The Ivory Tower Survey

How IR scholars see the world.

BY PAUL C. AVEY, MICHAEL C. DESCH, JAMES D. LONG, DANIEL MALINIAK, SUSAN PETERSON, MICHAEL J. TIERNEY | JAN/FEB 2012

 

Fading Camel, Rising Dragon?

Although the Middle East may get all the headlines, IR scholars pick East Asia as the region of greatest strategic importance to the United States today, with 45 percent identifying it as the most significant area, up from 30 percent who did so in 2008.

Policymakers are in line with the professors: Half of the practitioners surveyed agree with this assessment today, and 85 percent think East Asia will be the most important strategic region for the United States in 20 years.

 

Methodology: The authors are researchers with the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at the College of William and Mary. The fourth wave of the TRIP survey explores the views of international relations (IR) faculty from every four-year college and university in the United States, as identified by U.S. News & World Report, for their views on various international issues. The results include the responses of 1,582 faculty members, representing more than 40 percent of IR scholars in the United States, collected between August and November 2011. The parallel survey of practitioners surveyed 244 current and former policymakers who served from 1989 to 2008 in national security decision-making roles at the level of assistant secretary, director, and designated policymaking groups within several U.S. government agencies.You can find complete results from the survey of U.S. IR scholars here.

 

MROCK

12:20 PM ET

January 4, 2012

Hindsight...

Interesting that scholars approved the use of force in Libya after the fact to prevent massacre and remove a leader that willingly killed his people, but overwhelmingly do not support the use in other instances. Evidence of political bias, shortsightedness, or simply pacifism?

the Libyan Gaddafi regime had even willingly given up their WMD program and had been cooperating with the US, so do scholars simply not have any sense of quid pro quo foreign relation negotiations? Syria has provided many of the weapons and soldiers that have killed our soldiers in Iraq, but they deserve more deference than Gaddafi?

They'll support preventing atrocities in Libya, but not genocide in Sudan? Liberia is a great case of how we've intervened decisively and with little cost, yet yielded a result of a democratic, successful country.

This article provides pretty strong evidence for why I do not support most scholars. The common sense of all of them put together wouldn't add up to a hill of beans.

 

HECTORGREG11

11:48 PM ET

January 6, 2012

serious differences

Not sure who to trust here, because the educators are more idealists and one would think the politicians are more realists, but I think they plan too much to get re-elected than anything else and the country tends to suffer. You can see clearly from the graph that the politicians work more in fear mongering than anything else and they have lost their grip on reality...there is so much wrong with this country that I do not think that this list is all conclusive, but it is a good start nonetheless autorepairaustintx.org, maybe me might get one of these items fixed this year but most likely we will have more problems next year, but at least there are some signs of improvement on some of these issues.

 

GRANT

1:44 AM ET

January 8, 2012

It's predictions on things

It's predictions on things like war that I question. Obviously you can safely predict that Canada and the U.S won't go to war any time in the near future and you can also say that Sudan and South Sudan will probably go to war in the near future, but to say whether or not China and the U.S will go to war in the near or distant future? That's impossible. An IR scholar in the 1950s would probably have said that they would whereas an IR scholar in 1972 would almost definitely say that they wouldn't. The world simply changes too much for us to make predictions based on anything other than geography and natural resources. Mexico is weak and has great instability now, but a century ago the same was true for China. China has a large and fairly well equipped military now but seventy years ago the same was true of Japan. In the soft sciences nothing is definite.

 

DAMMAN

4:39 PM ET

January 12, 2012

Ohh

OMG, China is in TOP, strange.

huge population and huge result??

regards

Valuation

 

YARINSIZ

9:36 AM ET

January 27, 2012

Not sure who to trust here,

Not sure who to trust here, because the educators are more idealists and one would think the politicians are more realists, but I think they plan too much to get re-elected than anything else and the country tends to suffer. You can see clearly from the graph that the politicians work more in fear mongering than anything else and they have lost their grip on reality...there is so much wrong with this country that I seslichat do not think that this list is all conclusive, but it is a good start nonetheless autorepairaustintx.org, maybe me might get one of these items fixed this year but most likely we will have more problems next year, but at least there are some signs of improvement on some of these issues.