Alex Burns

I recently got negative reviews for two articles submitted to the Journal of Futures Studies (JFS). Many academics I know find article rejection to be highly stressful. Below are some comments and strategies addressed to three different audiences: academic authors; reviewers; and university administrators. Attention to them may improve the probability that your article is accepted for publication in an academic journal.

Academic Authors

1. Be very familiar with your ‘target’ journal: its editors and review panel, its preferred research design and methodologies, and how it handles controversies and debates in your field. Look for an editorial or scoping statement that explains what kinds of articles the journal will not accept.

2. Before submission do a final edit of your article. Define all key terms or cite past definitions if you have referred to the scholarly literature. Check paragraph structure, connecting sentences, section headings, and that the conclusions answer the key questions you have raised in the beginning. Cite some articles from the target journal if possible. Consider who is likely to review your article and factor this into your discussion of key debates. Use redrafting for honing the article and for self-diagnosis of mental models.

3. Ask if the journal has a rejoinder process for authors to reply to the blind peer review comments. A rejoinder is not an invitation to personal attacks or to engage in flame-wars. Rejoinders do enable authors to address situations in which one or more reviewers misunderstand the article, frame their comments in terms of an article they wish the author had written (rather than the actual article), or where there are concerns about the methodologies used, the research design, or data interpretation. An effective rejoinder process respects all parties, maintains the confidentiality of the blind peer review process, and provides an organisational learning loop. A rejoinder response does not necessarily reverse an editorial decision not to publish.

4. If the journal does have a rejoinder process then carefully examine the feedback pattern from reviewers. Highlight where one reviewer answers the concerns that another reviewer raised: this should neutralise the negative comments or at least show that varied opinions exist. It is more difficult when several reviewers raise the same concerns about an article.

5. Set a threshold limit on the amount of editing and rewrites you will do: you have other opportunities. A rejected article might fit better with another journal; with a substantial rewrite; with a different research design; or could be the stepping stone to a more substantive article. Individual reviews also reflect the particular reviewer and their mental models: this can sometimes be like an anthropological encounter between different groups who misunderstand each-other. Sometimes reviewers like critics just get it wrong: one of my most highly cited publications with international impact was dropped from the blind peer review stream.

Reviewers

1. Use the ‘track changes’ and ‘comment’ function of your word processor to provide comments. It can be difficult for authors to read comments that you provide in the body text and that is written in the same font. Be time-responsive: authors hate waiting months for feedback.

2. Do a first read of the article without preconceptions: focus on the author’s state intent, their narrative arc, the data or evidence, and their conclusions. Be open to the article you have been asked to review, rather than the article that you wish the author had written. Be open to innovation in data collection, methodologies, and interpretation. Even do a self-review of your own comments before you send your feedback to the journal editors.

3. Know your own mental models. That is, how you see the field or discipline that you are reviewing in; your preference for specific methodologies and research designs; your stance on specific controversies and debates; and what kind of material you expect the journal to publish. Be aware of situations in which you are asked to review articles because you have a particular stance: the tendency is to write lukewarm reviews which focus on perceived deficiencies or ‘overlooked’ material. Be careful of wanting to ‘police’ the field’s boundaries.

4. Use your feedback as a developmental opportunity for the author. Don’t just give negative feedback, faulty sentence construction or grammar. If you don’t like something then explain why so that the author can understand your frame of reference. Focus also issues of research design, methodologies, and data interpretation. If there are other external standards or alternative perspectives (such as on a controversy or debate) then mention them. Articles often combine several potential articles or can have scope problems so note them. Highlight sections where the author makes an original, scholarly contribution, including new insights or where you learned something. It’s important to provide developmental feedback even when you reject an article for publication. A developmental review may evoke in authors the ‘moment of insight’ that occurs in effective therapy. The mystique of the blind peer review process ultimately comes down to the reviewer’s attention to the craft of providing constructive yet critical feedback that sets up future opportunities for the academic to advance their career.

