ABSTRACT
While there has been a great deal of concern about a growing lack of policy relevance due to the increasingly abstract debate in academic International Relations theorizing in general and security studies in particular, opportunities and barriers for translating academic ideas for the policy community also depend on the political environment in which policy-makers operate. The impact of politics on policy-relevant academic work is clear if we consider the fate of International Relations theory’s two main intellectual traditions – realism and liberalism see (Chapters 2 and 3 this volume) – in the American national security debate since the end of the Cold War. Academic realists, focused on the balance of power, have offered trenchant arguments against an overextension of the American military machine, and were especially clear in warning about the folly of going to war in Iraq in 2003. Leading figures in the field of international security such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2003) explained on the pages of leading journals and newspapers why policy-makers should avoid an unnecessary war – all to no avail. Meanwhile, liberals such as Michael Doyle (1983), emphasizing the possibilities for cooperation, have promoted the idea that democracies make better international partners, leading successive administrations since the collapse of the Soviet Union to trumpet the importance of promoting freedom and democracy. While each tradition is subject to intensive debates within academia, the liberals have been much more successful over the past twenty years in shaping policy because the political environment favoured their arguments while leaving the academic realists unable to convince American policy-makers not to go to war in a number of instances.
