Can scholars influence foreign policymaking? - Worldview

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Dec, 2003

Does the academic study of international relations matter in the real world of foreign policymaking? Many scholars have made the leap by using their intellectual training to work on gritty real-life issues.

"As an academic, you basically do retrospective analysis with more or less full information and lots of time. When you're making foreign policy, you have no time and limited information," says Stanford (Calif.) University political science professor Steve Krasner, who witnessed firsthand the often chaotic world of foreign policymaking as a member of the policy planning staff at the State Department and as director for governance and development at the National Security Council.

Krasner suggests that international relations scholarship can be relevant to policymakers because it can offer potentially important new insights into issues. Yet, he cautions academics to avoid policy-directed research and instead concentrate on doing "serious" work that might one day make a contribution--although perhaps not in a predictable manner. "Making foreign policy is extremely difficult--it's a lot harder than rocket science. Having a lot of ideas out there to choose from is helpful. Academia provides a lot of those ideas."

Formal training in academic international relations can be useful, Krasner points out, because it teaches people how to think systematically and build frameworks for considering issues. "If you have a lot of social science training, you can write better memos."

Krasner notes that several influential people in the current Administration have made the transition from academia--for example, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have doctorates in political science.

Unlike the natural sciences, Krasner maintains, international relations scholarship is less likely to provide definitive answers that can be used systematically in tackling real-world problems. "Our ability to give conclusive findings with low residuals is low."