On Deaf Ears? Toward Better Informed Policy
Harvard International Review › Vol. 28 Nbr. 2, July 2006
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Summary
Today, policymakers around the world champion democratization, believing that democracies do not go to war with each other. Realist theorists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, among others, argued that war on Iraq was unnecessary. Yet the neoconservative doctrine that advocated war has its roots in the academy. The influence of the academy on policymakers can range from negligible to transformative. Policymakers seem free to make decisions, leaving the academy to watch and criticize. To understand how the relationship between the academy and policymaking operates in the real world, four authors discuss how knowledge is created and applied to inform policy. While an ideal relationship between academics and policymakers has yet to be defined, people are beginning to understand what the academy can provide for policymakers, how policymakers can effectively use research and academic methods, and how academics can ensure their work has the greatest possible influence on policymaking.
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On Deaf Ears? Toward Better Informed Policy
US President John F. Kennedy was deeply influenced by historian Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and applied its lessons about World War I to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Did reading academic work help Kennedy forge a cautious policy that...
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