A little over four years ago the U.S. Department of Defense issued its first Minerva grants. These often substantial awards have produced a significant number of publications by some of the “best and brightest” (including long-term Duck of Minerva guest blogger Josh Busby) in the field and, whether directly or indirectly, shaped the nature of (at least) contemporary security studies. But it seems to me that we haven’t had anything resembling a robust discussion about consequent costs and benefits to political science, international relations, and security studies.
A brief search online doesn’t turn up much. Sean Kay has a piece in Defense Horizons that praises the program. An older news-style piece in Science by Jeffrey Mervis suggests both why the discussion matters (“That type of funding is on a scale most social scientists have only dreamed about”) and why it might be difficult to have. There’s–and I almost hate to say this–predictable nastiness about the whole thing from some anthropologists. But other than that….
At some level, this is hardly surprising. As Ido Oren documents, political science has long been inflected by various financial carrots and sticks, as well as ideological forces from within and without. The apparatus of comparative politics owes a great deal to the Cold War funding priorities of the U.S. Government. The National Science Foundation has played an enormous role in shaping U.S. political science into its current methodological form. But I can’t recall anything resembling a recent-ish large-scale conversation about the historically and socially contingent character of the field–ranging from what it studies to its allocation of symbolic, cultural, and financial capital–let alone one that focuses on the role of external funding.
Given that the Minerva Initiative–and cognate projects–may be exercising something akin to gravitational pull within (at least) security studies, it seems like the time is ripe for such a discussion. But I’m not at all sure what to make of the key issues, whether the scope and nature of the effects on the field or the normative implications of these effects.
I’m wondering if our readers have any thoughts, or places where the debate is taking place.
Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.
He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.
He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Thanks for the plug, Dan. Two quick observations. First, I concur that no serious critical discussion of the effects of Minerva and cognate projects has taken place. And it should.
Second, with the caveat that drawing historical analogies is risky and imperfect, I offer the following analogy. During the Vietnam War American political science and IR were flooded with money from DARPA and other agencies (or foundations working closely with the government). This money favored behavioral/quantitative-oriented projects. In IR, it funded data gathering and simulation projects with acronyms like COPDAB and CREON. The findings of these projects are now in the dust bin of the discipline’s history (whoever remembers COPDAB?) and they left, I would dare say, little intellectual value or legacy. Still, at the time, the flow of the money gave a reputational boost to scholars who rode the gravey train and it helped strengthen the status of “scientific” approaches to the study of politics. But as the defense budget began to contract in the aftermath of Vietnam, DOD support for social science has dried up and the fortunes of quantitative IR have consequently declined. These fortunes were reversed again in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the flow of money was resumed and the “fact” of the Democratic Peace provided an intellectual focal point for quantitative investigations.
Currently we are facing another significant contraction of the US defense budget. Will this shrinkage impact social science projects like Minerva? We’ll see.
I would not say that there has been no serious critical discussion on Minerva and its cognates. First, our friends in anthropology have discussed perhaps ad nauseum:
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rdt/summary/v086/86.gusterson.html
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2008.00608.x/abstract
Second and closer to home, there was even a piece in Perspective on Politics
https://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS8_04%2FS1537592710003208a.pdf&code=273cca53eb7dd602559d97c60a9e146d
Third, when you look at the budget, I would hardly call Minerva a “flood” of money. In 2012, according to Minerva, they funded 10 projects ranging in size from $200,000 to $3 million. NSF’s budget for social sciences was $11 million covering a much larger number and type of project.
I did mention anthropology in the original post. The link to the POP piece is broken.
https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7926870
Robert Albro, “Writing Culture Doctrine: Public Anthropology, Military Policy, and World Making” Perspectives on Politics, 8 (2010).
In fact, there is a symposium in the December 2010 Perspectives edition devoted the larger question of the relationship between the military and academia, particularly security studies.
https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=PPS&volumeId=8&seriesId=0&issueId=04
Thanks. I’d forgotten about that symposium. My sense is that it is heavily focused on the normative dimension of the relationship and less on the specific effects on what we do in IR. That might be wrong, but I will say that the forum did not prompt anything like a major discussion in the field.
