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 avoided nuclear war?

Today, policymakers around the world champion democratization, believing that democracies do not go to war with each other. But are they aware of the scholarship of Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, who contend that emerging democracies are more likely to fight wars?

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. Was the Iraq war the academy’s product or its nightmare? Or both?

The influence of the academy on policymakers can range from negligible to transformative. But no matter how hard they try, academics are often left groping to guide the process from the outside. Policymakers seem free to make decisions, leaving the academy to watch and criticize. Is this the best relationship? What can the academy offer architects of policy? What should policymakers learn from the academy? This symposium seeks to understand the interactions between academics and policymakers as they craft foreign policy.

In doing so, we must be mindful of the divisions between the academy and policy, between theory and practice. Academics have 30 pages to make their argument while policymakers have only three. Policymakers must make decisions when they are partially aware of the factors at play, but academics may be hesitant to reach conclusions when they have twice the amount of information. These are the different worlds that academics and policymakers inhabit. With these realities in mind, the following authors offer perspectives on the influences the academy has on policymaking and what can be done to optimize the academy-policy relationship.

Michael Barnett and John Willinsky lead the symposium with theoretical views on the relationship between the academy and policymaking. Barnett, professor at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, uses his personal experience in the US Mission to the United Nations to explain the differing worldviews of policymakers and academics. He highlights the quality of academic policy analysis and calls for policymakers to be more rigorous in their own.

Willinsky, professor at the University of British Columbia, examines the influence that the Internet may have on policymakers. He believes that academics should make use of and encourage the creation of “open access” journals and databases that make academic work available online for free. These open access resources make research easier to incorporate into policy.

To understand how the relationship between the academy and policymaking operates in the real world, we turn to four authors who discuss how knowledge is created and applied to inform policy.

Aparajita Ramakrishnan and Ashok Alexander of Avahan, the India AIDS initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, argue for the importance of organizational structure and management in translating theory to policy. When the theory underlying a particular goal is widely accepted, as in the case of AIDS intervention, the effective application of that knowledge requires sound practice.

Former US Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard professor Lawrence Summers discusses his experience on both sides of the divide between the academy and policymaking and explains how academic research has, in some cases, made policy better.

Zbigniew Brzezinski reflects on his time as national security advisor in the administration of US President Jimmy Carter and examines foreign policy today. While sympathetic to the pressures on policymakers, he cautions against the uncritical and dogmatic use of academic ideas in policymaking.

To conclude the symposium, Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, discusses the origins of the idea of human rights. As the leader of a movement that creates and disseminates knowledge in order to produce social change, she identifies ways scholarly work has helped to protect human rights and identifies policy areas requiring further research.

It is clear that academics and policymakers do intersect. While an ideal relationship between them has yet to be defined, we 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. We hope our examination will lead to a more productive relationship between the academy and policymakers as they work together toward a common goal: the best course of action for the world.