5. Poison pen reviews have consequences. This is clearer in creative industries like film and music where bad reviews can kill a project or career. Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs are honoured in film and music circles respectively because they brought sensitivity and style to their reviews, even when they hated an artist. In academia, the blind peer review process can lead to internecine wars over different methodologies or research designs: problems that don’t usually arise in open publishing (because all parties know who is making the comments) or that can be handled through editorial review standards and a rejoinder process. Nevertheless, a negative review will have consequences. The author may not revise the article for publication. They may publish in a different journal. They may drop the project. In some cases, they may leave the field altogether. Consider how to frame the review so that you address the developmental need in a constructive manner.

University Administrators

1. Know the norms, research designs and methodologies, leading research teams, and the most influential and international journals in at least one discipline. This gives you a framework to make constructive inferences from. You will develop awareness of these factors in other disciplines through your interviews with different academics.

2. Understand the arc or life-span of academic careers: the needs of an early career researcher and the professor will differ, and this will influence which journals they seek to publish in. Every successful publication navigates a series of decisions. Know some relevant books and other resources that you can refer interested academics to.

3. Have some awareness of international publishing trends which affect journals and their editorial decisions. These include the debate about open publishing, the consolidation of publishing firms, and the different editorial roles in a journal. Be aware of the connection between some journals and either professional associations or specific university programs.

4. Know what to look for in publication track records. These include patterns in targeting specific journals; attending conferences; building networks in the academic’s discipline; and shifts in research programs. An academic may have a small number of accepted articles when compared with the number that have been written and rejected by specific journals. Use the publication track record as the basis for a constructive discussion with the individual academic, honoring their experience and resources, and using solution-oriented therapeutic strategies.

5. Understand that quality publications require time which equates to university investment in the academic’s career. The journal letter rankings in the Australian Research Council’s Excellence for Research in Australia led some university administrators to advise academics only to publish in A* and A-level journals. But not everyone will realistically achieve this. There can be variability of effort required: one A-level article I co-wrote required a substantive second draft; another took months to discuss, a day to do the first draft, and it was then accepted with minor changes. On the other hand, articles accepted in the A* journal International Security (MIT) have usually gone through multiple rounds of blind peer review, the authors are deeply familiar with the field’s literature, and have work-shopped the article extensively with colleagues, in graduate school seminars, and at international conferences. This takes a median two to five years to occur. The late Terry Deibel took almost 20 years to conceptualise and refine the national security frameworks he taught at the United States National War College for Foreign Affairs Strategy: Logic for American Statecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Deibel also spent two years of sabbatical — in 1993 and 2005-06 — to write it. John Lewis Gaddis spent 30 years of research on George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) and five years to write it. Both books make substantive scholarly contributions to their fields; both books also required the National War College and Yale University to make significant financial investments in the authors’ careers. Are you making decisions based on short-term, volume-driven models or helping to create the enabling conditions that will help academics to have a similar impact in their respective fields?

From an email to a colleague:

There are several ‘classics’ on Milton Erickson that go beyond his popular image as a hypnotherapist to discuss his unique contributions to therapeutic epistemology and methodology: Sidney Rosen’s My Voice Will Go With You collects teaching stories and anecdotes; Jay Haley’s Uncommon Therapy situates Erickson in terms of early family and solution-oriented therapies; William Hudson O’Hanlon’s Taproots, Stephen Lankton and Carol Hicks Lankton’s Answer Within, and Dan Short, Betty Alice Erickson and Roxanne Erickson-Klein’s Hope, and Resilience each discuss Erickson’s therapeutic methods beyond hypnosis, including progression and utilisation; and The Wisdom of Milton Erickson is a one-volume collection from his books, clinical papers, letters, and conference presentations.

 

There’s also a lot of information in the Milton Erickson Foundation’s past newsletters.

From an email to Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis on 17th January 2012:

Cold War Memories

1. My first ‘encounter’ with the USSR was aged 7 with the televised closing ceremony to the 1980 Moscow Olympics. I had a sense of viewing an alien, strange culture, with sombre music. I distinctly remember the USSR’s mascot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHqdWFpJkpk). The Andropov and Brezhnev eras seemed quick and fleeting: news reports of their deaths.

2. I was holidaying in New Zealand with family and New Zealand grandparents during the 1982 Falklands War. The headlines of New Zealand’s Dominion newspaper focused on the HMS Sheffield’s sinking.

