Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
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Tarak Barkawi
Tarak Barkawi an historian of war and empire. His scholarship uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His last book, Soldiers of Empire,...
Leaving the lab
Perhaps the problem isn’t that theories leak from the lab, but efforts to seal the lab in the first place. If political scientists spent more time observing the policy world, me might get both better and more careful theories in the first place.
Rebecca Adler-Nissen
Rebecca Adler-Nissen's research focuses on international relations theory (especially international political sociology, stigma, status, recognition, norms and the practice turn), diplomacy, digital technologies, social media, sovereignty, European integration and anthropological methods. Rebecca Adler-Nissen is PI of the ERC-project DIPLOFACE and the research group Digital Disinformation, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation. Moreover, she is...
The Leakage Between Political Science and Policy Goes Both Ways
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
Ido Oren
Ido Oren earned a BA in Middle Eastern and African studies from Tel-Aviv University, an MA in Political Science from New York University, and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Chicago. His intellectual and research interests range from IR theory, international security affairs, and U.S. foreign policy, through the history and politics of American political science, to interpretive methods of political research. Oren’s...
How Can We Vaccinate Against Viral Political Science?
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
The Democratic Peace isn’t a Virus
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose goal is to better connect academics and policymakers, this argument is important and cautionary. (In addition to Musgrave’s recent Foreign Policy...
Political-Science Lab Leaks: a Symposium
Today we're kicking off a new symposium on Paul Musgrave's Foreign Policy article, "Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks." In it, Musgrave likens academic disciplines to labs; academic theories that exercise political influence, in his metaphor, are like viruses. Perhaps, his piece suggests, international-relations scholars should exercise a bit more caution in their drive to “bridge the gap” between theory and policy. The contributors to...
Erica De Bruin
Erica De Bruin’s research interests include civil-military relations and civil war. Her work focuses in particular on the dynamics of military coups, the spread of militarized policing, and the ways in which armed groups build legitimacy. She is the author of How to Prevent Coups d’état: Counterbalancing and Regime Survival (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of...
James Goldgeier
James Goldgeier is a Robert Bosch Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a Professor at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as Dean from 2011-17. In 2018-19, he held the Library of Congress Chair in U.S.-Russia Relations at the John W. Kluge Center and was a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining American...
Will Afghanistan Hurt U.S. Credibility?
What we know about reputation and credibility doesn’t track with the claims of doomsayers. But it also doesn’t accord with those who argue that there’s “nothing to see here.”