Reflections Symposium

Technique Trumps Relevance: The Professionalization of Political Science and the Marginalization of Security Studies

Michael Desch

Abstract

I explain here the disconnect between our discipline's self-image as balancing rigor with relevance with the reality of how we actually conduct our scholarship most of the time. To do so, I account for variation in social scientists' willingness to engage in policy-relevant scholarship over time. My theory is that social science, at least as it has been practiced in the United States since the early twentieth century, has tried to balance two impulses: To be a rigorous science and a relevant social enterprise. The problem is that there are sometimes tensions between these two objectives. First, historically the most useful policy-relevant social science work in the area of national security affairs has been interdisciplinary in nature, and this cuts against the increasingly rigid disciplinary siloes in the modern academy. Second, as sociologist Thomas Gieryn puts it, there is “in science, an unyielding tension between basic and applied research, and between the empirical and theoretical aspects of inquiry.” During wartime, the tensions between these two impulses have been generally muted, especially among those disciplines of direct relevance to the war effort; in peacetime, they reemerge and there are a variety of powerful institutional incentives within academe to resolve them in favor of a narrow definition of rigor that excludes relevance. My objective is to document how these trends in political science are marginalizing the sub-field of security studies, which has historically sought both scholarly rigor and real-world relevance. — Michael Desch.

This essay is followed by responses from Ido Oren, Laura Sjobreg, Helen Louise Turton, Erik Voeten, and Stephen M. Walt. Michael Desch then offers a response to commentators.

Michael Desch is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (mdesch@nd.edu). He has published scholarly articles and reviews in Foreign Affairs, International Organization, International Security, Survival, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, Armed Forces and Society, Orbis, Joint Forces Quarterly, The Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, World Policy Journal, The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Mershon International Studies Review, Review of International Studies, and Ethics. He thanks participants in seminars at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, Northwestern University’s Buffet Center for International Studies, MIT’s Security Studies Program, the Lone Star National Security Forum, the University of Virginia’s International Security Colloquium, the University of Chicago’s Program on International Security Policy (PISP), George Washington University’s Jack Wright Series, the Notre Dame International Security Program, and the University of California–Berkeley’s MIRTH; for financial support from the Earhart and Lounsbery Foundations and the Carnegie Corporation of New York; for research assistance from Michael Rangel, Eddie Linczer, and Ji Hye Shin; and for helpful discussions with Paul Avey, Sean Lynn-Jones, Rogers Smith, Barry Posen, Robert Art, Marc Trachtenberg, Tanisha Fazal, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, and especially Stephen Van Evera.