3. US President Ronald Reagan’s March 1983 announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApTnYwh5KvE and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq6ZsF6bzOA) terrified my primary school class-mates and I. Around the time of the Able Archer exercise, there was a nuclear war scare in Australia focused on the Nurrungar and Pine Gap facilities. In 1984, my primary school (Marong) had a poster of the ABC tele-movie The Day After (1983) in the school’s common room. The school principal used negotiation between the United States and the Soviets as an example to me, during an argument I had with a fellow student; and later formed a class writing syndicate. From this period, I also remember the finale ‘Blake’ to Terry Nation’s dystopian science fiction series Blake’s 7 (1978-81) modelled on Nicaraguan rebels; WarGames (1983); the mini-series V (1983); the first televising of Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965); the BBC series Threads (1984); and most resonantly for me, the BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness (1985) in which environmental activists break into a nuclear facility. (My mother had died in a car accident when I was aged 4, so I was perhaps more influenced by this period than most.) Class-mates were influenced by the John Milius film Red Dawn (1984). Together with SDI, the Challenger space shuttle and Chernobyl disasters were perhaps generationally equivalent memories to JFK’s assassination: class-mates vividly remember the incidents, and where they were. As a result of Chernobyl, I became interested in 1990 about the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris; Stalker; The Sacrifice).

4. I was holidaying in New Zealand in 1984 when the Lange Government announced it was barring US nuclear ships from its waters. My New Zealand grandmother took me to visit the Beehive in Wellington – the New Zealand parliament. The foyer had peace sculptures. Wellington had social protests from peace groups, at the time.

5. Saddam Hussein’s 1990 occupation of Kuwait was discussed in high school as a social issue. I was again in Wellington, New Zealand, shortly before Operation Desert Storm broke out. I was reading Nostradamus at the time, and seeing social activist graffiti in Wellington’s main street, Lambton Quay (“no blood for oil” was a common phrase). The media focus was on CNN’s coverage; the Patriot missiles; and later, on the ‘highway of death’. During this visit, I discovered a copy of the USSR Constitution in my grandparents’ storage bookcase. They explained that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the USSR had attempted to hire staff from New Zealand’s electricity and geothermal industries, and that copies of the USSR Constitution were circulated during this period.

6. I was preparing for my high school’s final exams when the August 1991 coup d’etat attempt happened with Gorbachev. The first Australian news reports I saw focused on the Gang of 8, and then on Boris Yeltsin’s declaration on 19^th August 1991. I was working on a short video film project at the time, and the coup d’etat attempt influenced the scripting and editing. I remember the time as a period of critical uncertainty about the USSR. Teachers tried for several years to explain Gorbachev, perestroika and glasnost to us. Participating in a stage production of Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men in 1990 helped to shape my interpretation.

Post-Cold War ‘Afterlives’

Grand strategies have ‘afterlives’: legacies that continue to reverberate long after events have ended. Books that have explored this include: Barbara Harlow’s After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (London: Verso, 1996); Kristin Ross’s May ‘68 And Its Afterlives (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press, 2002); Marianna Torgovnick’s The War Complex: World War II In Our Time (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press, 2005); and Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s The World Hitler Never Made (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Some of how the Cold War continued to affect me over the next two decades:

7. U2’s imagery for its ZooTV tour (1991-93) — influential amongst my undergraduate university cohort — fused Marshall McLuhan and William S. Burroughs’ media theories; William Gibson’s cyberpunk aesthetic; CNN’s Gulf War coverage; post-Cold War triumphalism; and the geopolitical hopes for the European Union. Circumstances changed when the tour reached the Balkans during the Yugoslav War, in which concerts became experiments in Muzafer Sherif’s social psychology on defusing inter-group hostility.

8. In 1993, I read Peter Ouspensky’s book The Fourth Way (1957) on the Graeco-Armenian magus George Gurdjieff. Both had been shaped by pre-revolutionary Russia and by escaping the 1917 Russian Revolution. At the time, I was taking La Trobe University undergraduate classes on cinema studies theories. I had the experience of seeing how lecturers and students were influenced by ideologies, during discussions of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser. The discussion of Marxist theories felt out-of-sync to me.