Thanks for the references, Ariel!
I don’t see the same pattern with qualitative vs. quantitative: many more sources of “big data” to play with. better computing power, more statistical literacy, and more job-market pressure to include computational elements in dissertations. Also the NSF.
*But* I do wonder about the long-term implications for the kind of work that I alluded to.
Great idea! This seems like a huge gap in both disciplinary history and reflexivity. I am curious about:
1) How much pull big grants, often related to the defense industry, exerted on IR scholarship, especially but not exclusively during the Cold War;
2) in particular the marriage between big money and big computing (it would seem harder to ask for a couple million bucks to go to the library and read for several years)
3) how #s 1 & 2 interrelated with the rise of comparative politics, which you touched on, as a separate field within political science, i.e. what that disciplinary delineation left for IR, and how this influenced IR’s turn toward quantitative-empirical work.
4) a parallel study of IR or International Politics in the UK and Europe. We learn a lot about English School vs. realism, or the ‘classical approach’ vs. science, but usually as theoretical and/or epistemological arguments. The sociohistorical contextual side of these distinctions should be pretty interesting, as a conversation developing out of Brian Schmidt’s and Tim Dunne’s disciplinary histories, perhaps. My hunch is that if the intimations about the heavy hand of US DOD funding are to carry weight, we should find fairly different stories about the development of IR in the UK.
5) how do we go about this? Is it IR developing its own wing of social studies of science? A straight archival approach to grant documentation? Interviewing or surveying practicing IR scholars?
Philip Mirowski touches on this discussion, although he’s primarily interested in post-WWII developments in economic theory. Two book chapters:
“How Positivism Made Pact with the Postwar Social Sciences in America,” in George Steinmetz, ed., Positivism and the Social Sciences, Duke UP, 2004;
‘Realism and Neoliberalism: From Reactionary Modernism to Postwar Conservatism’ in Nicolas Guilhot, ed. The Invention of IR (Columbia UP 2011).
Both of those volumes have other chapters either directly relevant to IR, or which may provide models for how the discussion can proceed.
Thanks for these res. didn’t know bout the steinmetz volume…
Guilhot’s 2008 article “The Realist Gambit,” which argues that postwar American realism (a la Morgenthau, Kenneth Thompson, et al.) was an ultimately failed effort to insulate IR from behavioralism, perhaps tends to exaggerate the extent of the contemporary triumph, even in the U.S., of behavioralism and its successors. (The article is valuable, but in my view is open to a couple of criticisms, including the one I just mentioned.) I haven’t read the 2011 Guilhot-edited vol., though was aware of its existence.
My feeling is that the Minerva Initiative is only loosely driving what academics are studying in that the contours of what they called for and ultimately funded was pretty broad. There are a number of projects on terrorism, China, sub-national conflict, a few related to natural resources, and some general security type issues if you look at the awards. https://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html
In general, I think funding in part for policy-relevant work has been events-driven so 9/11 happens and more interest and money became available for counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency work, including but not limited to Minerva since Minerva comes along 2008ish.
As I recall, the DOD put out a call for projects for a variety of broad issue areas. Here is the current list which might be different from the early call for papers. https://minerva.dtic.mil/topics.html
Because of the funding, the magnitude of work we are doing in the climate-security space has increased dramatically and perhaps as a consequence more researchers are getting in to because of the visibility associated with the Minerva Initiative. That said, the connections between climate and security were already a hot-ish topic of sorts in the policy community so really scholarly interest is accompanying the wider sweep of issue attention in the popular/policy realm. We are just able to be more ambitious than we otherwise would have been.
Whether or not Minerva has a lasting effect on the topics people study may depend in part on what longevity it has as a funding vehicle and the consistency of the topics it selects.
