The International Relations Discourse is Boring as Fuck!
The mix of academics, and policy professionals who hold center-stage in international political discussions are an obstacle to the public’s access into our field.
My main area of focus is rich-world break-away movements. So, I read a lot about these movements, their histories, and the people involved in them. I also read a great deal about unrecognized or partially recognized states, irredentist efforts, indigenous sovereignty, and anti-colonial struggles. As a result of all of this reading, I am constantly exposed to a morass of academic writing. That is to say, writing written by people like myself with a background in the academic discourse of international relations and foreign policy. Outside of limited reporting on events surrounding some elements within this set of subject fields, most of the writing on these matters is written by academics and policy professionals for academics and policy professionals.
Why is this the case?
I started college late. I spend my early 20s a traveling anarchist — hitchhiking, hopping summits, and staying in squats up and down the Western seaboard. At 25, I had spent my entire adult life dodging the selective service — a requirement for being able to receive federal grants and loans to pay for college. I knew that I was unlikely to be able to work my way through college without federal assistance and decided that it was time to enroll. My interests were driven mainly by my participation in the alter-globalization movement of the pre-9/11 era. So, I decided to major in Political Science and minor in Economics.
It didn’t take long to understand how the academic game was played. Students are encouraged to emulate the rigor of their professors, who are under pressure to publish consistently and work toward the possible job security of tenure. The peer-reviewed journals they publish aim to further the conversation around their intellectual niche interests. In many cases, these conversations have been going on for over a century, if not many centuries. But ultimately, these conversations are part of a game. The goal of this game is to keep the conversation advancing among those few who work very hard to find a place in the conversation. In a few cases, this conversation results in behavioral changes among individuals and organizations acting in the real world. In these cases, the product of these conversations results in tangible changes to the lives of regular working people — for better or worse. While, despite hardships — including a brief stint sleeping in a chevy metro for a semester — I was determined to graduate. But well before I did, I knew I was entirely uninterested in becoming an academic.
In the decade since I left college, I spent some time working on a hog farm and settled into married-dad life. Nevertheless, I’m still interested in the subjects I studied and the conversations I was trained in at university. So, as I navigate my way through investigating stories about one large and interconnected niche I see within international politics, I’m back at my computer screen reading page after page — after page — of academic writing. This is unfortunate. It doesn’t have to be that most of this conversation is held by a minority of interested or potentially interested parties. And there are plenty of stakeholders. These people can and should be brought into the discussion.
Whether it be a mother of 3 young children wondering how she will be able to keep putting food on the table in the face of multi-crisis-driven inflation or a construction worker shocked by the increasing fuel cost he must commute to and from his job, these people matter to this conversation. At the same time, the failure of wonks to bring them into the discussion contributes to a more profound threat to everyday working people and policy professionals: disinformation. There are unscrupulous actors seeking power and money who will abuse the gaps between the highly educated and a desperate public seeking answers. Answers are easy to come by when one doesn’t care if they are true.
The challenge here is straightforward on its face: make these matters interesting to the general public. I’m not saying that academics should start trying to compete with Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylie Jenner, and Will Smith for cool points. Let’s face it that would be insane. But it’s no less insane that we live in an era with so much freely available information on these fields, and when so little of it aims at speaking to regular people.
If you are an academic or policy wonk and somehow find yourself reading this, I implore you to go talk to people outside your bubble. Not just in another department of your university or another policy institution, but in completely and utterly different walks of life. Find out how your focus area impacts them in real and tangible ways. Then, figure out how to talk to them about your interest area in plain language. The alternative is a shrinking circle of interest in a world that increasingly needs to understand itself more and more. And besides all that, haven’t we heard ourselves prattle on enough?