9. In 1994, I worked as a journalist on La Trobe University’s student newspaper Rabelais. Apart from calling “stop the presses” when Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain died, three other incidents stood out (amongst many). First, I discovered that the previous socialist editors had envisaged LTU as similar to University of California Berkeley in the 1960s, and had supported Fidel Castro’s Cuba regime (the newspaper was funded and run by a student union rather than the university administration). Second, during an interview with LTU professor Robert Manne about his book The Shadow of 1917: Cold War Conflict in Australia (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1994), we talked about The New Republic, Edmund Burke, and centrist political positions (I had taken Manne’s undergraduate class on Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany). Third, the university gave me access to the archives of Rabelais and its predecessor Paringa, and to former editors, now influential in advertising agencies and Prime Ministerial speech-writing. I discovered that Rabelais had adopted a progressive anti-war stance during the Vietnam War; a socialist stance during the 1982-83 Australian recession; and that by the late 1980s, many LTU students were increasingly disconnected from the editors’ political ideology and simply wanted to finish their degrees. On a broad ticket, I co-ran for editor, lost to a scare campaign, and discussed activist psychology during an interview with author J.G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun; Crash). (The editorial team that won the election were taken to court by the state government over union articles which advocated shop-lifting; this incident led to dramatic funding cuts for all university newspapers in Victoria for several years.)

10. In 2001, I wrote an undergraduate essay (archived version with dead links and in-text errors like ‘Hoover Institute’ instead of ‘Hoover Institution’: http://is.gd/MwT0o6) on early Cold War disinformation for LTU’s politics senior lecturer John Chiddick. The essay quality is questionable, but the main experience was discovering a wealth of Cold War literature and archives in LTU’s Borchardt library. Many of the Soviet sources were undoubtedly declarative propaganda, yet it was fascinating to find a ‘different’ history to the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War and the 1946-50 period. Today, many of the journal archives have been replaced, in order for the library to have more space for computers and collaborative group meeting rooms.

11. When Saddam Hussein was captured in ad-Dawr, Iraq on 13^th December 2003, I knew immediately from the site names ‘Wolverine-1’ and ‘Wolverine-2’ that this referred to the John Milius film Red Dawn (1984).

12. In 2005, I discovered that cyberpunk film imagery that had influenced me from 1983-97 had been used as a screening tool for some Aum Shinrikyo members.

13. In 2005-06, I decided to follow the SDI thread and looked at Herman Kahn’s career and theories for Masters research at Monash University. This was also a reaction to discussions in 2002-04 with critical futurist Richard Slaughter at Swinburne University’s strategic foresight program about Jonathan Schell’s ‘abolitionist’ approach. Slaughter was highly critical of Kahn, so I wanted to go to the source and evaluate it for myself. I applied Herman Kahn’s work to North Korea’s covert nuclear weapons program (http://is.gd/ibQCD5).

14. In 2010 during PhD preparatory research, I found and took notes for the Aviation Week Video Magazine documentary SDI: The Technical Challenge (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986) in which Robert Zalisk interviews SDI scientists on ballistic missile defence systems, and narrates conceptual videos on SDI’s planned capabilities.

September 11

15. Al Qaeda’s attacks occurred late in the evening of 11^th September 2001, Australian time. I found out the next day, late in the afternoon, from a Herald Sun newspaper headline (I was concentrating on finishing my undergraduate degree after a stint in publishing). I did not see much televised coverage of the attacks, their aftermath, or the United States bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001.

