Michael Desch

• Professor
• University of Notre Dame

THERE IS ENDURING INTEREST IN making political science more relevant to policymakers and the public.¹ Most political scientists seeking to bridge the academic-policymaker gap believe that the main obstacle they face is a failure of communication. According to this view, a significant amount of the research they conduct is potentially relevant to po...

Scholars continue to debate the relationship of academic international relations to policy. One of the most straightforward ways to discern whether policymakers find IR scholarship relevant to their work is to ask them. We analyzed an elite survey of US policy practitioners to better understand the conditions under which practitioners use academic...

I explain here the disconnect between our discipline's self-image as balancing rigor with relevance with the reality of how we actually conduct our scholarship most of the time. To do so, I account for variation in social scientists' willingness to engage in policy-relevant scholarship over time. My theory is that social science, at least as it has...

Response to Comments on “Technique Trumps Relevance” - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Michael Desch

What do the most senior national security policymakers want from international relations scholars? To answer that question, we administered a unique survey to current and former policymakers to gauge when and how they use academic social science to inform national security decision making. We find that policymakers do regularly follow academic soci...

In “The Right to Be Right,” Peter Feaver slurs Samuel Huntington and other civil-military relations theorists whom he dubs “professional supremacists.”1 This is doubtless inadvertent, because everyone in the field knows that he reveres Huntington. Moreover, Feaver’s version of the debate about prerogatives and limits in the interaction of soldiers...

Benevolent Cant? Kant's Liberal Imperialism - Volume 73 Issue 4 - Michael C. Desch

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of “Change We Can Believe In.” One of the biggest changes many anticipated with his election was a dramatic break with the previous administration's counterterror policy. There were good reasons for thinking that this would be the case. George W. Bush was a Republican who took his cues from the most conservativ...

Why has the United States, with its long-standing Liberal tradition, come to embrace the illiberal policies it has in recent years? The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaida's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terrorism have made America less Liberal. The logic of this argument is straightforward: intersta...

The rift between U.S. military and civilian leaders did not start with George W. Bush, but his administration's meddling and disregard for military expertise have made it worse. The new defense secretary must restore a division of labor that gives soldiers authority over tactics and civilians authority over strategy or risk discrediting civilian co...

The Holocaust has become an important part of the everyday discourse of American life. Indeed, it has become one of the central historical analogies for thinking about U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War world. The received wisdom about the Holocaust among most Americans is that the United States and the rest of the civilized world turned away...

Deterrence. By Lawrence Freedman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 160p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. The concept of deterrence—the effort to make an adversary's costs and risks of going to war greater than the political incentives pushing in that direction—was the centerpiece of academic national security studies and the core policy concern of We...

‘No one loves a political realist’, Robert Gilpin once lamented. A major reason for this hostility towards realism is its sceptical view of the role of ethical norms (principled beliefs about state action) in international relations. Some critics dislike realism because they think it leads to an immoral international order. Thucydides' famous...

International Security 28.1 (2003) 180-194 Ajin Choi, David Lake, and Dan Reiter and Allan Stam have each provided useful rejoinders to the critique of democratic triumphalism in my recent article "Democracy and Victory: Why Regime Type Hardly Matters." In response, I begin by summariz-ing our arguments and pointing out several issues where we have...

International Security 27.2 (2002) 5-47 Whether democracies are more or less likely to win wars has long been a contentious issue. The Greek general Thucydides' chronicle of the defeat of democratic Athens in its twenty-four-year struggle with authoritarian Sparta in The Peloponnesian War, particularly his account of the Sicilian debacle, remains t...

In the past half-century, the classic military conflict of armies maneuvering in the field has been replaced by conflicts that center on, rather than avoid, heavily populated areas. Modern military conflict more frequently is not just a fight to control villages or cities,but a variation on the timeless wish to control populations and the hearts of...

John S. Duffield is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia. Theo Farrell is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the University of Exeter. Richard Price is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Michael C. Desch is Associate Professor and Associate Director o...

Michael C. Desch is Assistant Director and Senior Research Associate at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University and author of Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming). I wish to thank Robert Art, Dale Copeland, Colin Elman, Eugene...

While there is no "crisis" in U.S. post-Cold War civil-military relations, it seems clear that the United States is now experiencing a weakening in civilian control of the military, at least compared with the Cold War. In a previous article, I argued that militaries with primarily external missions were more amenable to civilian control than milita...

Revolution and War Stephen Walt

For most of the twentieth century, international politics were dominated by World Wars I and II and by the cold war. This period of intense international security competition clearly strengthened states, increasing their scope and cohesion. However, the end of the cold war may represent a a period of significantly reduced international security com...

I wish to thank Mary Jo Desch, Ted Hopf, and Bruce Porter for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I also wish to acknowledge the research support of the Ford Foundation through the Olin Institute's Consensus Project.

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the US Naval Postgraduate School's Conference on “Conventional Deterrence and Cruise Missiles” in August 1992, and at the American Political Science Association's Annual Convention in Chicago, September 1992. For their very helpful comments, I would like especially to thank John Hopkins, Max Neiman...

Michael C. Desch is a John M. Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in National Security at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. He specializes in security studies and Latin American area studies. I gratefully acknowledge the advice, comments, and criticisms that I have received from Eliot Cohen, Michael Doyle, Alan Drimmer, Emily Goldman,...

Why has the United States, with its long-standing Liberal tradition, come to embrace the illiberal policies it has in recent years? The conventional wisdom is that al-Qaida's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war on terrorism have made America less Liberal. The logic of this argument is straightforward: intersta...