Article "Inside the Ivory Tower" by Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney appearing in Foreign Policy reports on a survey of international relations professors:
International relations professors also demonstrate remarkable agreement when it comes to future challenges. When asked to identify the three most important foreign-policy issues the United States will face during the next 10 years, scholars overwhelmingly point to international terrorism (50 percent), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (45 percent), and the rise of China (40 percent). Significant minorities consider armed conflict in the Middle East (34 percent), failed states (30 percent), and global warming (29 percent) to be top concerns. Surprisingly, given the periodic alarm raised in the media about the threat of a major pandemic, only 11 percent of academics deem it to be a pressing foreign-policy issue, placing it behind both global poverty (19 percent) and resource scarcity (14 percent).
At the same time, international relations scholars’ research may be shortsighted, given their own assessment of future foreign-policy challenges. Sixty-two percent of respondents believe the Middle East is the most strategically important region for the United States today, and two thirds report that East Asia will be the most important strategic region in 20 years. Yet only 7 percent of scholars identify the Middle East and just 8 percent name East Asia as the primary focus of their research. Occupants of the ivory tower, it seems, suffer from one of the disadvantages inherent in being so far removed from the policy process: They can be slow to respond to the emergence of new threats in the international system. If they hope to get a better audience with policymakers in the future, academics must do more than simply anticipate future challenges.
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