16. I spent 20^th-25^th September 2001 in New York City: the first and (as yet) only time I have visited NYC. The plane played the films Shrek and Bridget Jones’s Diary as in-flight movies. I stayed with author Howard Bloom and saw the dust cloud over ground zero from the roof of his Park Slopes, Brooklyn apartment block. The Brooklyn fire station had memorials to dead fire-fighters, and the streets had missing person posters. At the time, I edited the US-based alternative news site Disinformation (http://old.disinfo.com/archive/) with a different approach to its current incarnation. I met with co-founders Gary Baddeley and Richard Metzger, and discovered that the attacks had taken out our server, and that the FBI had interviewed our designer Leen Al-Bassam. Metzger (now curator of DangerousMinds.net) and I talked in his Christopher St apartment about the attack’s psychological effects on New Yorkers. Manhattan was blocked off below 14^th Street. I saw street vendors selling World Trade Center memorabilia and anti-Osama Bin Laden t-shirts. The local media did not cover protests in Washington Square Park, New York. Then-Disinfo.com contributor Preston Peet and I saw the Rollins Band play Irving Plaza on 24^th September 2011, where Henry Rollins gave a pre-show patriotic speech to New Yorkers, and I felt like being in an historical moment (http://is.gd/92NApr).

17. In the week after the attacks, I turned to Susan D. Moeller’s Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York and London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 166-170) for a four-stage cycle on assassinations to explain media coverage: (1) replaying the initial event; (2) disclosing the perpetrator’s identity and seeking justice; (3) funerals and public mourning; and (4) closure: “when the media reassert the supremacy of the established political and social order.” (p. 167). For the next several years, I did not publish anything on September 11 conspiracy theories. The Disinformation Company subsequently reversed this decision when it published material by Alex Jones. I left TDC in February 2008.

Iraq War 2003

18. I was in the common room for Swinburne University’s Faculty of Business & Enterprise when senior lecturer Joseph Voros glanced at the television and told me the United States forces had started bombing Iraq. We both remarked that the day felt very strange.

New Matilda’s Ben Eltham writes about Australia’s car industry:

All this sounds like a hymn to the efficiency of the open market, and to some extent it is. There is an unavoidably difficult truth to face when we discuss local manufacturing, which is that the high Australian dollar and the small size of our local market makes many aspects of Australian manufacturing uncompetitive. Fairfax’s Ian Verrender outlined the uncomfortable verities last week when he pointed out the obvious: making cars in Australia was never particularly sustainable, and has only been so in the long-term with massive government subsidies. “While we’re at it,” Verrender continued, “let’s be brutally honest. There is no such thing as an Australian car industry. It is an American and Japanese car industry with a couple of plants here.”

In the early, 1990s, the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reached a similar conclusion on Australia’s car industry and the trade-offs of the ‘make or buy’ decision. In their book The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production (New York: HarperPerenniel, 1991), authors James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos examined Australia’s car industry (pp. 270-272): the role of foreign producers, the $US/$A currency cross-rates, attempts to follow South Korea’s manufacturing model, and an export focus on North America and Europe.

Womack, Jones and Roos suggested that Australia’s car industry follow a different strategy:

The logical path for Australia would be to reorient its industry toward the Oceanic regional market including Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Each country within this region might balance its motor-vehicle trade, but, collectively, by permitting cross-shipment of finished units and parts, they could gain the scale needed to reduce costs and let lean production flourish. Australia, as the most advanced country in the region, presumably could concentrate its own production on complex luxury vehicles, while Indonesia at the other extreme, would make cheap, entry-level products. (p. 271).

Womack, Jones and Roos observed that this realignment was unlikely for Australia due to two reasons: (1) its focus on northern hemisphere export markets; and (2) cultural and foreign policy barriers to greater involvement in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Eltham notes that Australia’s tariffs policy has played a detrimental role in preventing the transition to a lean industry:

You need not be a rabid libertarian to note the negative economic impacts associated with car industry assistance. Tariffs are a device to transfer wealth from consumers, who pay more, to producers, who receive direct and indirect subsidies. Those subsidies support local jobs in the manufacturing industry, but at a price. The Productivity Commission estimates the total subsidy is something like $23,500 per worker. Yes, you can take issue with modelling and the econometrics and quibble with the numbers and so on. But there’s no doubt that, in the end, we all pay for the pleasure of sustaining a local car industry.

 

University of Wollongong’s Henry Ergas observes in The Conversation:

 

This is an industry that was born from very high levels of protection and has depended throughout its existence on the continuation of high levels of assistance. None of that makes me hopeful for the long-term prospects of the industry.

