outside assessments by their fellow academics or on citation counts strikes me as sound. Because we can never know exactly what sort of expertise we are going to need, a diverse intellectual ecosystem is preferable to a monoculture, especially when dealing with issues of war and peace. Emphasizing policy relevance and engagement is an effective way to preserve that essential diversity, instead of allowing purely methodological criteria to define and distort the substance of the field.
