Editor's Note: This is a guest post by David Edelstein. It is the eighth installment in our "End of IR Theory" companion symposium for the special issue of the European Journal of International Relations. SAGE has temporarily ungated all of the articles in that...
e-International Relations asked me to write a piece about doing policy-relevant research. I thought I'd cross-post it here, especially timely given recent posts on this blog along with Ronald...
The seventeenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Iver Neumann, then of the London School of Economics.
I have read with great interest over the last few days posts by Jeffrey Stacey and now Sean Kay on the gap between scholarship and policy. I agree with much of what they said - seriously - and I...
In Spring of 2006, I was nearing the end of data collection on my investigation into the human rights of children born of rape and exploitation in conflict zones, and I presented my preliminary findings on the topic atUniversity of Pittsburgh’s Research in International Politics (RIP) monthly brown-bag. In such circles, heavily dominated by empirical approaches, one does not present normative theory (that is, value-laden arguments about how the world should look) or policy-oriented sets of recommendations about particular problems. Rather, one identifies empirical puzzles about the world and...
As I gathered content today for my upcoming ISA presentation on social media, I was delighted to discover that my "Blog Wars" video from few years back (a response to a theory-policy debate stirred up by Joseph Nye and Dan Drezner) is cited in an academic paper as an actual contribution to the debate! The paper itself is quite good: Bradley Parks and Alena Stern conduct one of the few empirical studies I'm aware of how scholars actually interface with the world of policy. They use as a hook the debate over policy relevance sparked off by Joseph Nye's "Scholars on the Sidelines?" op-ed back...
Among the assigned readings for my new doctoral seminar in Human Security this week are a number of pieces from last year's International Studies Review Theory v. Practice Symposium. There are numerous fascinating pieces here, including Dan Drezner's case study on the evolution of "smart sanctions," Roland Paris' discussion of "fragile states" as a case study in epistemic agenda-setting, and Kittikhoun and Weiss' debunking "The Myth of Scholarly Irrelevance for the U.N."In particular, a quote from Jentleson and Ratner's contribution jumped out at me:"The profession-based incentive structure...
After rejections from two other policy journals and ten days of wrangling with the editors, my first policy-article on the rules of war has just appeared in The National Interest. In a nutshell: "The arguments of the Bush administration when it comes to torture, prisoner-of-war status and extraordinary rendition have been met with outrage by the international community, constitutional scholars and human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, which has referred to Guantánamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times.' But the polarization of these two camps obscures the broad middle ground...