Paul Musgrave is assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studies U.S. foreign policy, international relations theory, and how oil revenues change political institutions. His research has appeared in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, American Politics Review, and International Theory. and he has written for The Washington Post and other...
I was just about to block "Afghanistan" as a key word in my Twitter timeline when I saw several people asking why British conservatives were even more freaked out about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan than American conservatives. The question was in response to the UK defense secretary saying that the United States isn't a superpower if it's not willing to keep up its endless wars. A UK intelligence officer swimming in the same ideological...
G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
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,...
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'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...
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
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...
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
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...
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...