Scholarly ideas also are likely to receive a warm reception if they help public officials reduce uncertainty about the future. The end of the Cold War, for instance, was both a highly welcomed and anxiety-producing moment. On one hand, the United States had won a 40-year confrontation with the Soviet Union without firing a single shot and with the Soviets asking for integration with the West. On the other hand, the end of the Cold War unleashed considerable uncertainty about what would come next and how the United States should organize its foreign policy. To reduce this anxiety and respond to the future, US policymakers turned to scholarly ideas that could easily tell them what the future might look like and how to bring it about. This tendency was most obvious in their acceptance of the claim that the spread of democracy and markets could transform societies and establish a more integrated and peaceful international order.

Going Beyond the Beltway

If I am right—that US officials have little interest in international relations theories and research—does it matter? I am not very troubled that officials have not familiarized themselves with the paradigm wars that rage among international relations theorists. Why should they expose themselves to the internecine fighting of which most academics have already grown weary? For two simple but important reasons policymakers should pay attention to academic research and its methods: scholarly research can force policymakers to stop generalizing from their own, highly limited and biased experiences; and academic reasoning can bring some discipline to what might otherwise be highly politicized and ideologically charged debates.

Policymakers would be wise to follow academic research in order to avoid their tendency to believe that their personal experiences and impressions provide the best guide for understanding past, present, and future trends. I have been struck by the tendency of officials to generalize from their own experiences, to rely heavily on their favorite historical analogies, and to elevate recent events and give these factors greater weight in their general theories. An important benefit of scholarly research is that it stands distant from specific events and engages in critical empirical inquiry. In short, such research can help guide policy debates and help policymakers avoid major catastrophes. Consider the following three examples that derive from the growing body of research on peacekeeping, multilateral peace operations, and democratization.

In the early 1990s peacekeeping was so celebrated by the international policy community that it nearly came to be regarded as an elixir for the new world order. Yet it soon encountered “failures” in the field, and the response by many in Washington was nearly to condemn the entire enterprise. Academics, though, were beginning to ask: Under what conditions is peacekeeping likely to work? What are the alternatives? Which variables might policymakers be able to manipulate to enhance the probability of success? How is success defined? At the same time that US officials were giving peacekeeping the cold shoulder, academics were concluding that under the proper conditions peacekeeping could independently reduce the chances that a state would return to war within five years of a peace agreement. Although there are deeply political and partisan reasons why US policymakers were willing to condemn peacekeeping, many pointed to isolated cases as evidence that the entire enterprise was unredeemable—beliefs contrary to existing research.

The academic research on global violence suggests that the security initiatives, operations, and institutions developed after the end of the Cold War are having their intended impact. According to the Human Security Report published by the Human Security Centre at the University of British Columbia, there is evidence that the decades-long increase in organized violence began to decline precipitously around the mid-1990s. This is an important finding; it challenges the assumption among policymakers and others that global violence has increased steadily since the end of the Cold War. The report, moreover, addresses the possible causes of this trend, including democratization and poverty reduction, but concludes that they are weakly correlated with changes in violence. It does observe, however, that this decline is positively associated with the increase in peace operations and infers that the impressive range of security organizations, tools, and technologies developed over the last 15 years may be reducing the death toll. This is an important possibility, challenging the sometimes overly critical analyses of the efficacy of security institutions. These institutions might have particular properties that make them better suited to deal with incipient and manifest conflicts. For instance, because they are more likely to be viewed as more legitimate and independent than institutions dominated by a great power, multilateral security institutions might be more effective at encouraging combatants to take conflict-reducing measures.

We still do not know precisely whether or not security interventions are making a difference, but there is reason to believe that they are. If studies on the effect of security interventions correctly identify the trends in violence and accurately note the contributions of multilateral security operations and initiatives in reducing violence, then one policy recommendation would be to increase investment in the development of international, regional, and transnational institutions that can prevent and respond to such conflicts.

Finally, consider the literature linking democratization and peace. As previously noted, most policymakers have accepted this argument as a whole, failing to question the conditions under which democracy might produce peace or the specific mechanisms by which this feat is accomplished. But does democracy alone produce this result? Democratic institutions may need to combine with international organizations dominated by democracies, expanding markets, or both to produce democratic peace. The precise cause presumably matters for policymakers. If democracy alone is not responsible, then an obsessive focus on democratization might be a major error in policy. Moreover, if the association of peace and democracy is restricted to mature democracies and does not include democratizing or recently democratized states, then we should be wary of transitions. This is the finding of Ed Mansfield and Jack Snyder, who argue that transitions from authoritarianism to democracy can unleash tremendous domestic instability, which in turn encourages leaders to seek foreign policy adventures to distract their populations from the problems at home.