What lean manufacturing opportunities have Australian policymakers missed? For several decades the GM/Toyota joint collaboration New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc (NUMMI) was highlighted as a success story of United States-led lean manufacturing. But NUMMI closed in 2010. Tesla Motors reopened the former NUMMI factory in 2011 as the Tesla Factory to manufacture the Tesla S sedan car. Meanwhile, Honda plans to increase its United States production. Once again, Australia’s policies on car industry assistance appear to leave it behind global innovation and lean manufacturing.

Yale’s Charles Hill discusses his book Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). This Hoover Institution clip is interesting for Hill’s definition of grand strategy; his pedagogical philosophy in teaching the classics (and what approaches he rejects); and his discussion of several examples from Grand Strategies and Hill’s diplomatic career. Austin Bramwell at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen blog ran a three-part series (parts 1, 2 & 3) that was highly critical of Hill’s presentation. Yale’s Jim Sleeper also responded with a ‘civic-republican’ negative review of Hill’s book Grand Strategies in Foreign Policy Magazine which reads as inter-departmental warfare between the political science and history disciplines. I think Grand Strategies makes a well-argued point about literature’s role in an analyst or diplomat’s strategic education – and the examples could be expanded and further elaborated on.  This is perhaps a clip to be re-watched using Robert Dilts‘ sleight of mouth patterns for framing, persuasion and changing beliefs.

One of my PhD’s three case studies is on Colombia’s insurgent movement FARC.

The US-based Congressional Research Service has been publishing interesting FARC profiles over the past decade. The latest (18th March 2011) covers the Santos administration; the second Uribe administration; Plan Colombia; and the Colombian military’s progress against FARC. The army’s success comes at the expense of human rights, and has not stopped FARC’s continued taxation of Colombian cocaine production.

Apart from the CRS report, I have most of the recent PhDs and academic journal publications dealing with FARC. This body of work includes anthropological, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, intelligence, and sociological approaches. It differs from the popular books about FARC’s kidnapping and ransom activities.

On my possible reading list for 2012 from Wiley Finance:

1. Michael Goodkin’s The Wrong Answer Faster: the inside story of the quantitative finance firm Numerix and the physics models that Goodkin developed to model financial markets. I look forward to some backgammon tips.

2. Maneet Ahuja’s The Alpha Masters: an insider’s guide to the money management strategies of hedge funds — I hope it’s on a par with Andrew Lo’s research (MIT).

3. Jack D. Schwager’s Hedge Fund Market Wizards: the fourth book of interviews in Schwager’s hugely influential Market Wizards series — will it live up to the excellence and insight of the previous three books?

From an email to futures studies and strategic foresight colleagues:

 

Successful projects for the Australian Research Council must have a research design that compares and evaluates several different approaches — e.g. [for strategic foresight projects] Integral, CLA [causal layered analysis], GBN [Global Business Network] scenarios, political forecasting, simulation methods — and not just ‘advocate’ a position. Examples I currently have for the PhD include strategic culture (Alastair Iain Johnston’s PhD Cultural Realism), American military policy for victory (William C. Martel’s Victory in War), American foreign policy (Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence), nuclear proliferation that compares two leading theories and has FOIA findings (Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety), and war-fighting (Stephen Biddle’s Military Power which uses historiography, case studies, formal mathematics, statistical analysis, and simulation). Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis built an entire career as the US ‘Dean of Cold War history’ out of looking at the Cold War’s genesis and then revisiting and evaluating the material from different historical archives and sources. After seeing the richness and sophistication of this work, I find ‘advocacy’ or ‘critical’ work based on one stance to be just un-nuanced.

 

There is an art to writing rejoinders and scholarly debate. But when someone writes pithy one-liners and quotes selectively (to mis-characterise) from others’ work, this is a sign of personal agendas and the positive illusions that arise when we get too close to our own ideas. It’s not scholarship, it doesn’t advance the debate, and ultimately I’ve learned personally that it’s best to ignore it.

Andrew Carr blogged at The Interpreter on a new survey of international relations scholars:

While a colleague has noted that you’ll never hear the word ‘constructivism‘ inside the walls of DFAT*, it is the most popular IR discipline. In some ways this isn’t too surprising, as constructivism is a new field with high research energy. But given the traditional dominance of realism, and the return to great power studies that has accompanied China’s rise this century, I would have expected many more realists.

