Foreign Policy Relevance and Impact: The Sirens’ Song – a personal reflection
Submitted by University College of Dublin on Tue, 02/16/2016 - 15:02
The ANTERO network[1] recently hosted a packed panel session at our inaugural scholarly meeting last December which brought together policy makers and academics to discuss what the academy was ‘missing’ - in terms of its teaching and research – on EU foreign policy. A fascinating session resulted, in what diplomats would have described as a ‘full and frank’ exchange of views. There was certainly much food for thought and important challenges posed; the paucity of good comparative analyses, the predominance of organizational/ bureaucratic studies over active field work, the narrow range of academic interests and the frequent failure to account for complexity – especially the intersection of competing policy priorities across many different functional areas. The conversation also led to calls for more bilateral engagement, more exchanges of views and more relevant and robust analysis of policy. Later, in a very self-reflective session, several scholars expressed caution at this offer of engagement.
All academics love to present their work. It is basic to the gold standard of the research university that cutting edge scholarship provides the backbone to our teaching and is the material with which we work in collaboration with research students. Academics are now also increasingly expected to prove their worth in the larger public sphere. The ideal here is often the ‘public intellectual’, the scholar that is as comfortable in the television studio as she is in the lecture theatre and whose books are as likely to grace the New York Times’ Best Sellers list as they are to appear on a syllabus. For most of us, those dizzying heights of academic celebrity are beyond the horizon of our experience. At the same time, we do seek, and our universities have begun to measure and to reward the extent to which, our scholarship can be seen to be relevant and to impact on the societies of which we are part. We are encouraged and in some cases required, to descend the ivory tower and to get our feet wet and our hands dirty in the public marketplace of ideas. We are expected to assist policy makers and publics make sense of choices, to assess costs and benefits, to reconcile contradictions and to offer objective analyses from which judgements may be made. In such a context, increased access to policy makers – such as that proffered above – is invaluable.
At the same time, academia lends itself to obvious pitfalls in respect of public engagement, many related to ego and vanity. There is little as intoxicating as seeing your name in print. There is huge satisfaction in being publically recognized as an expert – one whose views somehow float above the hurly burly of the political fray. There is enormous vindication too of isolated hours of research and writing when you are ushered into the radio or television studio or when your twitter feed breaks 10,000.
But there is also – for many – a nagging doubt underpinning all of this: a deep-rooted insecurity encapsulated by the phrase “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Whether in the STEM disciplines or the social sciences and humanities the ambition not simply to observe, to comment and to critique, but to do. Those of us working in international relations, security and foreign policy – where the normative goals of peace, justice and human rights are core – face a very special challenge here. It is potentially on this rock: where the confluence of expertise, ambition, engagement and policy access coincide, that hard-nosed scholarship could suffer.
Following our above-mentioned meeting with practitioners, partners within the ANTERO network began to reflect, very openly and honestly, on the vista that lay before us. In the pursuit of relevance and impact, greater access to policy makers was a potentially enormous asset. At the same time, we reflected on the potential for ‘capture’ of our research, the extent to which becoming policy ‘players’ might adversely impact on analytical distance and the possibility that policy ‘access’ and ‘engagement’ might become a currency or a reward bestowed on those whose research operated within what might be deemed useful or acceptable parameters. Surely, some of us responded, our social scientific objectivity would save us from such eventualities?
These are indeed critical questions – in both senses of that adjective. As the academy is pressed increasingly into public policy service, as we seek to prove our relevance to wider society, we need to ensure that this service and relevance is based on an essential distance from those and from what we study. As noted above, that is already difficult in our field – suffused as it so often is – with normative ambitions and assumptions. The dangers are all the greater if we own up to the human ambitions and insecurities which are both basic to our work and which serve to make us good scholars.
Ben Tonra
Jean Monnet Professor of EU Foreign, Security and Defence Policy & Associate Professor of International Relations
UCD School of Politics and International Relations
University College Dublin
[1] ANTERO (Addressing the Needs of Teaching, Education and Research on EU Foreign Policy) an ERASMUS+ funded Jean Monnet Network