The State Failure Task Force and the later renamed Political Instability Task Force have gone through five iterations of funding. I’m wondering if that project more than anything is responsible for the turn in security studies to study sub-national conflict. Did funding drive that turn? Or, with the decline in inter-state conflict, did scholars (and funders) respond to events in the world?
Another interesting question is the relative balance of IR scholarship between security studies and IPE and everything else (human rights, environment, health, etc.). This blog has lamented that there was very little IPE scholarship on the financial crisis in the lead up or aftermath in the major journals. That may have been corrected, but I do think that IR graduate students might have trended more towards security studies in the post 9/11 era than IPE because of the attraction of doing work on contemporary problems. I think this easily testable in terms of PhD dissertations from major degree granting institutions to see if there is a before/after shift in topic selection. TRIPS or somebody may well have done that investigation. Presumably, one could see if there is some Minerva effect on dissertation or journal scholarship in Security Studies, but there is probably going to be a lag effect there (since journals in our field take time to publish and some of these projects are only now generated significant peer-reviewed content).
Ido has generally looked at this issue as much as (and earlier than) anyone, though I’d quibble with a few details
COPDAB: yes, disappeared, but COPDAB wasn’t funded by DARPA, and no one ever really figured out where the funding for COPDAB came from, and it pretty much disappeared, after a couple attempts to revive it, after Azar died in 1991. The DARPA investment was in McClelland’s WEIS scheme, which continued in a variety of venues until around 1994 or so when the automated schemes began to kick in and those — IDEA and CAMEO — are very much alive and being used in funded research.
End of DARPA funding: Yes, definitely — almost a complete absence of funding of political scientists from the early 1980s until the ICEWS project in 2007 — but the decline occurred well after the post-Vietnam decline (in fact DARPA was funding a lot of work at that point) and stopped during the Reagan defense expenditure *increases.* The reason, which was fairly explicit, was the Reagan administration’s antagonism — David Stockman in particular — to social science research generally. Social scientists said silly things that Stockman and Reagan didn’t want to hear, like that lowering taxes while raising expenditures would cause an increase in the deficit.
General comment: The simulation and modeling work, most of it horrendously bad, continued under DoD, it simply wasn’t done by people with the remotest clue about the social sciences (well, occasional economists might have some idea) or anything we would recognize as theory, and consequently didn’t feed back into political science for the most part. Also very little of this work has had any empirical component. The one exception on the feedback (certainly not the empirics) would be game theory — for better or worse, depending on what you think of it — where substantial investments by the Office of Naval Research problem had a lot of impact (particularly during the Cold War), and much the same could be said for agent based modelling starting in the 1990s and continuing to the present.
Minerva: My assessment at the moment is “too early to tell.” The first couple of rounds didn’t go all that well for a variety of reasons; more recently things have begun to align more — that is, DoD has figured out how to ask questions that social scientists might be interested in answering. But compared to NSF and unfunded individual research (or, to take an earlier set of projects that had far more impact, the MacArthur Foundation international security initiatives in the 1990s), the number of people involved is still quite small. Political Instability Task Force has certainly had more impact recently (though it isn’t responsible for the focus on sub-state issues: those are getting attention simply because they account for virtually all violent conflicts now) , and ICEWS might, depending on how they eventually sort out the extent to which they want the results to be published in the academic literature. Same for the various IARPA forecasting projects. And the various Dept of Homeland Security projects.
If Minerva wanted to have major impact, they’d be better off — per NSF — funding a lot of small projects rather than a few large ones. As was noted a while back
“It’s the small, portable books at 30 sous that are dangerous. If the Gospel
had cost 1,200 secterces, the Christian religion would never have been
established.” Voltaire to d’Alembert
But that’s not how DoD works: generally they find a small number of projects and invest a lot and for a long time, rather than investing in a large number of projects, which limits the impact. The typical social science project could be funded for the amount spent on sandwiches and unreadable powerpoint slides in a DoD project: it is too small to bother with.
Many thanks, Phil, for the detailed and informative account, as well as the neat Voltaire quote.