From my email reply to Carr:

There are several possible reasons for the high response rate of self-identified constructivists in the survey of US international relations scholars. A younger generation of IR scholars have been influenced by Alexander Wendt, Peter Katzenstein, John Ruggie, Martha Finnemore, Friedrich Kratochwil, and other constructivists. Professional associations have changed: the Perestroika Movement created a debate in the American Political Science Association about epistemic assumptions and research methodology, whilst the International Studies Association now hosts conference sessions on critical security studies and similar topics. However, realism still remains influential, through the enduring influence of Kenneth Waltz, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt. The survey response to ‘I do not use paradigmatic analysis’ might include diplomatic historians and scholars who use inter-paradigmatic and multi-perspectival approaches.

Gyngell and Wesley’s observation about DFAT staff who are self-identified realists follows an historical trend in Australian policymaking. Several contributors to Graeme Cheeseman and Bruce Roberts’ critical anthology Discourses of Danger and Dread Frontiers (Allen & Unwin, 1996) complained that Australian defence and security policymaking was realist-dominated and that scholars from other traditions had few opportunities to influence or shape policymaking. The Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at Australian National University was usually singled out as the institutional villain. This past debate suggests a disconnect between Australian scholars and policymakers.

This scholar-policymaker disconnect plays out in the media, academia and in formulating specific strategies. Consider counter-terrorism. The 2006-08 campaign by James Cook University’s Mervyn F. Bendle in Quadrant and The Australian about ‘terrorism studies’ was essentially a disagreement between a realist and critical theory-influenced academics. There was little discussion of what was actually being taught in ‘terrorism studies’ courses. Australia’s Counter-Terrorism White Paper (2010) conceptualised terrorism in a similar fashion to debats within the Bush Administration in 2003-05 — but didn’t appear to include ‘lessons learned’ from researchers in Monash University’s Global Terrorism Centre, the Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, and similar academic groups. Over the past decade, Australian Research Council grants awarded in defence, counter-terrorism and security have reflected the visibility and perceived urgency of topics — there are more opportunities for collaborative research teams.

What insights can constructivists share with DFAT and the Defence Department? Ideas matter. Institutions and non-state actors are important. Diplomacy and intelligence are crucial for dealing with ideational factors like culture, history, identity, and threat perception. These insights are echoed in recent non-constructivist work on perceiving enemies and strategic culture (Patrick Porter’s Military Orientalism); how the US Army and Marines developed new counter-insurgency doctrines (David Ucko’s The New Counterinsurgency Era); effective psychological operations (Ron Schleifer’s Psychological Warfare in the Intifada); decisions about nuclear weapons development (Jacques E.C. Hymans’ The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation), and diffusion of military innovations (Michael Horowitz’s The Diffusion of Military Power). Constructivist insights can be seen in how the US State Department dealt with the Arab Spring and in the Obama administration’s Sustaining US Global Leadership (2012) which echoes John F. Kennedy’s ‘flexible response’ period. Theory can inform more robust and resilient policy formulation. But academics need to heed US Secretary of State George Marshall’s advice to grand strategist George Kennan: “Avoid trivia.”

I missed University of Chicago professor Dan Drezner’s call for YouTube clips on American grand strategy, blogged here. My suggested clip is the confrontation with the android Ash from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979):

I wrote Drezner:

The full, original scene reveals that ‘layered’ grand strategy has strategic priorities, compartmentalised intelligence and operational plans — and expendable people. This excerpt on the Wayland-Yutani company’s plans to ‘weaponise’ the alien xenomorph has dialogue worthy of Machiavelli or Kissinger-style realpolitik.

The scene illustrates the uncertainty of new weapons development and the tension between advisers and policymakers documented in Bruce Kuklick’s book Blind Oracles: From Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2007).

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus (2012) suggests a failure to heed Sun Tzu’s advice on understanding enemies and using strategic intelligence rather than force:

For more clip suggestions, see my Spiral Dynamics Field Manual for Film Scanning (2003) and Spiral Dynamics of Cinema Studies (1998).

The Lowy Institute also responded to Drezner’s list of grand strategy clips.