"Cult of the Irrelevant?" The Influence of IR Scholarship on National Security

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

In his new book, "Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security" (Princeton University Press, 2019), Michael Desch argues that professionalization and scholarly rigor have made social scientists and social scientific research increasingly irrelevant to US national security policy.

Desch’s book joins a chorus of voices—including scholars, practitioners, journalists, and others—who in recent years have lamented the gap between the academic and policy communities of international relations. Some observers blame the theory-practice divide on policy makers who lack the time and/or interest to read academic journals and books. More commonly, students of the gap blame academic norms and incentives that emphasize sophisticated theory and methodology over content. Increasingly, such critics argue, international relations research is highly specialized, abstract, arcane, and/or inaccessible to non-specialists and fails to address issues of interest to practitioners. Still other observers claim that the problem is less about content than it is about the timeliness and effective communication of research to policy practitioners. Together, however, the overwhelming majority of these works attribute responsibility for the gap between the academic and policy communities to academics and academic institutions, and they call upon scholars of international security, and international relations more generally, to close that gap by producing more policy-relevant research.

Michael Desch’s book falls squarely in this camp. In "Cult of the Irrelevant," he outlines the history of the relationship between the academy and the policy world from World War I to the present. Desch concludes, based on this historical analysis, that social science research on national security issues is most policy- and problem-oriented during war and less relevant during periods of relative peace. He argues, moreover, that the increasing professionalization of security studies—especially the focus on increasingly sophisticated mathematical methods borrowed from economics—has moved the field away from its roots in US security policy. Desch calls for a return to the problem-focused research that characterized the Golden Age of nuclear strategy. Based on his historical analysis and a survey of current and former defense and security policy officials, Desch makes a series of recommendations to return the international security field to these policy-relevant roots.

The proposed roundtable brings together a diverse group of prominent scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners to explore the questions of how policy-relevant national security and international relations are and how policy-relevant they should be. The roundtable participants will interrogate the role of contemporary theory, methods, professional standards and incentives, and other factors in the evolving policy relevance of the discipline. Finally, they will ask whether, as a small number of scholars and contemporary observers suggest, we should even be seeking to close the gap between the theory and practice of national security and international relations, or whether the gap is essential to ensuring continued academic objectivity and the accumulation of knowledge.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 19: International Security

Chair

• Susan Peterson College of William and Mary

Presenters

• Michael Desch University of Notre Dame

• Michael Horowitz University of Pennsylvania

• Sarah E. Kreps

• Kent Campbell Myers Office of Director of National Intelligence

• Ido Oren University of Florida

• Jordan Tama American University-SIS

• Stephen M. Walt Harvard University