My faddish discipline thinks my subfield is hot

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Friday, February 13, 2009 - 5:04 AM Share

The latest Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey of international relations scholars has been released (I've blogged about a prior TRIP survey here).  The part that jumped out at me: 

On the policy side, we see several important changes from previous surveys. In 2008, for instance, we see fewer than half as many scholars (23 percent of respondents in 2008 compared to 48 percent in 2006) describing terrorism as one of the three most significant current foreign policy challenges facing the United States. Most surprisingly, while 50 percent of U.S. scholars in 2006 said that terrorism was one of the most important foreign policy issues the United States would face over the subsequent decade, in 2008 only 1 percent of respondents agreed. American faculty members are becoming more sanguine about the war in Iraq, as well: in 2006 76 percent said that the Iraq conflict was one of the three most important issues facing the country, but in 2008 only 35 percent of U.S. respondents concurred. Concern over several other foreign policy issues is also declining markedly: when asked about the most important problems facing the country over the next ten years 18 percent fewer respondents chose WMD proliferation, 12 percent fewer said armed conflict in the Middle East, and 13 percent fewer indicated failed states. At the same time, 17 percent more respondents in 2008 than in 2006 believed that climate change will pose a serious challenge, 6 percent more worried about global poverty, and 4 percent more said that resource scarcity is one of the most significant foreign policy challenges.

Basically, my colleagues have mellowed a bit on the standard threats everyone has fretted about for the past eight years.  Now they're more worried about threats emerging from the global political economy. 

Which puts them in line with the Director of National Intelligence: 

The new director of national intelligence told Congress on Thursday that global economic turmoil and the instability it could ignite had outpaced terrorism as the most urgent threat facing the United States.

The assessment underscored concern inside America’s intelligence agencies not only about the fallout from the economic crisis around the globe, but also about long-term harm to America’s reputation. The crisis that began in American markets has already “increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global economy,” the intelligence chief, Dennis C. Blair, said in prepared testimony.

Mr. Blair’s comments were particularly striking because they were delivered as part of a threat assessment to Congress that has customarily focused on issues like terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Mr. Blair singled out the economic downturn as “the primary near-term security concern” for the country, and he warned that if it continued to spread and deepen, it would contribute to unrest and imperil some governments.

“The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he said.

It's great to get this kind of attention, but I fear that part of it is faddish.  All it will take is one conventional interstate war or one spark across the Taiewan Straits, and the focus will shift back towards more conventional security threats. 

EXPLORE:ACADEMIA, GLOBAL WARMING, INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY, IRAQ, SECURITY STUDIES, TERRORISM
 

DANI K. NEDAL

2:08 PM ET

February 13, 2009

And yet, if you take a quick

And yet, if you take a quick look at the leading IR journals from 2007 through 2008 you'll see remarkably little serious discussion of the present economic crisis. Hm...

 

DANIEL W. DREZNER

3:45 PM ET

February 13, 2009

Not the best metric

There is a long lag time between submitting something to a peer-reviewed IR journal and having it published -- a year between submission and publication would be lightning fast. So I'm not sure that's a fair measure of whether IR scholars were on top of this.
 

PERCNON

11:39 PM ET

February 13, 2009

Peer review

This is true, which is what makes blogs such as this such a brilliant resource for humble grad students, such as myself, struggling to get to grips with things.

Articles should begin to appear in journals on the subject soon but chances are they'll be fairly out of date given how much worse everything is than all but the most pessimistic commentators thought a year or 18 months ago.

edit: Just thought that a good place to look for an academic perspective on the credit crisis is most GPE stuff published around 1999/2000 on the Asian financial crisis. That'll only tell you part of the story, this one is so much bigger, but its actually quite eerie how interchangeable much of the text is.

 

FNORD

11:04 PM ET

February 23, 2009

point

There is a lot to learn from the Scandinavian handling of the crisis of 88 as well, I think. A thread about it can be found at http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x4059977

It seems that Greenspan is advocating the scandinavian model these days?

 

KYLE L

2:34 AM ET

February 15, 2009

Both reassuring and disturbing

On the one hand, this data should be reassuring for IR grad students and scholars who were justifiably worried that the topics of terrorism/non-state actor security threats/Islamic extremism were going to trump more traditional IPE and especially security studies as the big direction of the field for at least a decade. While those topics are no doubt important, I've felt that they've had an unjustified near monopoly in some big journals (I'm looking at you, IS) for the last few years at the expense of other important issue areas. My personal belief (and, OK, professional hope) is that IPE and great power politics will either always remain relevant or will always reemerge as important for the indefinite future. As long as relative power differentials continue to shift between the big players, understanding how great powers interact is always going to be important. And regardless of how dependent you believe the IPE and IOs are on great power politics, IPE will remain a vital field as well: even in times of power transitions, inti'l economic norms, rules and institutions are likely to change in ways that cannot be fully explained by GP politics, while in more settled times--like 1991-? --the things studied by IPEers are indisputably more important than much of what happens in the security realm.

On the other hand, this data should be disturbing for the field as a whole, and especially for outsiders who see political scientists as "experts". To the extent that anyone listens to political scientists at all, we are SUPPOSED to be much better at prediction than the average Joe the Plumber, Joe the Pundit, or Joe the Politician. In contrast, these results continue to indicate that we're no better at forecasting future challenges and focusing on the most important issues than much of the rest of reasonably informed society. Is anyone else out there as disturbed as I am that political scientists are no less likely to be swept in fads as the US news media, Congress, or the American public? Big terrorist attack happens, that's threat #1 for our lifetime. Russia invades Georgia, we're in a new Cold War, it's back to great power politics, and international order is breaking down. Tensions erupt between Israel and _____, and it's regional hot spots and ethnic/religious/territorial conflicts. Oil prices shoot up, we're in an unending catastrophic energy war. It's ridiculous.

Am I being unfair here?

 

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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