The Need for Praxis: Bringing Policy Relevance Back In

So, a Washington foreign policy colleague asked, which of your models and theories should I turn to now? What do you academics have to say about September 11? You are supposed to be the scholars and students of international affairs—Why did it happen? What should be done?

Notwithstanding the surly tone, the questions are not unfair. They do not pertain just to political scientists and international relations scholars; they can be asked of others as well. It falls to each discipline to address these questions as they most pertain to its role.

To be sure, political science and international relations have produced and continue to produce scholarly work that does bring important policy insights. Still it is hard to deny that contemporary political science and international relations as a discipline put limited value on policy relevance—too little, in my view, and the discipline suffers for it. ¹ The problem is not just the gap between theory and policy but its chasmlike widening in recent years and the limited valuation of efforts, in Alexander George's phrase, at "bridging the gap." ² The events of September 11 drive home the need to bring policy relevance back in to the discipline, to seek greater praxis between theory and practice.

This is not to say that scholars should take up the agendas of think tanks, journalists, activists, or fast fax operations. The academy's agenda is and should be principally a more scholarly one. But theory can be valued without policy relevance being so undervalued. Dichotomization along the lines of "we" do theory and "they" do policy consigns international relations scholars almost exclusively to an intradisciplinary dialogue and purpose, with conversations and knowledge building that while highly intellectual are excessively insular and disconnected from the empirical realities that are the discipline's raison d'être. This stunts the contributions that universities, one of society's most essential institutions, can make in dealing with the profound problems and challenges society faces.

It also is counterproductive to the academy's own interests. Research and scholarship are bettered by pushing analysis and logic beyond just offering up a few paragraphs on implications for policy at the end of a forty-page article, as if a "ritualistic addendum." ³ Teaching is enhanced when students' interest in "real world" issues is engaged in ways that reinforce the argument that theory really is relevant, and CNN is not enough. There also are gains to be made for the scholarly community's standing as perceived by those outside the academic world, constituencies and colleagues whose opinions too often are self-servingly denigrated and defensively disregarded. It thus is both for the health of the discipline and to fulfill its broader societal responsibilities that greater praxis is to be pursued.

September 11 Questions: Answers from the International Relations Literature?

What knowledge is most needed to understand September 11 and the questions posed about its causes, consequences, and the policy agenda it has set? And what answers do political scientists and especially international relations specialists have to offer? Four sets of questions need to be considered.

Terrorism

What causes terrorism? What are the underlying political, social, economic, and cultural dynamics?

On these kinds of questions, largely causal-explanatory and geared to gaining greater understanding of driving forces across various levels of analysis (individual, group, societal, state, regional, and international), the academic literature does have significant contributions to make. This is the role of international relations scholarship and social science more generally in seeking, as Robert Keohane puts it, "to elucidate underlying structures of social reality, which generate incentives for action." ⁴ International relations, comparative politics, and other areas of the discipline have long, solid traditions of work (including much of recent vintage) on subjects such as the relationship between economic inequality and political radicalization; social movements; the dynamics of globalization; the building of civil society; stable democratization; culture and identity; and ideology and beliefs. There...