RETHINKING SECURITY

The Duck of Minerva has an interesting blog on the professional orientation of IR academics, using data taken from a recent survey:

Asked “Would you approve or disapprove of the use of U.S. military forces in the following situations?”, scholars responded:

War between North and South Sudan: 84.6% disapprove.
If it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon: 79.9% disapprove
If extremists were poised to take over Pakistan: 63.3% disapprove
To support democratic transition in Syria: 78.6% disapprove
To support democratic transition in Yemen: 84.4% disapprove

The repository of all human knowledge on the Internet suggests that this means that IR scholars, as a community, are more hostile to the U.S. use of force in these cases than economists, as a community, are hostile to raising the minimum wage.

Of course, this may not be a defensible methodology to evaluate such claims. Several of these (Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) are not directly related to the national interest. In other cases (Iran and Pakistan) it is debatable whether or not force would really do much good.

However, ruling out intervention in Syria and Yemen due to the national interest is in and of itself an judgment based on certain assumptions of worldview (e.g. you think force should be linked to interests, you don’t consider democracy promotion an interest, or agree that there is such a thing as an interest altogether). So perhaps the survey may be more indicative of a consensus than it immediately appears.